Gillespie has a rather interesting approach for fundraising with regards to TIGHAR – if it doesn’t have a big and immediate payoff, it seems he’s not that interested.

Case in point, the Amazon Smile program, where people who shop on Amazon can designate a charity to receive a small portion of their receipts. Obviously, the more people who shop on Amazon who select your charity, the more money the charity receives – but it is NEVER going to be a huge amount. Amazon does it strictly as a PR move, it seems to me. Gillespie got quite excited several years ago when a person on the TIGHAR forums suggested people start doing Amazon Smile for TIGHAR (this was before Gillespie implemented pay-to-post and banned all non-members from the forums).

There the matter rested for awhile, until a member queried how things were going with Smile (Gillespie hadn’t done anything to promote or encourage it, beyond the initial enthusiasm, if I recall correctly). Gillespie flatly dismissed it as a waste, as TIGHAR got a check for a few dollars, once in awhile.

Which prompted me, at least, to switch my Smile charity to one that was at least publicly appreciative of ANY support it could get.

I agree that TIGHAR’s method for publishing books is odd, but it is not unheard of. At least in the case of Finding Amelia, a book was published in part with member’s assistance.

Not so the case with the promised Niku VIII video. That was to be a first for TIGHAR, an in-house video of the expedition so the organization wouldn’t have to give up most of the profits to media rights. To help make it happen, they offered the Your Name Up In Lights campaign, where everyone who contributed at least $49 would get a copy of the video and their name listed in the credits. No one knows how many people pledged to help, or how much money was eventually raised – Gillespie hasn’t released specifics.

The video has never happened. Other than saying in January 2016 it is “indefinitely delayed,” Gillespie refuses to discuss it. It has now been, what, two-and-a-half years since Niku VIII? TIGHAR made a promise, hasn’t kept it, has no schedule to keep it, and is keeping the money in the meantime.

Getting back to TIGHAR …

One of the things that stuck me, after I really started seeing things, is how much executive compensation changes from year-to-year at TIGHAR. In many US non-profits, salaries are a relatively stable item, except for the raises for cost of living or if someone takes on new duties. Those are things you would expect and which wouldn’t raise an eyebrow anywhere, including with the IRS.

It doesn’t work that way at TIGHAR. Executive compensation bounces up and down like a brand new tennis ball, although there is a rough correlation between higher compensation and years when expeditions take place. That is expected, there is a lot more work and planning involved. If you look at the percentage of executive compensation compared to total revenues for a specific year, it is all over the map – ranging from a low of about 9 percent to a high of 78 percent of revenues for a given year. Since these numbers are from the IRS 990 forms TIGHAR has to file every year, which are available to the public and which Gillespie or Thrasher have to sign off on, there’s not much to argue about as far as the numbers themselves go. If anyone has different information or wants to dispute these numbers, I’m open to updating them.

Executive compensation as a percentage of revenue has averaged 41 percent a year at TIGHAR over the last 15 years, and is about 29 percent of overall revenues for the same time period. In other words, for the past 15 years, not quite one-third of the money TIGHAR has raised has gone to pay Gillespie, Thrasher and the handful of part-time/temporary employees they use. The chart below might be useful:

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