Episode Details
Back to Episodes“Salary Sacrifices Are Donations. Let’s Treat Them as Such.” by Christoph Hartmann 🔸
Description
TLDR
- NGOs pay less than for-profits.
- Employees accept this because they have impact.
- This makes employees implicit donors to the NGOs
- NGOs should account for this in cost-effectiveness calculations
- This is a coordination problem and can only be solved as a movement
- Salary sacrifice is more tax-efficient than donating the money
- This would make finding talent for pressing problems much easier
- It is a problem EA is uniquely positioned to solve
In this post, I use "salary sacrifice" informally to mean voluntarily accepting compensation below one's market alternative. I do not mean the formal payroll or tax arrangement called “salary sacrifice” in some jurisdictions.
Measuring impact
How do you measure your impact of working at an NGO? You could try analyzing your replaceability, but that's hard and pretty contested. Or you could just look at the "input" - donations vs the "output" - impact, and divide it up.
For example: Let's assume the Against Malaria Foundation managed to save one life. They did this with EUR 3000 donations raised. From those donations they paid salaries, bednets, research and evaluation.
The Against Malaria Foundation "sells" that impact to their donors. As a donor, you can "buy" one life saved [...]
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Outline:
(00:12) TLDR
(01:00) Measuring impact
(02:24) Implications for cost effectiveness analyses
(03:30) This is a coordination problem
(05:14) Salary sacrifices are tax efficient
(06:09) What does this mean for career choice?
(07:09) Whats there to lose?
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First published:
May 16th, 2026
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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