March 25, 2011 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Fund raisers seeking to climb the career ladder are welcoming the improving job market, but that isn’t causing the same kind of salary frenzy that marked the days before the economy soured.
Many of the fund raisers interviewed at this week’s conference of the Association of Fund Raising Professionals in Chicago say their pay has been stagnant. All of the fund raisers said the topic was so sensitive they didn’t want their names or the names of their institutions used in this post.
Two fund raisers from a Kentucky community college, for example, said it’s been four years since they have had a salary increase.
The only reason the college could afford the travel and registration costs for the conference, they said, is that it earned extra money by charging people to park on its premises during a local festival. The college decided the proceeds could go toward the fund raisers’ professional development.
Another woman who works for a Chicago area social-service group said she hasn’t had a raise since 2008, and money owed to her organization by the state is long overdue.
At a state university on the West Coast, a fund raiser said she and her colleagues had received no raises in seven years, and in each of the past four years they had been furloughed for at least a week.
It’s not just fund raisers who work for nonprofits that face compensation challenges.
An experienced fund raiser in his 50s who works in a large fund-raising consulting firm said his company resorted to pay cuts on top of layoffs to survive in 2008 and 2009.
The firm last year was able to restore salaries to what they had been before the cuts, he said, and this year plans to provide a modest cost-of-living increase to its consultants.
Another consultant who advises nonprofit groups on fund-raising software said he’s nervous about increasing his hourly rate this year by $25—which amounts to $200 more per day—after 10 years of working for the same fee. To keep his clients happy, he said, he decided to charge them his old rate until July.
Most of the fund raisers who had received a raise recently said the increase was very small; in fact, they described it as more of a token gesture by their organizations than a raise.
A woman who raises big gifts for a charity in the Midwest, for example, said she recently got a 1.5-percent increase, while a fund raiser from a Texas social-service charity said her organization raised her pay by 1.8 percent.
When was the last time you received a raise? What else can nonprofits offer if they can’t afford salary increases?
