[pbhjpbhj]

>Would you rather ...

How are they going to raise the money, does the one raising $5M blindly do so by enlisting a third party to pay poverty wages to young people to con pensioners out of their money (usual way is to trick them in to signing a monthly payment when they think they're paying a one-off [to get rid of the annoying person invading their home]) on the doorstep?

Do CEOs only act competently for immoral sums of money?

How about the CEO does an honest days work, raises what they can without defrauding people and gets paid at most, say, 3 times the median salary of everyone employed by the organisation?

There's a good chance that even if the CEO is honest and completely above board all they're doing is stopping other charities getting money. That is, splitting the pot differently. So, perhaps the $100k is far better - was overall the charity sector gets more to spend on charitable aims.

[vkou]

100k may be better for the overall charitable sector, but its worse for this particular charity. It's the tragedy of the commons. It's a well-studied problem, and there's no non-centralized solution to that problem.

My wife worked for a non-profit theater (12 million/year budget, 4 million from donations, 8 million from ticket sales. Most of the donations are from major donors - 5K and more.) Its 'CEO' was the best-paid person in the theater, paid ~230k/year. The stagehands, who were making ~$25/hour would grouse non-stop about how much he was paid. From what I know of him, and his job, (mostly fundraising), I am almost positive that he was a profit center for the theater. If he left three months from now, their financials would not improve.

Now, it's entirely possible that someone else in his position, who would take the job for $130,000/year, and would raise as much, or more money. Or maybe someone else would raise even more money, and expect $500,000/year.

I think that for that particular theater, they'd probably be wrong to fire their CEO, if their goal was to cut costs.

[patejam]

A very pessimistic view of everything!

I can't say anything about your fraud or conning comments. Obviously that's bad, and I worry that you're arguing in bad faith by bringing that up.

My main point is that being the leader of a large organization that brings in lots of money is a skill that is highly sought after. If you want to attract that kind of person then you'll have to pay for it, or find the 1 in [some large number of people] that has both the skills needed and the willingness to work for much lower than the rest of the market would pay them.