[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.