The Automatic Nonprofit Salary Calculator
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Jon Pratt of the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits uses a tongue-in-cheek version of the familiar Salary Calculator model to comment trenchantly on the indiscriminate -- and not so indiscriminate –differences in how nonprofit staff get paid:
How much should you be paid for your nonprofit job?
What . . . you want to get PAID? You mean an actual salary, not just a stipend, and for a nonprofit job that is not solely volunteer? Don’t forget to factor in all of the psychic income you get knowing you are making the world a better place! After all, you are doing the Lord’s work, so your reward may not be in this life but in the next. Plus, there is the prestige and halo effect – that has to be worth something!
Even after taking these not inconsiderable intrinsic rewards into account, you might still wonder whether you are getting paid the right amount of actual money (probably not) or whether one of your co-workers is getting paid the right amount (probably too much). The following fourteen data points provide a "scientific" formula (created by someone with two advanced degrees, neither of them in a scientific field) that you can use to check your salary against cruel reality:
1. Start by entering your organization's total budget here: ____________
Then enter the the number of full time equivalent employees here:________
Then divide the budget by the number of FTE, write in here: __________
Then divide by 2 = ____________ Use this number as a base then change according to your answers to the questions below.
[Example: if your organization has a $1 million dollar budget and 25 FTEs, then divide $1,000,000 by 25 = $40,000. Divide that by 2 and you get the starting number of $20,000.]
Congratulations! You have properly calculated your appropriate salary. Now get back to work. :)
See also in Blue Avocado:
- Low-Wage Workers in Nonprofits [4]
- How Much to Pay the Executive Director? [5]
- Benchmarking and Analyzing Salaries in Nonprofits [6]
Jon Pratt is executive director of the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits [7], which publishes a sensible Salary and Benefits Survey. He submitted the photo at the left, claiming that he was the model for the statue.
Although he has a degree from the Kennedy School at Harvard and is a male CEO, he swears that his organization has never paid a compensation consultant $20,000 for a "Top Hat Plan." (But if you need one, he might know someone who could fix you up . . . .)
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> Read more [9]