[habosa]

Don’t let all the shenanigans at the top stop you from doing good. It’s clear that the American system of tax preference for philanthropy is easy to abuse, but while it’s there you might as well use it to help people if you can afford to.

If your company matches donations, take them up on that. That means for $1 pre-tax (~$0.60 out of your pocket) you can give $2.00 to an organization that could use the money. That’s almost 3.5x force multiplication.

Also I promise it will feel good, and if you choose a local organization that doesn’t have mega donors (not that the big ones are all bad) they will truly notice your help.

[banannaise]

Getting a 3.5x multiplier for a charity that is mostly waste puts you more or less back at 1x.

Which is not to say you shouldn't help people. It is to say that the best way to help may not be registered and legislated charity. Mutual aid is a powerful thing - you can enable communities around you to be self-determining, rather than funding a bunch of salaried assholes to decide what they need.

Go find a mutual aid organization near you. Set up a big chunky recurring contribution. And if you're feeling intrepid, get to know some of the people and learn how you can help out on the ground.

[krageon]

And what organisations, pray tell, actually need the money and would be visible to a normal human being in a country that isn't shattered by war? Most of the large charities have disgustingly paid CEO's and I can't be the only one that gets a sour taste in their mouth when I give an amount of money to them and realise this CEO receives 100k-1m in compensation while actual human beings starve in the streets or freeze to death.

[throw__away7391]

I worked for several different charities for a few years. Supposedly "good ones", a couple of big names. After what I have seen I don't think I'd ever donate to a charity. The CEO's pay is almost the least concern, everything runs according to the whims of people who wouldn't last 5 minutes in a for-profit business. The people donating just want to feel good about themselves or get some positive press for donating. Those are the real customers, that's the real product, and that's what the charity focuses on delivering first and foremost. They have a couple of "showcase" projects/centers/cases they use for the cameras over and over again and the rest of the work is done as cheaply as possible to get their numbers up. The disconnect between the folks on the ground and what's happening in at the home office is greater than anywhere else I've ever seen.

In terms of finances, the real money is in fundraising. From the perspective of the charity, spending $999 on fundraising to raise $1000 dollars in donations is a net positive and huge amounts of money are "wasted" on fundraising efforts. If you want a lucrative career in the industry, being a freelance fundraising consultant is definitely the way to go. You can ask for nearly as much as you can raise and you get none of the scrutiny the CEOs get.

[sokoloff]

I still donate to several causes, and take a slightly different view on the expenses associated with fundraising. No one objects when for-profit businesses spend right up to the microeconomic theoretical optimal point where the marginal profit is zero. Yet we seem to object when charities do it.

If I ran a charity and had an exclusive choice to either spend $X to raise $Y or spend ($X + $0.99M) to raise ($Y + $1.00M), why wouldn't I choose the latter, assuming the charity has a use for the additional net $10K?

Having friends working in charities, it was eye-opening to see the divide between "development" and "programming" in charities. Development (fundraising) rarely struggled for money, so long as they could show a positive RoI. Programming (the actual, intended work of the charity) got whatever was left over, but that seems like the natural and intended way to run a charity.

[s1artibartfast]

>If I ran a charity and had an exclusive choice to either spend $X to raise $Y...

The common criticism of this hangs on how elastic the supply of donor dollars are. If you spend $1M to divert funds from another charity to yours, then the system overall is worse off.

This isn't a perfect model because donor dollars are not fixed, and all charities are not equivalent. reality lies somewhere in-between.

That said, it is all pretty irrelevant because there are lots of groups that evaluate charities on their overhead to benefit, so it is pretty easy to find one with low overhead if that is a concern.

[yial]

So part of the problem is the evaluation based upon low overhead …. What’s low overhead?

Everyone wants to donate to program work, but never to operations.

Even grants that carve out for operations aren’t always realistic.

Major gifts is one of the best ways to get unrestricted donor funds.

You can get a lot of information from the 990 filing of an organization.

In other comments, I agree that in many non profit organizations there are people who might not last in for profit.

Most of those people however are working in roles that are $30,000 , maybe $40,000 a year and there wouldn’t be someone in for profit who would take that role, for that amount of pay.

Overwork and burnout in the field is very real.

Unrelated to that staffing, I would again go back to operational expenses - rent, electricity, payroll etc. Depending on the nonprofit, this may be a huge percentage… but if you have an organization that has a $250,000 a year revenue, two staff to accomplish what their mission is…. What actually goes to program work might be very little.

[s1artibartfast]

It sounds like we agree. I dont have a fixed definition for low overhead.

I just know that im not interested if I see a non-profit with 50% marketing expenses, 30% in other operational expenses, and passes through 20% to the beneficiaries (e.g. medical supplies, research grants, or whatever the stated purpose is).

I would call that high overhead.

This sounds extreme, but some large non-profits actually have numbers like this.

[throw__away7391]

From the charity's perspective, yeah. From my perspective, knowing that of that $100 coming out of my pocket, only a fraction is going to what I am donating towards, and pretty inefficiently at that, and at the expense of some government programs if I write it off, that's not so interesting to me.

For what it's worth I also tend to avoid products that seem to spend a lot on advertising.

[sokoloff]

It's likely less expensive on the government angle that you might think. Take a thought experiment where from your $100 donation, $90 goes to wages of highly-paid fund-raising or executive staff and only $10 goes to charitable "actual work". Suppose that your combined marginal tax rate is 40%.

If you instead kept that $100 to spend on yourself, you would give the government $40 and you could spend $60.

In the case you give it to charity, the development/executive staff pays income taxes on that $90, so if their marginal rate is the same as yours (assuming they're highly paid), they pay $36 in taxes, have $54 to spend, and $10 goes to programming. If it goes to staff paid under $147K, they pay their (lower) marginal rate on it, but the full 15.3% amount for Social Security and Medicare is paid on those funds.

It seems like the government is only out ~$4 ($40 less from you; $36 more from someone else), with ~$10 available for programs.

(The largest loss is that you lost $60 of spending power in exchange for only $10 in programming while development staff got an extra $54 of spending power. You lose way more than the government loses.)

[throw__away7391]

Meh, at the end of the day it is wasted effort. In my experience fund-raising staff were the most talented/educated people I worked with, they could be doing something better with their time and I could be doing something better with my money. You're right that the government is the biggest loser here, and by extension anyone who pays taxes or uses government services. The ability to write-off donations against taxes is a major distortion. There's a lot of fuzzy dealing, politics, and influence peddling going on with charities that I think we'd be better off as a society without.

[Biologist123]

The type of organisation you are talking about, typically styled as NGOs (non-governmental organisations) are anything but. They are in fact huge - often international - delivery vehicles for government funds, with a dispensation to raise money from the public too - hence charitable status. So it’s just as much an issue why a de facto civil servant makes a million bucks a year as does the head of a charity.

And here’s the weird philanthropic angle: as an NGO head you only get access to the government cash spigot if you can show “co-finance”, typically private, which will 3x a philanthropist’s funding and give them huge power in resource allocation.

[8note]

Something. like partners in health makes a pretty clear impact, with the Paul Farmer aims to treat people directly, and not as statistics.

Now that he's died, it might not be the same though

[anonymous_sorry]

I guess what I really care about is "how much good does my donated dollar do?". Compare a dollar donated to expensive cancer research in the west with a dollar spent on cheap treatments which we already know to work in a developing country. How much of my dollar goes to CEO and staff pay is part of the calculation, but not the only part.

The Effective Altruism movement aims to direct money towards these activities with maximum impact. But to do this they actually need charities to collect data to measure their impact, which I guess may require some degree of professionalism.

https://www.effectivealtruism.org/

[exdsq]

My issue with EA is similar to the posts point - it seems to be a lot of money being moved around between EA organizations finding their own blue sky philosophy research. For example the Future of Humanities Institute is funded by Giving What We Can, which passes funds to some AI orgs in SF, that the guys at FHI collaborate with, etc… I agree with their points but the actual funding of EA infrastructure appears to be a huge circle jerk.

[anonymous_sorry]

I've found that the funds are generally quite clear where the money goes. Givewell have a separate fund for EA infrastructure.

[exdsq]

Yes, they are, but the issue is it’s so intertwined between the people in EA funds and their supported charities its hard to not be skeptical.

[raspberry1337]

The first thing that website shows is a TED talk, how ironic.

[croon]

Use some comparison service to get some insight into how the money is distributed and pick one with the most impact:

https://www.charitynavigator.org/

https://www.givewell.org/

https://www.charitywatch.org/

[mattferderer]

Please be careful using these services. They show you high level data & many times do more harm than good due to misinterpretations.

Working with many non-profits, they're very careful to keep expenses below a certain percentage of their donations. Otherwise sites likes these cause them to lose donations.

Unfortunately this results in low salaries for employees which means the employees gain skills but can't afford to keep working there. The non-profit loses talent they helped build.

I know of some non-profits who have gotten around this by creating a 2nd non-profit where they receive donations just for business & administrative costs. Than use their 1st non-profit to say 100% of donations goes to our causes.

In reality, you should get to know your non-profits. Volunteer & help them out. Then you'll have a better understanding of how they use their money. Sometimes those high administrative costs result in a lot of value being achieved, even if the percentages don't look great.

Personally I'm a huge fan of a lot of community non-profits like local YMCA's if anyone is looking for a good place to start. I also tend to work with other small, local non-profits.

[colinmhayes]

This seems like bad advice. Local non profits are largely incapable of having the impact international ones do. The local YMCA will not even come close to the impact per dollar that global health non profits have. Yes, it can be hard to get to know the international non-profits, but there are plenty of services that provide meta analysis on non profit impact. Just looking at the top of givewell you can see that lives can be saved for the order of $1000, the YMCA can't compete with that.

[mattferderer]

Every non-profit is different. I am not going to argue in favor of any over the other. I apologize if it seemed that I was arguing in favor of small local ones.

I think one ends up down a deep rabbit hole comparing different non-profits. In the end I think you need to find a mission you care about & a group that you believe does it well. I think the most important thing is that you are invested in the non-profit.

A local YMCA can provide very cheap after school child care & activities that keep kids safe, out of trouble, maybe a small meal & allows their parents to work. This can end up having very huge benefits directly & indirectly in the community.

GiveWell shows a lot of cost effective ways to distribute things like medicine & safety items. Plenty of awesome non-profits there.

I work with some small non-profits that pick & fund specific research at universities on childhood cancer.

I'm not sure how you compare different non-profits like that. Especially if you want to see the impact they have over N years, how that impact is spread or if some other larger issue needs to be addressed that's making a non-profits work pointless. GiveWell itself says it doesn't try to be a charity evaluator. They try to find a small number of really good donation opportunities for people.

[cillian64]

Look at organisations like Against Malaria Fund. 100% of your donations go to buying and distributing bed nets and they collect a lot of data to prove that they end up hung above the beds of the right people.

There are an awful lot of rubbish charities but there are at least a few worthwhile ones so it’s not an excuse for not donating.

[CameronNemo]

How did you learn about this organization? I agree there are a lot of people out there doing good work, but how do I know which ones they are?

[paisawalla]

What should a non-profit CEO be paid? If it's someone who attracts top talent in the industry or has the connections to large donors, but they have equal/more passion for getting paid than the mission, what's the right choice?

Surely you can see that "get the best person you can for $40k" has limitations as a hiring strategy.

[9oliYQjP]

Having worked at non-profits, the distribution of wages can be unlike anything ever seen at for-profit corporations and has made me become quite cynical. At a couple of the organizations I was involved with, there was lots of unpaid volunteering, grossly under-market salaries, and unpaid overtime at the bottom of the hierarchy with anemic pay all the way up the pyramid until you reached the CEO position. The CEOs rarely did much of anything except help keep alive the notion that everyones sacrifice was worth it. In one instance, the CEO went on sabbatical for over a year, appointing a few senior management to share their leadership role and the whole operation actually seemed to function better while they were gone.

I don't have anything against a non-profit CEO paying themselves well if they also pay their employees well. Many do not, with some unspoken culture of employees needing to accept meager compensation so that resources can be directed toward the core mission whose objectives are fluid and progress often difficult to measure.

[kortilla]

You should rethink this stance. Do you want competent people running the organization or the cheapest possible?

A charity that just passes money straight through by sending envelopes full of cash to a war torn country is much worse than one that spends a ton of money on analyzing first what the most effective way to help is.

[consp]

This argument is always raised but in the end, the most work is done by volunteers and the top of those big corporations (the charity status is just a tax dodge) reap wealth like in any other corporation.

The lower down payed employees get the "you don't get much but you work for a charity" speech and get abused as much as the volunteers.

Let the CEO do it out of charity and take a 1$ salary and see if it all goes to hell. I very much doubt it.

[kortilla]

> and the top of those big corporations (the charity status is just a tax dodge) reap wealth like in any other corporation.

No it’s not, the charity status is a massive burden and it’s about the stupidest thing you can do if you’re forming a corporation with the intent to make money.

> the most work is done by volunteers

No, that’s not true. Much of the work is done by the suppliers charities buy supplies from and employees of the charity. Doctors get paid in Doctors Without Borders.

> Let the CEO do it out of charity and take a 1$ salary and see if it all goes to hell. I very much doubt it.

This is just the standard ignorant “I don’t think CEOs do anything” view dressed up in a comment about charities.

[headsoup]

By that logic open source software should be mostly crap...

High pay bringing high competence and passion seems a rather poor assumption.

[barry-cotter]

> By that logic open source software should be mostly crap...

And it is. Most free software projects never go anywhere. Those that do commonly have UI/UX that is far inferior to most consumer software produced for people willing to pay for it. The extreme right tail of open source software is great and most people who work on it are paid to do so. If you want reliability and quality paying for it works a lot better than hoping for people to do so uncompensated.

[kortilla]

Being a CEO of a large charity is about connections and logistics. Not passion.

[liminvorous]

https://www.givedirectly.org/ is I think a fairly effective charity, admittedly I assume they mostly send money to people in non-war torn countries, but I think the point still holds, and just doing the moral equivalent of sending evelopes full of cash is a decent baseline for charities.

[rtpg]

Loads of people take below market salaries. Plenty of CEOs are merely paid low six digits instead of 300k+!

Is it unreasonable for a charity CEO to merely be paid a bit closer to the median for their kind of work?

[newsclues]

Is it unreasonable for charity CEOs to be charitable when negotiating salaries and living on the local medium salary (great incentive to raise the local economy)?

[krageon]

Your stance that the most competent people are paid the most is the kind of toxic capitalism that got us into this situation. Nobody is helped by this except the egos of the donators and the pockets of whoever is in charge.

[colinmhayes]

That's not the stance though. The stance is that administrative costs isn't what matters. Impact is what matters. Sometimes impact requires more administration, sometimes it doesn't. But impact is something that we can measure, so why use a bad heuristic instead?

[nivenkos]

Since the choice is often restricted for these options, I usually choose Doctors Without Borders since at least they're actually out there doing stuff on the ground.

Otherwise the FSFE when it's an option in Europe since their Public Money, Public Code campaign is great.

[8note]

one local church in seattle is making a clear impact for the homeless. you can tell by where all the tents are set up

[rhacker]

It's not even the CEOs. Most non-profits are just staffed by busy-bodied millennials working up a bunch of corporate memphis themed junk content. It actually is incredible how many people work jobs at a non-profit that think they are the stars of "The Bold Type" (I know that show is about a magazine). Doing nothing important all day except talking to their friends and posting it on social media - expecting that THAT was work. Also it's late and I'm salty.

[ClumsyPilot]

> Doing nothing important all day except talking to their friends and posting it on social media - expecting that THAT was work. Also it's late and I'm salty.

Have you ever seen a corporate marketing department?