Salary Scales

Q: I’m in the Midwest and am trying to come up with appropriate salary ranges for staff members of a nonprofit organization I’m starting. What is the best way to do that?

A: Depending on your location, your state nonprofit association may have information and guidelines to help you. All state nonprofit associations are listed on the National Council of Nonprofit Associations’ Web site. The Kansas Non Profit Association, for example, maintains a detailed salary and benefit survey for that state. Herb Callison, executive director of the Kansas group suggests that if your state’s nonprofit association doesn’t have such information, the state’s department of commerce probably does. Your nonprofit association can also give you a sense of what kind of benefits, if any, your new group will be expected to offer employees. Susan Ellis, vice president of the Indiana Association of Nonprofit Organizations recommends calling your local United Way, if there is one: “They’ll be able to give you a sense of salary ranges based on organizational budgets.”

For further guidance, you may want to check out Web sites that contain nonprofit salary data. A previous edition of Hotline rounded up a few of these sites. In addition, look for recent salary surveys: The Chronicle does its own annual survey of executive-director pay and also posts articles about similar studies. To find these data, simply scan Philanthropy Careers’ Job Market library, or look for the salary stories archived in the Recruiter’s Primer. Ms. Ellis warns, however, that salaries can vary widely from one organization to the next and one city to the next because of local economic factors — and that jobs in urban areas pay much better than those in rural towns.