Mildly Infuriating

Do you live in San Diego? It's incredibly expensive to live there; that said, these pays are far to fucking high even for SD.

I suggest donating to your local wild animal rescue/rehabber. They're all volunteer based. They receive $0 public money. The public rarely sees the work they do. They're doing physically and mentally taxing work purely for the love of animals.

They typically all have a donation page, and many have Amazon Wishlists where you can send them cleaning, maintenance, or medical supplies directly if you're worried about the money going to something you might not intend.

Nothing will go to people. You won't have to question if you're really help an animal that may or may not exist in a country you'll never see. They're your neighborhood animals.

As the [email protected] person here, I look specifically for a raptor rehabbers to donate to, and I share links to those rescues worldwide.

I can't find my link to the world rescue database, but for a US based one, you can look here or just Google up "wild animal rescue near me" and you should get some options.

Here's the thing: I don't know about this charity in particular. But in general, a big charity is just as complicated a business as a big for profit company.
The task of managing it isn't any easier. So the people who have experience in managing big businesses can get that kind of money elsewhere, too.
In our system, the charity is pretty much forced to pay competitive CEO salaries if they want experienced people at the helm.
If they paid much less, they wouldn't get anyone to do the job who's actually competent.

I earn <20k a year

Could I ask what you do for a living or what field of work you're in?

A quick Google shows there expense ratio is 86% which I think isn't horrible.

https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/951648219

Same in the UK - and in part it's encouraged by the regulatory body, the Charity Commission to ensure competent senior staff. (Not usually as high as the example you give, but certainly most large charities pay senior grade around £100k and upwards.

You can kind of see that point, but most people would be shocked and dismayed to know how little difference their individual donation makes.

I always encourage people to check this information as you've done for your country before donating. Many charities can do a huge amount of good with small donations, but it's the big ones that can make effective change through lobbying.

But the more cynical amongst you will realise that charities exist on paper to solve problems. There is an inherent contradiction that if they do solve those problems, everyone that works for them is suddenly out of work.

If paying a CEO $200k more makes the charity $2 million more, it's a no-brainer. Billionaires love to give to animal-related causes, so that's easily plausible.

In reality of course, predicting the amounts of money a CEO will bring in is virtually impossible, so it becomes a nepo-baby-fest like everything else. People with rich connections are in high demand at pretty much every entity that has a need to raise money, so they cost a lot.

Then of course you have the problem that in the wider scope, this reality creates an arms-race between charities for fundraising potential that diverts from the causes themselves. The only real solution to that problem is to punish charities that pay their officers too much by not giving them money.

I'd like to be "chief philanthropy officer" as well.

Okay, so think about it like this:

Suppose your job is making wooden chairs. It's takes you the exact same skills to make a wooden chair to sell for profit, as it does to make a wooden chair to donate to a chairless children's charity, right? So why would you spend all your time and skills doing a job that's eventually going to bankrupt you? While you might do a few chairs because you feel like it's morally right, the bulk of your work is going to be selling chairs because that's how you sustain yourself.

CEOs are in the same situation. A 500-person for-profit company takes the exact same skill set to run as a 500-person non-profit. So the reality is that non-profits need to either be competitive in pay with for-profits, or they have to be attractive in ways other than compensation so they can entice CEOs to work for them.

Now, none of that is to say that the scale of CEO compensation is appropriate, because it's not. But that's the calculus a non-profit has to make.