Report Published on choosing Charities to Donate Money to without high Salaries or Costs

LONDON - Jan. 20, 2016 - PRLog -- Choosing a charity to donate hard earned money to is not a particularly easy task. This report, published today, sets out the decisions made by a charity’s trustees on donating to a number of causes and how we came to make those decisions.

Jonathan Fagan, a trustee of the Ten-Percent Foundation explained that the Foundation has preset criteria for making donations:

1. The charity deals with a range of work that appeals to us.
2. The charity has no ulterior motive – eg religious teachings or political leanings.
3. The charity appears to do some good and does not just hoard money or spend it frivolously.
4. The charity pays its staff a reasonable and not excessive level of remuneration. For us the level is £75,000 as an absolute maximum. We do not believe a charity, which by definition is dependent on donations and support from the general public, should be paying staff a higher salary than this level and we would only ever expect to see 1 or 2 members of staff on salaries of more than £60,000 in very large charities.

We looked at a number of charities including the Parkinsons Disease Society, Amnesty International, the Solicitors Benevolent Association and War Child. We give these four as specific examples of charities we decided did not fit our criteria, and cite their filed accounts as evidence for our decision.

"It is clear that salaries in charities in the UK, and possibly overseas, have become so high that they eat up a large portion of charitable giving to a specific charity. A report was put together a few years ago to look at high levels of executive pay in the charitable sector, but concluded that it was up to the trustees of charities to set pay levels and not for outside interference."

To access the report, please visit http://legalrecruitment.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/choosing-c...

Salary Comparisons

Here is a comparison for other sectors of pay:

• Chief Constable of North Wales: £135,774 (responsible for 2,600 police officers and staff).
• Hospital Consultant: £75,000 - £101,000 per annum, plus private work/overtime etc..
• Chief Fire Officer of Staffordshire: £149,000.
• Member of Parliament (to 2015): £67,060.
• Average salary in the UK in 2014: £26,600.

To put a salary of £100,000 into figures, this is how it breaks down (courtesy of the Salary Calculator)

Net annual salary: £65,325.70

·     Net monthly pay: £5,443.81

·     Net weekly pay: £1,256.26

It is also interesting how many charities have their headquarters in central London or thereabouts. May be a relocation out of an expensive area and into more regional locations could assist in keeping salaries and administrative costs lower?

Summary

• 91% of charities have no paid staff at all. However out of 161,000 charities and a £39 billion income, 533 charities received £19 billion of this.
• Pay for senior executives in some charities seems to be disappearing off the top of the scale of a reasonable level of remuneration bearing in mind that a charity relies on the goodwill of someone else, usually unsuspecting members of the public.
• The charity sector apparently provides employment for 800,000 people and the report of the panel above highlights this – indicating that this is a healthy contribution to society. Perhaps this is true – we should support charities and pay their staff because it keeps them in employment - a charitable aim in itself. Miners could probably have used the same argument in the 1980s…

Jonathan Fagan is Managing Director of Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment and a non-practising Solicitor.