In a public company, and to a large extent a private company, the bottom line is the bottom line. Investors invest, and they want money out of it. As long as it's legal, anything goes to get that profit.
In a charity the bottom line is providing some much less tangible benefit to someone or something. The bottom line is a much fuzzier concept. The benefit is harder to gauge than when you're just looking at a number of currency units.
I don't know -- I think a major portion of the experience is the feeling you get from the donation rather than the experience of seeing an objective indicator of your cause improving. Who the heck cares if Charity CEO A owns a Leer and parties with Paris Hilton every weekend if his charity has triple the ROI on donations as compared to Charity CEO B. (Not hard at all to imagine, incidentally -- private companies have that sort of difference in competence all the time.)
No. That's exactly the point: people don't give money to charities to help a cause, they give money to feel good.
If they gave to help a cause, then they would support whatever (reasonably ethical) methods best helped that cause. The fact that so many donors bitch about frankly miniscule CEO compensation proves that the majority of them are not in it to improve the world -- or at least that there are other things they want out of their donation.
I don't know anyone who actually gives just to feel good. Feeling good is a by-product of giving, but only because you've done something worthwhile (or so you believe).
That people bitch about CEO compensation doesn't mean they don't want to improve the world. They bitch because they want to improve the world, and they believe that high CEO compensation (as they perceive it) is a modern evil that stands in the way of improvement.
Also, they bitch because it's hard to measure performance directly. The best we can do is often look at the % of administration vs programs vs fund raising. Even there you can have a lot of funky accounting.
If you really want to get into it, we can look at the names & brochures of the individual programs. Going all out, we might news search the names of the programs to see what news references we come up with.
We know that charities are inefficient. But we can't work out who or how. Charities don't have ROI or p/e. So we look at things like CEO salary.
In a public company, and to a large extent a private company, the bottom line is the bottom line. Investors invest, and they want money out of it. As long as it's legal, anything goes to get that profit.
In a charity the bottom line is providing some much less tangible benefit to someone or something. The bottom line is a much fuzzier concept. The benefit is harder to gauge than when you're just looking at a number of currency units.