Charity salaries vs inflation over the last 5 years

There’s been a lot of talk about inflation in recent weeks. And plenty of chatter about the upcoming public sector pay rise and whether the increase will be above the inflation rate.

In this post we thought we’d take a look at charity sector pay over the last five years to see how it compares.

Using a combination of our own data collection and archived job adverts from Third Sector, Charity Job, and The Guardian, we built up a picture of salaries for different job types in different locations.

It quickly became apparent that we’d bitten off way more than we could chew. So, we made the following decisions to make the task a little more manageable:

1. In an effort to simplify things, we narrowed it down to fundraising in London. But this was still too much, so we simplified it further to include just ‘officer’ and ‘manager’ level jobs, then just ‘manager’ jobs.

2. In an attempt to make things as comparable as possible, we only used roles advertised directly by charities. We used the upper end of the salary banding, (if one was advertised), and measured the mean of the middle 80% by year to ignore outliers.

3. We used the Bank of England inflation calculator for the maths.

 Our efforts generated this:

In this example, the inflation-adjusted salary has been taken from the previous year. If you ignore the intervening years and calculate what the salary would be (if kept in line with inflation) until August of this year, you’d expect the mean to be £40,481 which is -2.75% under the inflation rate over the five years.

So, it seems charity sector pay (in this very specific example) consistently falls behind inflation. We’re not sure what happened in 2017 for there to be such a big jump. A cynic might say it was because it was an election year (more money was given to the third sector to boost the perception of the incumbent government). That would also explain the drop the following year and the boost in pay in the following 2019 election year. But that’s pure speculation.

It seems there was a drop in the mean salary during the pandemic, but not by a huge amount. And it’s rebounded somewhat in 2021.

Anyway, we’ve got more data than we know what to do with, so we’ll leave it there for now.

Feel free to drop your thoughts to tim@bamboofundraising.co.uk.   

Global distribution of ‘thought leaders’

As with any of our blogs at Bamboo, it’s best not to use this as the basis of a PhD.

With that caveat out of the way, we’ve noticed an increase in people describing themselves as ‘thought leaders’ on LinkedIn. With the definition being a bit too nebulous for us to get our heads around, we thought we’d look into the global and regional distribution of thought leaders, and leave the concept for others to analyse.

To kick things off we’ve taken the total number of people on LinkedIn who self-identify as thought leaders and looked at how this breaks down in terms of countries where English is the main language. There may well be a French or Mandarin equivalent of thought leader but it’s outside the remit of this blog.

Expressed as a pie chart, it doesn’t really tell us much except that most of the world’s thought leaders are in the US, but you didn’t need us to tell you that would be the case:

What’s much more interesting is what it looks like if you break down the number of thought leaders as a percentage of the total population (according to Wikipedia).

A surprisingly even distribution.
Here’s the data.

To make the comparison a bit easier, we multiplied the percentage by 1000.

It shows us that Australia and the US have broadly the same number of thought leaders in their population, which is roughly double that of the UK, Canada, NZ, and Ireland.

As a slight aside, that works out to one English-speaking thought leader on LinkedIn per 32,038,349 people globally.

Moving on to the UK.

The first thing to note is there’s a fairly big discrepancy between the overall number of thought leaders in the UK and those we could find by searching by city. We couldn’t figure out where the missing 2,910 thought leaders in the UK are living so we widened the search.

Again, the pie chart doesn’t tell us much except that most are based in London. Again, quelle surprise.

However, once again, when shown as a percentage by population, the pie chart is more revealing.

This leads us to conclude that the missing 2,910 thought leaders must be fairly evenly distributed between every town and city in the UK.

Again, the stats by city.

So, what can we conclude from all this? Perhaps that the overall distribution both on an international and regional level is surprisingly similar in countries where English is the first language.

Looking at the regional distribution of thought leaders in the UK, it seems that areas in the Celtic League have roughly half the number of thought leaders with the exception of three in Llandudno where the stats may have been skewed by the very low numbers. Why this might be is anyone’s guess.

We’ll have to revisit this in a year or so to see how things have changed.

Stay tuned.

How recruitment consultants describe charities

In one of the most niche blogs ever dreamed up, we decided to take a look at the different adjectives used to describe charities by recruitment consultants looking for fundraisers in Greater London.

We decided to focus on the precis of the advert which comes up on the various job boards.

Of the jobs currently advertised by agencies, 65 use the ‘we are working with a [insert adjective] charity’ format.

Here are the results.

So, half of all recruitment agencies are using one of the ‘big three’, leading, exciting, and the fairly uninspiring ‘well known’.

In the interest of transparency, of the 9 jobs we’ve currently got advertised, there are two ‘fantastic’ charities and one ‘leading’ one.

The point of this was to see whether recruitment adverts are as repetitive as we suspected they might be.

And it seems they are. For every ‘inspiring’, ‘amazing’, and ‘fabulous’ charity (as perceived by recruitment consultants) there are three ‘leading’ ones.

The conclusion? We’ll head to thesaurus.com before posting our next advert.

The vagaries of Individual Giving

This morning, we found ourselves wondering how exactly an ‘individual giving (IG)’ job is defined.

We assumed it was a direct marketing role, with the odd charity using the term interchangeably with major donor fundraising.

We thought we’d put our theory to the test by taking a look at a snapshot of roles advertised by charities and agencies.

Broadly speaking, (for charities at least) the primary purpose of an IG fundraiser is to ‘solicit funds from an individual, or facilitate a way to do so’.

This makes sense.

But when it comes to mid-level giving, IG roles fall into a grey area between direct marketing and major donor fundraising. So we’ve erred on the side of direct marketing.

The major donor roles indicated below fall under the IG umbrella.

Findings for jobs advertised by charities:

And for agencies:

So, it seems our suspicions were in the right ballpark. Although charities seem to agree that IG is mainly direct marketing, the odd charity defines it as a pure major donor role.

Agencies, it seems, agree that direct marketing is the king of the IG castle, but they believe major donor fundraising plays a much bigger role in the catch-all of ‘individual giving’.

As for the other results, your guess is as good as ours.

We would have thought corporate and statutory fundraising are about as far away as you can get from individual giving, but who are we to judge?

Conclusions

If we were going to advertise a pure major donor role, we’d title it as that.

With Direct Marketing, it’s a judgment call.

We’ve started collating stats on the number of job titles across fundraising advertised by charities.

Here’s a graph showing the roles advertised as either IG or DM from mid-December to today.

Assuming the majority of charity advertised roles are direct marketing, you can see there’s a preference for charities calling direct marketing roles ‘individual giving officer/manager’, with the trend increasing in the last few weeks.

Is this a move to ‘soften’ the job title in the wake of various ‘scandals’ (as the tabloid press would call them) and GDPR making people more aware of marketing in general?

It’s impossible to say as we only started analysing a couple of months ago.

As with all our stats-based bloggery, we’ll revisit it at a later date to see how things have changed.

Stay tuned.

#4 Correlation: Fundraising vs hair-raising

With the year’s most pointless holiday (for the over 10’s demographic anyway) upon us once again. we’re dredging up some more tenuous associations from Google Trends that look at meaningless correlations in the fundraising sector for the fourth installment of Correlation Corner.

It turns out there aren’t too many Halloween-associated keywords that show much correlation with fundraising, but we finally found one in ‘hair-raising’. 

Red: Fundraising
Blue: Hair-raising 

You won’t be surprised to see that ‘hair-raising’ hits its peak of popularity right at the end of October, and then drops off a cliff as a search term. 

Fundraising follows shortly after, reaching the Christmas low and January high discussed in previous posts.

After this, there’s little correlation until the start of July, when both terms become inversely correlated for the first week of the month. 

It’s worth noting that this graph is only true of the last 12 months, and the only thing of note (according to Wikipedia) that happened during that week is that North Korea successfully tested its first intercontinental ballistic missile. 

If anything, we would have thought that people would be frantically searching for how to give to CND, but it’s a hair-raising situation, so clearly, the latter won out as a search term. 

There’s another slight inverse correlation, with fundraising showing a spike in conjunction with minor a drop in hair-raising that coincides with the total solar eclipse, just a coincidence? Absolutely. 

Stay tuned for the next installment of Correlation Corner.