What should we pay for this role?
It sounds like a straightforward question.
In reality, for charities and not-for-profits, getting the answer right can be surprisingly difficult.
Pay too little and you risk struggling to attract the people you need, losing good employees to better-paying organisations or creating internal pay inequalities that become increasingly difficult to address.
Pay too much and you may be committing scarce charitable resources to salaries that are higher than the market requires.
And simply looking at an average salary for a particular job title rarely gives you the answer.
That’s why we’ve launched our bespoke salary benchmarking service for charities and not-for-profits.
Why charity salary benchmarking is different
Salary benchmarking is the process of comparing your organisation’s salaries with the market rate for similar roles.
But a meaningful benchmark needs to go much further than searching for “average salary for a Head of Fundraising” or “CEO charity salary UK”.
Job titles can mean very different things in different organisations.
A Head of Fundraising at a £2m charity with a team of three may have a very different role from a Head of Fundraising at a £50m national organisation managing a large income-generation team.
The same applies to CEOs, Finance Directors, Communications Directors, HR leaders and virtually every other senior role.
The scope and complexity of the role, size of organisation, location, cause area, team responsibility and candidate market all matter.
NCVO makes a similar point in its guidance on setting salaries: market rates are a useful guide, but organisations should consider internal fairness and affordability too and ideally use more than one source of salary data.
In other words, there isn’t one “correct” salary for a job.
There is a market range that makes sense for your particular organisation and role.
Charities are operating in a challenging employment market.
Budgets are under pressure, while competition for talented people remains strong. Candidates are also increasingly considering the whole employment package – including flexibility, benefits, culture and opportunities for progression – rather than salary in isolation.
Recent sector benchmarking research continues to show how much pay and benefits can vary between organisations of different sizes.
That creates a difficult balancing act for charity leaders:
How do we pay fairly and competitively without paying more than we need to?
Good salary benchmarking can help answer that question.
When should a charity consider salary benchmarking?
There are lots of situations where independent salary benchmarking can be useful.
You’re recruiting for a new role
Perhaps you’re about to advertise a CEO, Director or senior management position and aren’t sure what salary to put in the advert.
A benchmark can give you a realistic salary range based on comparable organisations, rather than relying on what the previous postholder was paid or what the last similar vacancy you saw advertised offered.
This can be particularly valuable for senior appointments, where getting the salary wrong can significantly reduce the quality and quantity of candidates you attract.
You’re struggling to recruit or retain people
If you’re repeatedly losing candidates because of salary expectations, or struggling to recruit for a particular role, your pay may not be competitive.
Benchmarking can help you establish whether salary is genuinely the problem – and, importantly, whether increasing it is likely to solve the problem.
You’re reviewing your organisational pay structure
You may be reviewing salary bands, introducing new grades or undertaking a wider people strategy review.
In this situation, benchmarking multiple roles can help you understand whether your internal structure is consistent with the external market.
It can also highlight potential compression or inequity between roles.
You’re preparing for a Trustee or Remuneration Committee discussion
Pay decisions often need to be explained and justified to Trustees.
Having clear, independent and evidence-based benchmarking gives you something much stronger than “this feels about right”.
It provides a defensible evidence base for conversations about salaries, pay ranges and wider reward.
You’re concerned about pay equity
Salary benchmarking shouldn’t only be about external competitiveness.
It’s also an opportunity to look at internal equity.
Are people doing roles of broadly similar value being paid consistently?
Are there historic salary differences that no longer make sense?
Could your approach to pay or progression be creating barriers for particular groups?
A good benchmarking exercise considers both the external market and your internal organisation.
Why a single salary survey isn’t enough
There are a growing number of salary surveys and guides available to charities.
They’re useful.
But they shouldn’t necessarily be treated as the answer.
Different surveys use different methodologies, sample sizes and comparator groups. Some focus on particular types of charity or particular roles.
And published data can quickly become out of date in a changing employment market.
That’s why our approach is to triangulate multiple sources of information.
Depending on the project, this can include:
- Published charity and not-for-profit salary surveys
- Industry salary guides and reports
- Live data from relevant job boards
- Data from a leading UK salary benchmarking platform
- Our own specialist recruitment market knowledge
- Charity People’s internal recruitment data
- Your own organisational pay and grading information
We then consider the data in the context of organisation size, role scope, sector or subsector and geography to create a more meaningful comparison.
The aim isn’t to give you a number.
It’s to give you a number you can understand and defend.
What does bespoke salary benchmarking look like?
Our service is designed around your organisation rather than giving you a generic salary report.
We start by understanding what you’re trying to achieve.
That might be benchmarking one role before you recruit.
It might be reviewing five roles within a particular team.
Or it might be a much broader review of salaries, benefits and pay structure across your organisation.
We then gather, validate and analyse relevant market data to ensure the insights are accurate, reliable and actionable.
Our reports can include:
- An executive summary of the key findings
- Market trends and recruitment insights from across the sector
- The methodology and sources used
- Role-by-role salary comparisons
- Recommended salary ranges or bands
- Internal equity and other EDI considerations
- Compa-ratio analysis
- Affordability modelling
- Benefits benchmarking
- Clear guidance for Trustees, Boards or Remuneration Committees
The result is a practical report designed to help you make a decision, rather than simply giving you a spreadsheet full of salary figures.
How much does charity salary benchmarking cost?
Not every organisation needs a full pay review.
Sometimes you simply need to know whether the £75,000 salary you’re considering for a Director is competitive.
Sometimes you need to benchmark a handful of roles.
And sometimes you’re reviewing the pay structure across the whole organisation.
Our salary benchmarking service is therefore available at different levels, from light-touch benchmarking of individual roles through to a full organisational benchmarking review.
That means you can get the level of insight you need without paying for a much bigger project than you require.
Salary benchmarking isn’t about paying the most
This is perhaps the most important point.
The purpose of salary benchmarking isn’t to help charities become the highest-paying employer in the sector.
It’s to help you understand where you sit in the market and make informed decisions.
For some organisations, the answer might be that salaries need to increase.
For others, it might be that salaries are already competitive and the bigger opportunity lies in benefits, flexibility, progression or how the organisation communicates its overall employee offer.
And sometimes the data will tell you that you simply can’t afford to match the market.
That’s useful information too.
Because you can then make a conscious decision about where you want to compete – and where you need to differentiate in other ways.
A better way to answer “What should we pay?”
The best salary benchmarking combines good data with sector expertise and organisational context.
That’s what we’ve built our service around.
Charity People has spent more than 30 years recruiting exclusively across the charity and not-for-profit sector. That gives us access not just to salary data, but to the conversations happening in the market every day: what candidates are expecting, what organisations are offering and where we’re seeing recruitment and retention challenges.
Our bespoke salary benchmarking service brings that insight together with multiple external data sources to help charities make fair, competitive and financially responsible decisions about pay.
Whether you’re benchmarking one role, a team or your whole organisation, we’d be happy to talk.
Find out more about our Salary Benchmarking Service for Charities and Not-for-Profits
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