Fundraisers’ Pay Hikes No Match for Inflation, Report Says

Seven in 10 fundraisers didn’t see their pay rise high enough in 2017 to keep pace with inflation, according to a new survey.

On average, fundraiser pay rose 11 percent in 2017, according to the latest annual report by the Association of Fundraising Professionals. But those gains were not evenly distributed. Inflation stood at 2.1 percent last year; only three in 10 fundraisers received salary increases of 4 percent or more. Twenty-one percent of fundraisers got no raises, and nearly 6 percent took pay cuts.

Fundraisers’ median pay was $67,100 last year, a level that has budged only slightly since 2010, when it was roughly $65,000.

The reasons underlying the sluggish pay increases, despite the hot market for fundraisers’ skills, are puzzling, says Melissa Brown, co-founder of the Nonprofit Research Collaborative, who helped analyze this year’s data for the report.

Nearly half of all fundraisers looked for a job with another employer in the past year, according to the report. Thirty-eight percent of all fundraisers who said they were thinking about changing jobs said the reason was to earn more money.

Brown was surprised that fundraisers are finding different reasons for looking for new jobs than “the types of things we talk about at AFP conferences.”

In addition to the search for higher pay, fundraisers cited a desire to advance in their careers (35 percent) and to engage in more challenging work (26 percent) as the top reasons they wanted a change.

“It was so clearly career-development-oriented and not the structural barriers that make fundraising more challenging,” Brown says. For instance: Unrealistic work expectations were cited by only 13 percent of fundraisers who said they were thinking about moving on from their current job.

The survey gathered responses from more than 3,000 association members.

Feeling Valued

Female fundraisers make an average of nearly 20 percent less than their male peers do, according to the study: $74,519 for women versus $92,544 for men. In March, the association announced a new effort aimed at studying gender inequities in compensation and gathering ideas for solving them.

“We’re going to delve a little more deeply into this by looking at past benefit-compensation surveys,” says Michael Nilsen, the association’s vice president for communications and public policy. He promises “more nuanced answers” later this year from the organization on why the gap persists.

The survey’s other noteworthy findings include:

• Fifty-nine percent said they believed fundraising is valued throughout their organization.
• Sixty-three percent said their board helps with fundraising. However, more fundraisers in the current survey than in the previous one cited relationships with board members as a source for declining job satisfaction.
• Professionals who hold the Certified Fund Raising Executive credential made an average salary of $98,958, compared with $77,862 for those without it.
• The report provided a demographic snapshot of the association’s members: Eighty-eight percent are white and 80 percent are female. The members also appear to be aging: Forty-nine percent, compared with 45 percent in the previous survey, are at least 45 years old.