Having spent the better part of 30 years working with, in, and on behalf of nonprofit organizations as a national board member, program director, and consultant, I consider myself well-qualified to evaluate your post as an uneducated rant.

1. You criticize Mr. Pallotta for making “quite a lot of profit in the process”. How much profit did he make? Do you know? Do you really believe that entrepreneurs who strive to make this world a better place have no right to profit from the good they do? Mr. Pallotta never masked the fact that his was a for-profit enterprise; there was no deception.
2. A net of 18.59% is not bad for any business. My involvement in nonprofit work enlightened me over the years to the fact that many organizations go to great pains to create the illusion of low cost-of-fundraising ratios. They fear the blowback they might get from people, like you, who do not understand the business side of operations.
3. You accuse Mr. Pallottta of “misappropriation and fraud”. I do not know your profession or position in business, but do you honestly believe or expect that 100% of your donation should go directly to the cause? If so, Mr. Hui, you are grossly naïve.
4. When you suggest making a full disclosure of salaries and bonuses on promotional materials you imply that banks are required to disclose such costs and expenditures and that failure to do so would send people to jail for a very long time. I am not aware of any requirement that for-profit private businesses have to divulge any such information to the public.
5. Your statement that he managed to “con people with a sob story” to pay themselves 81.41% in the process is recklessly ignorant. Are you aware of the costs associated with putting on these events? He delivered $108 MILLION (and nearly $200 million to another) to an organization that, otherwise, would not have received any of it. If he made money for his company, who cares? Should he have sold cookies in the churchyard after Mass and sent the $75.50 he made to the organization? Would that be better because the cookies were donated?

Mr. Hui, Dan Pallotta has shown us all what it means to dream big and help those in need. All nonprofit organizations would benefit greatly if his sensible philosophy and passionate vision were understood and embraced by the public. I admire Dan Pallotta for taking the lead on what, hopefully, will become a bouleversement of an archaic paradigm and bring hope to the many who are in need of spiritual, emotional, and physical healing.

But here’s the key in these paragraphs.

AIDSRide raised a total of $581 million gross, but contributed only $108 million for AIDS services in the US!

This means that running a couple of bicycle rides costs a staggering $473 million USD!

I’m thinking that Mr Pallotta and his buddies made quite a lot of profit in the process. He just happened to capture the imagination at the right time, in the right place when AIDS was at the forefront of public consciousness.

This amounts to misappropriation of funds and fraud on Bernie’s scale given the fact that he raised the money on the premise of a lie — that the money was going to treat AIDS. Simply put — if I had donated $100 dollars to AIDSRide back in 1990, only $18.59 USD would have ever made it to the beneficiaries. Perhaps less. I wonder how many of those sponsors would be satisfied with the way their hard earned money was distributed.

Worse. I worry about how this endangers the entire non-profit sector. If the benchmark is to contribute just 18.59% of my donation to the cause, I am likely to become quite cynical and stop giving altogether. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me .. ..

I wonder if Mr Pallotta thinks it would be good to put that declaration into one of his expensive full-page colour adverts along with full disclosure of salaries and bonuses? If a bank failed to disclose such costs and expenditures, people would go to jail for a very long time.

The “success” of his programme lay in the fact that they managed to con people with a sob story and extract 81.41% to pay themselves in the process. He was simply lucky that charity isn’t regulated in the same way as financial institutions.

The fact that he believes his time is “worth it” is galling. If he really is that talented or capable, why didn’t he make his money elsewhere and donate his time to the AIDSRide venture? This could mean more of the $581 million would end up in the right place.

If charitable giving is stuck at a fixed percentage of 2% gross as he says (and I believe this to be correct), then all he has succeeded in doing is take money from other charities to fund his profit / operations / costs / bonuses and salaries.

I know this much to be true. I make a fixed amount in income. In any given year, if I give to A, then I give less to B. It is not a bottomless moneypit of goodwill that he is mining from. He conveniently neglects to connect these particular dots in his argument.

Clearly he believes he has done good, but I think he may have bent the spoon to fit his mouth.

He is clearly persuasive and a good presenter. But let’s carefully consider the content before siding with the stylistics.