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Comment by doktorhladnjak | Hacker News Reader

> If I wanted to donate a large amount of money to a non-profit, I would structure it as a zero-interest loan, and would just keep deferring the repayment of the loan as long as the org stays true to its mission

This flies totally in the face of Paul's post. His point is to donate unrestricted to non-profits you _trust_. If you can't trust the organization or need to put controls in place to prevent them from doing something bad, you should find another organization to donate to or need to check your ego.

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I don't think it's so black and white. The leaders at the organization could change and they certainly aren't going to give you your money back.

So plan to give $x/N per year for N years, and stop donating if you don’t get the results you want.

I don’t see a reason to make things complicated; every bit of overhead reduces the net impact your dollars are going to have.

What if the complication keeps them moving in the direction you want? That may make your dollars have additional impact rather than less.

Right, that is the exact line of thinking that TFA is arguing against. It's a pretty short piece as it is, but if you're looking for a TL;DR then this is as good a sentence as any:

> If a nonprofit doesn't understand better than its donors where money needs to be spent, then it's incompetent and you shouldn't be donating to it at all.

Though see TFA for some (corner-) cases where this might not apply.

Open to your thoughts on why TFA is wrong on this point - but I think you need to flesh your case out a bit more to at least address the arguments presented therein.

See Paul’s fine article. If you don’t trust the management at a nonprofit to do the right thing, then don’t give them your money.

One of the biggest challenges nonprofits face is donors who think they get to micromanage them because they give money. Any decent nonprofit has a development head who will politely but firmly tell donors to butt out, and hand them their check back if they don’t.

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