Keeping the Best on Board

In a tight job market, charities try to heighten their appeal to workers

Leaders of Jumpstart for Young Children, a national non-profit group in Boston that helps preschool youngsters, don’t want their employees bolting for other jobs. So each year

the organization gives $500 apiece to nearly 60 of its full-time workers to attend professional-development activities of their choice. What’s more, it invites employees in all 11 cities where it operates to fill out a quarterly “satisfaction assessment” that gauges how happy they are in their jobs.

The Nature Conservancy also wants to hold on to its best and brightest. A recent compensation analysis prompted the environmental charity to raise the pay of a third of its information-systems employees.

And Boys & Girls Clubs of America this year began a “Professional Development System” project aimed at improving employee recruitment, training, and retention at its 2,662 local affiliates. The effort provides local club executives with everything from sample performance-appraisal forms to a computerized “career-fitness builder” that is designed to help the charity’s employees decide on career goals and figure out ways to achieve them.

Facing the tightest job market in decades, Jumpstart, the Nature Conservancy, Boys & Girls Clubs, and countless other charities are looking hard these days for ways to recruit and retain good employees. From improving training programs and raising salaries to mounting aggressive recruitment-advertising campaigns, non-profit groups are scrambling to heighten their appeal as places to work.

“If you have a candidate you like, don’t drag your feet,” advises Laura Fortson, director of human resources at the YMCA of the USA. “You call them back and they’ve already got a job.”

Among the employees most in demand are chief executives and other high-level managers. More than one-third of the organizations in The Chronicle’s annual survey of non-profit salaries changed chief executives since 1997, and eight groups switched top executives twice.

The burgeoning information-technology industry is an especially powerful lure for current and prospective charity employees.

“The ‘new economy’ has placed a real demand on non-profits to compete with for-profit companies,” says Eric Dawson, national executive director of Peace Games, a charity in Boston that trains youngsters in non-violence strategies. “Because we can’t compete in terms of salaries and stock options, it’s forced us to become really good employers.”

Mr. Dawson, a 26-year-old Harvard University graduate who co-founded Peace Games eight years ago, believes that jobs at charities like his can be as rewarding as those in technology — except perhaps in financial terms.

“What I can offer folks is something they can’t get at Microsoft: the ability to help kids be peacemakers,” he says. “After making a certain amount of money — enough to take care of your kids and put something away for retirement — what matters is job satisfaction, who you’re working with, and what your work is contributing to the world.”

It’s a message that many charities are promoting these days. In a new employee-recruitment campaign, the American Red Cross bills itself in employment ads as a place “where your heart and mind go to work.” Similarly, the Nature Conservancy, in a new marketing campaign, invites potential recruits to “pour your heart and soul into our land and waters.”

Salary Disparities

Yet, for all the emotional appeal that a non-profit career may offer, charities face an uphill struggle to find and keep first-rate employees.

One challenge, of course, is matching the compensation levels of the for-profit world.

A study this year by Christopher Ruhm, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and his colleague, Carey Borkoski, concluded that average weekly wages at non-profit organizations are 11 percent lower than those in the for-profit world, mainly because most non-profit jobs are concentrated in relatively low-paying fields such as education and human services.

Mr. Ruhm, an economics professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and his colleague also found that, on average, people lose 2 to 4 percent of their earning power when they move from for-profit to non-profit jobs.

In many instances, Mr. Ruhm acknowledges, the wage gap between the for-profit and non-profit worlds is significantly wider than his study reflects. The main message of the study, he says, is that, especially in fields such as education and health care where non-profit groups often compete for labor with for-profit companies, non-profit groups had better pay market rates if they want to attract workers. “You can’t pay less just because you’re a non-profit and get good people,” he says.

Strategic Advertising

Aware that the salaries they attach to high-level positions can make or break a recruitment effort, many charities are being strategic about the way they advertise key jobs.

“In order for us to attract applicants, we don’t even put in a salary figure” when seeking mid-level and upper-management professionals in information-technology, finance, and other specialized positions, says Pedro Martinez, controller of Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Chicago. “We try to see what they’re already making.”

In recent months, Catholic Charities also has been working to bring the compensation of its middle managers and professional staff members in line with pay levels at other big employers in the Chicago area, Mr. Martinez says. “Our seasoned managers who have been with us for years are specialists,” he says. “Some of them could go to other non-profits, to government, or to for-profits. In today’s economy, people are realizing how much they can make.”

To pay for the salary adjustments, Catholic Charities has worked to increase its revenue from government and other sources. It also has looked for ways to operate more efficiently, including by using computers to handle administrative tasks.

Mr. Martinez acknowledges that Catholic Charities can’t pay as much as many large for-profit employers. But, he says, “our goal is to try.”

He adds: “Our employees come to work for us because of our mission to help the poor. But when they see that we also are trying to come close to matching what they could get in the for-profit world, that helps to retain them because they see the appreciation” of their work.

Meeting salary expectations isn’t the only financial challenge facing charities that seek a stable work force. Non-profit groups also struggle to find money for employee programs and benefits that can enhance their attractiveness as work places. Frequently, donors resist giving money for such purposes.

Peace Games, which has 40 full-time workers, is trying to raise $100,000 from foundations and other donors to start a “support and training” department to provide professional-development opportunities and otherwise nurture the charity’s staff, Mr. Dawson says. So far, he says, “it’s been very hard to go out and get funding” for the project. Many donors “want to give money that’s going to go directly to support kids,” he says, “but not to the people who are supporting kids.”

Lengthy Searches

Finding qualified workers — especially in such fields as fund raising, computer technology, accounting, and communications — has become painfully difficult in an era when the for-profit economy is going full blast, many charity leaders say.

Mr. Dawson says he spent a year searching for a director of finance and administration for Peace Games. Filling the position posed the kind of challenge that many small non-profit organizations face. “We needed someone with an M.B.A. who wanted to work in a start-up, but who didn’t want to make $120,000 a year and who was committed to social justice,” Mr. Dawson says.

Bob Nelson, executive director of Dolores Street Community Services, in San Francisco, has faced a similar predicament. Last month, after three weeks of extensive advertising for a new director of finance and administration, Dolores Street had received a response from only one qualified applicant. The charity was offering a starting salary of up to $50,000, two-thirds more that it paid for the same position three years ago — but not as much as many for-profit employers pay for similar jobs in the hot San Francisco Bay market.

Mr. Nelson, who says that the job was eventually filled, notes that a previous finance director was hired away by a dot-com company that offered an attractive compensation package and a career path in a rapidly expanding field.

“We couldn’t match it,” Mr. Nelson says. “I had to be happy for him. It was a great career move for him.”

Jumpstart for Young Children, which uses college-age AmeriCorps volunteers to help preschool-age youngsters from low-income families succeed in school, also has struggled with the tight labor market. This summer, it advertised for a month for an accounting manager at its main office in Boston, a technology and commercial mecca where many jobs go begging to be filled.

Still, Jumpstart eventually filled the job, and it also has been more successful than many non-profit groups at finding other employees. The six-year-old organization has filled 53 of 54 open positions since last spring, nearly half of them by promoting current employees or AmeriCorps volunteers.

“We’re increasingly seeing that it’s important, not only for our program quality and our growth but also because of the current economy, to look internally” for talent, says Edith Buhs, vice president for organizational development.

When Jumpstart hired a chief operating officer recently, it wound up offering a salary 14 percent higher than a recent compensation study undertaken by the organization had recommended, Ms. Buhs says.

The salaries of other Jumpstart employees also have been under review as part of a larger make-over of the organization’s personnel policies that began two years ago when Ms. Buhs joined the organization, she says.

Since 1998, Jumpstart has upgraded its on-the-job benefits, overhauled its performance-appraisal system, increased employee training and development opportunities, put more emphasis on training of managers and, when filling jobs, worked to promote people from within its pool of paid staff members and volunteers.

“When I was hired, I envisioned that human resources would be about one-fourth of my job,” Ms. Buhs says. “Now, we’re moving to having a department called ‘organizational development’ that will have the equivalent of two-and-a-half people working on recruiting, retaining, and developing our staff.”

Fresh Approaches

Other charities also are looking for fresh approaches to finding and keeping workers.

Ms. Fortson, the human-resources director at the YMCA of the USA, says her organization is testing an online recruiting system that would allow local Y.M.C.A.’s anywhere in the nation to post job openings and applicants to submit résumés.

Similarly, Boys & Girls Clubs of America, in Atlanta, this year began using its Web site as a one-stop employment clearing-house through which managers at any of the organization’s affiliates can post vacant jobs and people can apply.

The Web site is part of the larger “Professional Development System” program that Boys & Girls Clubs is using in an effort to improve its employee recruitment, training, and retention.

Ronnie E. Jenkins, vice president for services to clubs and the executive who oversees the professional-development program, says that it is modeled after those used in the for-profit world. The effort will save Boys & Girls Clubs thousands of dollars in future years by reducing turnover and making employees more productive, Mr. Jenkins predicts.

“There is a war for talent,” he says, “and we intend to attract the very best to serve our young people and our clubs.” He adds: “If we are to compete in the evolving global marketplace, should we not be on a level field with for-profits and with colleges and universities” in recruiting and retaining employees?

The Nature Conservancy also is taking steps to capture the hearts and souls of prospective employees. In recent months, for example, it has created a three-person recruiting department and revamped its pay system to give managers at the charity’s local offices greater latitude in setting salary levels to match market demand in their regions, says Paquita Bath, senior director for staff development and recruitment.

In addition, she says, the Nature Conservancy has begun bringing every new worker — whether hired in Indianapolis or Indonesia — to its Virginia headquarters for a three-day orientation that includes a field trip to a site that the organization is working to protect.

If the conservancy doesn’t invest in its 3,000 employees, says Ms. Bath, “we’re not necessarily going to keep them or have them performing at their best.”

Charity leaders say that duty should be a concern for all chief executives. “It’s up to an organization to keep its staff,” Mr. Dawson says. “The challenges are on me as a director to make sure that my staff is challenged and supported.”