$5 Million Per Year: Outrageous Salary for Komen CEO Nancy Brinker

Alternet has updated this story. She only makes $417,000/year. I hope that she donates a large percentage to charity.

http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/775558/$5_million_per_year%3A_outrageous_salary_for_komen_ceo_nancy_brinker/

UPDATE: In what can only be described as an epic reporting #FAIL by The Daily Beast, a quietly made correction to Sandra McElwaine's article about Nancy Brinker, CEO of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure, now restates her salary as $417,000 a year, as opposed to the $5 million originally reported in the article.

Yes, it is, and there are also questions about how much money that is raised is actually spent on research or breast exams.

http://jezebel.com/5840564/the-breast-cancer-charity-scam

Nonprofits have to report financial information to the IRS, but it's easy to fudge the numbers. Money used to hire telemarketers can be described as funds used for education if the words "Don't forget to get a mammogram!" are stamped on the bottom of the charity's stationary. The value of gifts may be inflated to make it seem like the charity is bigger, and distort the fact that most of the money isn't going to breast cancer research.

http://jezebel.com/5380683/breast-cancer-is-a-disease-not-a-marketing-opportunity

Maybe, maybe not. As Aimee Picchi writesat AOL's Daily Finance, the breast cancer-specific packaging is more an indication of savvy marketing than corporate benevolence. In some cases, there's no guarantee at all that part of your purchase price will go to a charity; Procter and Gamble will only donate two cents of your pink Swiffer purchase if you have a specific coupon that appeared in newspapers a couple of weeks ago, for instance. In others, the fine print tells you there's a cap on donations — e.g., $15,000 for Herr's Whole Grain Pretzel Ribbons — so if you buy the product after the limit's been reached, your money goes exactly where it would go if you bought the normal package. And in still other cases, such as Hershey's Bliss chocolates, the donation is not only capped (at $300,000 there), but entirely separate from sales of the product, so there's no reason at all to buy the pink package unless you like your chocolate gendered.

I will never buy a product with a pink ribbon, unless I was going to buy it anyway. If I want to give to a charity, I'll make a donation directly to the charity and make sure that my money doesn't go towards a corporation's profits.

Yes, the recent Komen scandal has opened my eyes about charities.

Komen is 58% overhead expenses.

I haven't checked in a few years but, the last time I did the average overhead cost at most major charities was anywhere between 15 and 30 percent. The only exception was The Salvation Army where overhead was less than 10%.