[videoappeal]

For sure, I hope you dont object I've just registered adsbycappuccino, my idea is to make it a non-profit ad agency that does work for benefit of charities, in my business plan Ive decided to pay myself $120k pa (is yours the same? we can share a coffee and talk) presuming we get that via donations and running some commercial ads in the roration. It should take off as those stupid HN readers will see non-profit and put some rockets behind my startup. Sweet.. :D

[corin_]

Yeah, that's an example of it being bad, what I'm saying is that a charitee with paid staff isn't automatically evil, it's not so black and white.

For example, let's say this charity has a range of options for getting free advert spots on sites for charities. Option A is to have people who care but don't have the experience, and they get X monthly impressions. Option B is to pay someone a low full-time wage, say $30k, and they get Y monthly impressions. Option C is to pay a fantastic salesman $120k/year and he can pull in Z monthly impressions. Until you know the numbers, is option C guaranteed to be bad for the charity?

And of course that's just an example of a high salary - my first comment, that you replied to, was talking more about charities like Oxfam, where without any paid staff they just couldn't operate, they're far too big to be run on a 100% volunteer basis. But people they do employ are paid lower-than-typical salaries for their positions, and a large number of their work force are indeed volunteers.

[videoappeal]

Agreed. But with no transparency it pays to be cynical. In addition, bootstrapping it by asking HN to commit their time and web space whilst drawing a salary is a bit of a slap in the face from day 1. Im sure a consortium of true HN readers could get this off the ground without salary employees, maybe in six months then it would make sense to appoint salary positions such as a treasurer and top-notch biz dev person.