Most Nonprofits Will Increase Salaries
and Hire More Workers, Study Finds
Nonprofit Pay: Salary Ranges
in Washington and New York
Chief executive officers
By Jennifer C. Berkshire
Nonprofits are stepping up
their hiring and increasing the
pay of many employees, according to a new survey of trends in
three regions of the East Coast.
The report, on a total of 1,700
nonprofits in New York, New
Jersey, and Washington, found
that 63 percent of charities plan
to increase staff salaries this
year, while one in three groups
intend to hire additional employees to help carry out their
missions.
That’s a significant change
from recent years, says Gayle
Brandel, president of Professionals for Nonprofits, the staffing firm, with offices in Newark,
N.J., New York, and Washington, that conducts the annual
survey.
“The nonprofit sector is feeling increasingly confident that
the worst of the downturn is
over and that it’s time to start
hiring again,” says Ms. Brandel.
The survey found that just 10
percent of charities continued to
reduce their work forces in 2010,
while the remainder either
made no staff changes or added
employees, including executive,
finance, development, and program staff members. That’s a
trend that is likely to pick up in
2011, says Ms. Brandel.
said they anticipated higher
budgets in 2011, which will allow them to hire more people.
“These groups are feeling
much better about their abil-
ity to raise money in the coming
year,” says Ms. Brandel. “Dona-
tions are up, foundation grants
are increasing.”
The survey found that nearly
a quarter of the nonprofits plan
to hire fund raisers. Yet more of
“Now we’re
starting to see real
competition, especially for fund raisers
and program staff.”
the groups will focus their efforts on hiring program staff
members, Ms. Brandel says.
“During the hard times, a lot
of these groups had no choice
but to cut at the meat of their
organizations—the programs,”
she says. “Now they’re saying
that they’re ready to rebuild
their program work.”
Hunting for Talent
Increases in nonprofit budgets
are expected to drive a growth
of staffs, she notes. Nearly one-third of the charities surveyed
Growing Salary Gaps
The survey found that many
charities are concerned about
finding qualified talent over the
next year. Half of the nonprofit groups said that despite high
unemployment in the broader economy, filling the new job
openings could prove difficult.
“Finding the right people for
these jobs is always a challenge,
but now we’re starting to see
real competition, especially for
fund raisers and program staff,”
says Ms. Brandel.
Budget size
$2.1- to $5-million
$5.1- to $10-million
$10.1- to $20-million
$20.1- to $50-million
More than $50-million
Washington
$120,000-$140,000
$140,000-$180,000
$160,000-$200,000
$200,000-$240,000
$240,000-$300,000
New York
$140,000-$160,000
$160,000-$220,000
$180,000-$260,000
$250,000-$300,000
$280,000-$350,000+
Budget size
$2.1- to $5-million
$5.1- to $10-million
$10.1- to $20-million
$20.1- to $50-million
More than $50-million
Washington
$90,000-$110,000
$100,000-$120,000
$110,000-$140,000
$120,000-$150,000
$130,000-$160,000
New York
$100,000-$120,000
$120,000-$140,000
$140,000-$160,000
$160,000-$180,000
$180,000-$220,000
NOTABLE BOOK
Nonprofits Should Follow Businesses’ Example in Learning From Errors, Say Authors
Charities and grant makers
should not fear failures but embrace them as opportunities to
learn valuable lessons, write
Robert Giloth and Colin Austin
in their new book, Mistakes to
Success: Learning and Adapting When Things Go Wrong.
Mr. Giloth is vice president
of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, in Baltimore, and Mr.
Austin is program director at
MDC, a group in ChapelHill,
N.C., that focuses on economic
and work-force development.
For this book, they collected
case studies of unsuccessful
community economic-devel-opment programs and asked
people who led those projects
what they would do differently.
In an interview, Mr. Giloth and
Mr. Austin discuss what other
nonprofits can learn and how
grant makers can help foster a
more open atmosphere when it
comes to making mistakes.
Why did you write this
book?
Mr. Austin: What was inter-
esting to me and to Bob was
thinking about the way busi-
nesses often approach mistakes
and the case-study method of
looking at business failures
and trying to learn from them.
What lessons can nonprofits
learn from the business
world?
Mr. Giloth: There’s much
more openness, and there’s
much more realization that
during the innovation business, you also have to be in the
mistakes and learning business. That kind of cultural
change is something we need
in the philanthropy and non-profit sector.
Mr. Austin: Businesses heav-
ily invest in prototyping and in
testing and retesting. We sort
of touch on that as a theme of
the book. We use the example
of the Wright brothers and
the number of years that they
spent out on the Outer Banks
of North Carolina testing and
crashing their models. They
were engineers; they were try-
ing to define problems in very
precise terms.
How much of the pressure
to succeed comes from
foundations?
Mr. Austin: The book really
has a message for practitioners, but a lot depends on the
funding agencies as well.
Private and public funders
need to make space for this
kind of learning and understanding mistakes and that
means going beyond charitable
giving and really engaging
with grantees about problems
in order to produce innovations.
Mr. Giloth: The investors set
the tone for what nonprofits
think they can talk about. It’s
difficult when there’s a certain
amount of public skepticism
about the results that nonprof-
its are creating, or how effi-
cient they are.
How does the bad economy
affect whether nonprofits
make mistakes?
Mr. Austin: There’s a huge
amount of pressure on nonprofit
organizations. We’ve seen a lot
of our sister organizations close
their doors.
At the same time, there’s an
opportunity in the recession and
the economic climate because
foundations are also thinking
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ISBN: 978-1-4502-4683-5.
about how to do more with less,
so there’s a certain level of rethinking going on and there’s an
opportunity there to interject a
lot of this mistakes practice and
consideration of failures.
