Shortly after dropping a few coins in a collection box for a small-ish charity in the south-west the other day I was a little taken aback to find that it was advertising for a new chief executive at a salary of £80,000. Rather more than most of us receive, I guess.
But, it seems, such a salary is quite modest when compared with that offered by the bigger charities. A survey by civilsociety.co.uk last year revealed that the average salary of the chief executives of the country’s top 100 charities was over £166,000.
And do bear in mind that the £166k is only an average. In 2010 the Daily Telegraph revealed some of the real high-rollers of the time, including the fact that the chief executives of two housing charities were being paid nearly £690,000 between them and the top two people in one education charity were getting £950,000 between them.
It’s not surprising that there was an outcry when it was discovered that such salaries are far more than we pay the Prime Minister. And it’s no wonder that hard working volunteers in various charities have resigned in disgust, amid comments about ‘gravy trains’.
But what has this to do with those of us in learning and development, HR, employee communications and related fields?
From my point of view it is largely a question of whether or not these people are real value for money. Do they really have the expertise and the qualifications to justify such hefty salaries? If so, who says so? And what do they do for their nice salaries and perks?
I worked for a not-for-profit organisation at one time and it was clear that the Board had little idea of how to assess and measure the performance of its chief executive.
Charities are supposed to exist, I believe, to help others. But massive salaries require an awful lot of volunteers to rattle tins, deliver and collect envelopes, run charity shops and the like.
Like very many people, I’ve done my bit for charities in the past. But in future I’m going to be much more circumspect. A small charity local to where I live – run entirely by volunteers – helps people who are truly destitute, so any money it raises goes towards providing basic care for them.
I know where my spare cash is going to go next time. And it won’t be to the charity I have long supported which I have just found out, recorded in a report a couple of years ago that its chief exec ‘earns barely over £100,000’. It added that ‘average salaries are quite low, certainly lower than you would expect in central London’. So why don’t they relocate and divert some of that loot to the cause to which we all thought we were contributing over the years?
Visit the Fuse Learning website: www.fuselearning.co.uk
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