Charities can’t just brush aside criticism of executive pay in today’s Times, says Kirsty Weakley.

This is not the blog that I wanted to write this week, and like many people in the sector on seeing the front page of the Times this morning my heart sank and I considered going back to bed until 4 January.

The headline ‘Anger over six-figure pay deals for charities’ is one that we’ve seen many times before.  In most cases the criticism is unwarranted, and I wondered why the national press can’t seem to go more than two days without trotting out, as someone on Twitter put it, “money for old rope”.

But *whispers it* once you get beyond the headline and read the report in the Times, it is actually a fair and balanced piece which draws attention to an important issue: that below the surface of the top charities there’s another layer of large multi-million-pound organisations, where senior executives are being paid very well, and in some cases as well as the big boys.

The paper’s journalists are quite right to ask why those people deserve the same level of remuneration as those at the top. There may be a very good reason for it, but the charities highlighted did not adequately explain why, and by not doing so could not only damage their own reputation but that of the entire sector.

When the ‘big boys’ of the sector are criticised, small and medium-sized charities are quick to complain that most of the sector does not operate on that scale. But when it’s smaller charities that are being highlighted, it is more difficult to make that argument.

NCVO has some good advice for how to respond if journalists ask questions about executive pay. Charities should make sure they have read this, and that they have a plan in place for when the media comes knocking.

Another point worth noting is that the journalists at the Times seemed to accept that the chief executive at Save the Children, might deserve his pay package – so maybe the message around executive pay is beginning to sink in.

And on that positive note: here are some festive fundraising songs (aka the blog I wanted to write this week).