Fundraiser salaries increased last year from a median of $75,000 in 2020 to $78,000 in 2021, according to a new survey by the Association of Fundraising Professionals. The increase is especially notable since the yearslong trend of increasing salaries flatlined in 2020.
The February 2022 online survey polled 3,482 U.S. fundraisers about their employment status, compensation, and benefits the previous year. Among other questions, surveyors asked about the gender, racial, and ethnic makeup of the staff and boards at respondents’ organizations.
A bright spot in the report was the high share of fundraisers (77 percent) who said they planned to stay at their current organization. Among those staying, the majority (also 77 percent) said they expected to earn more in 2022 than they did in the previous year.
Plenty of fundraisers looked for new opportunities during the first year of the pandemic. Nearly half of respondents said they searched for or accepted a role at a new organization from March 2020 to February 2021. Another 8 percent said they laid the groundwork for self-employment during that time. The report noted the average fundraiser salary also increased slightly — from $88,421 to $89,799.
The red-hot job market in 2021 pushed organizations to increase pay to attract fundraisers to fill their many vacancies, says Mike Geiger, AFP president. But that may be changing.
“That demand for employees has slowed,” Geiger says. “There’s a lot of conversations about an impending recession.” Fundraisers have a reputation for job hopping, but Geiger says a gloomier economic outlook may persuade them to stay put — at least in the short-term.
Gender Pay Gap Persists
As in previous surveys, the report found a substantial gender pay gap among fundraisers. Men earned an average of $107,433 while women’s average salaries were $86,939. Based on those simple averages alone, compensation for male fundraisers was 24 percent higher than it was for female fundraisers in 2021.
The stubbornness of that pay disparity underscores the work nonprofits have left to do. “Have we as a sector done a good enough job? I think the answer to that is no,” Geiger says. “If we had done a good enough job, we would have parity.”
Fundraisers get closer to parity when comparing median salaries for nonwhite and white fundraisers. The 359 respondents who identified as Hispanic, Black, Indigenous, Asian, or a person of color earned a median salary of $79,000. That was slightly lower than the median pay for the 2,054 white, non-Hispanic respondents: $79,625.
The situation is flipped when it comes to average salary, with fundraisers of color taking home $97,070 compared with white fundraisers’ average pay of $89,638. Bear in mind, however, that the number of white fundraisers polled on this question was far greater than the number of fundraisers of color. This data differs from last year’s report, which showed that those identifying as Black, Indigenous, or people of color earned 10 percent less on average as those who identified as “white only.”
Geiger says future research should dig deeper into compensation trends among the discrete racial and ethnic identities contained in that category.
Among the other findings:
- 38 percent of respondents said at least a quarter of their organization’s trustees were members of a minority group or a group underrepresented in leadership. In 2020, that share was 33 percent.
- 26 percent of survey respondents said payments for their employee-sponsored health plans increased in 2021.
