After the sale, where to send the money?
Ada and Michael wanted to support wildlife affected by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico as well as more general relief efforts for endangered species. And we'd raised $102.50 to split between the two.
But which charities to choose? Luckily, these days there are websites like Charity Navigator to help. There you can search for non-profits by name, by category, by 'hot' topics (like the Gulf spill), and get a quick snapshot of the finances of a particular organization -- seeing how much it spends on overhead, for example, its overall scale and scope of operations, or its sources of funds.
A quick check showed that Oceana would be a good place to send money for the Gulf. We felt that the CEO's $211,000 remuneration was a bit steep, but the non-profit is based in DC and manages a wide variety of programs. It seemed like a reasonable salary for a top-rate executive in a town with many similarly attractive jobs.
Then to help endangered species, we'd thought to go with the World Wildlife Fund. But then we saw that WWF CEO Carter Roberts receives a whopping $439,000 a year. That's more than the President receives (he gets $400,000).
While there aren't too many things more valuable than protecting the threatened fauna of our planet, it seemed to us that the person in charge of such a task might reasonably set a good example and devote, say, half that salary to the good works he is paid to oversee. That would leave him with $219,000 to live on -- plenty more than most Americans of great good character, devotion and industry will ever earn per year.
Luckily, Charity Navigator made it easy to find an alternative. We chose the Center For Biological Diversity. It has very similar interests and is as widely praised as the WWF for its work -- and it pays its CEO a positively frugal $104,000 a year.