Under the wat­chful gaze of crumbling saints and baby-f­aced angels, you hurry down a path lined with mausoleums. Eventually, you pass crops of headstones glinting in the moonlight, each engraved with the Cliffs Notes version of the dead person's life. You practically run past sunken graves and dying flowers, hoping upon hope that the sound you hear is just the wind and trying to shake the feeling that something is following close on your heels.

HOW MUCH OF YOUR CONTRIBUTION TO A NONPROFIT GOES TOWARDS “COMMISSIONS”?

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word "commission" as “(a) payment to an agent proportional to the amount involved in a transaction, a percentage on the amount involved” while Microsoft Encarta English Dictionary defines it as “… a fee paid to an agent for providing a service, especially a percentage of the total amount of business transacted”. This of all the other definitions is particularly pertinent to the issue that this article is aimed to address. The primary line of thought is targeted at the issue of nonprofit organizations use of agencies in order to raise funds. Large nonprofit organizations like OXFAM, UNESCO, Christian Aid, Save the Children, Amnesty International and a host of other multimillion dollar nonprofit organizations outsource a huge chunk of their fundraising work to agencies. The agents promise the nonprofit organizations a steady stream of income, which would also be recurrent as the donors they get are ideally and for the most part “long term supporters”. Such agents are often for profit organizations (although often with a passion for good causes) and get paid a decent sum of money for their labors.