>>Dan Pallotta had a good thing going. As the CEO of Pallotta TeamWorks, a 400-employee company with 16 offices, his salary in 2001 was $394,500. The money, obviously, was nice, but the best part? He didn’t need to feel guilty about it. His for-profit company produced charitable events, such as AIDS Rides and Breast Cancer 3-Days, which netted $305 million for nonprofits in just nine years—more than any other private events in the history of philanthropy. But it could not last. The way he tells it in his 2013 TED talk, when the media reported on his abnormally-high salary—at least for those in the non-profit world—the public labeled him greedy and criticized his company for funneling millions of dollars in charitable donations to “overhead” like advertising and marketing. They didn’t seem to realize that the expensive marketing campaigns were a major factor in the staggering amount of donations that poured in. With stunning speed, the charities that once praised Pallotta’s fundraising genius summarily abandoned him, and he was forced to shut down his company and lay off all his employees. That decision came at a high cost for the charities and the causes they championed. One breast cancer charity that fired Pallotta’s company staged its own fundraising walks and saw its revenue plummet by $60 million.
Posted on: Wed, 25 Jun 2014 01:01:05 +0000
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