Fundraising Salaries vs Job Titles Since 2017 – How Have Things Changed?

Fundraising Salaries vs Job Titles Since 2017 – How Have Things Changed?

We’ve often wondered whether there’s any real logic behind job titles in the charity sector. One organisation’s ‘Head of’ can be another’s ‘Senior Executive’. And a job simply labelled ‘Fundraiser’ can come with a salary anywhere between £25k and £50k, depending on where you look.

Although it would be lovely to live in a world where job titles don’t matter, the reality is they do. Plenty of people have turned down roles because they were advertised as ‘Manager’ rather than ‘Head of’—even when the responsibilities were identical. That got us thinking: over the years, how have salaries changed at different job levels? And how do these shifts hold up against inflation?

For simplicity's sake, we’ve focused on Greater London-based roles, advertised directly by charities across three charity job boards. We’ve tracked salaries across three years—2017, 2022, and 2024. It’s not an exact science, but we’ve tried to iron out anomalies by removing job titles with very few adverts, using the upper end of salary ranges, and discounting extreme highs and lows to create a truncated mean.

Details on each job title tracked and the mean salary for each year in the table below...

The Results: Winners and Losers

Senior Roles Holding Their Value (Just About)

One thing is clear: senior fundraising roles have fared better than junior and mid-level ones when it comes to salary growth. If you’re a ‘Head of’ something, your average salary has risen by 20.3% since 2017, from £51,666 to £62,142. That sounds impressive—until you adjust for inflation. In real terms, this increase is much more modest, suggesting that while these roles have seen nominal salary growth, they are largely just keeping pace with rising costs rather than offering any meaningful uplift.

Junior Roles Falling Behind

For Assistants, things have gone the other way. Their salaries have actually fallen by 3.2% over seven years. In 2017, they could expect to earn £23,714; today, that’s dropped to £22,945. Adjusting for inflation, the real-terms loss is much higher—Assistants today are earning significantly less spending power than their counterparts seven years ago.

Similarly, Co-ordinators have seen a 2.5% decline, with salaries slipping from £28,250 to £27,541. Once inflation is factored in, that’s a fairly significant pay cut in real terms.

It raises an important question: are entry-level fundraisers being undervalued? And if so, is that contributing to the talent retention issues many charities are struggling with?

Mid-Level Fundraisers: A Bumpy Ride

The story for Fundraisers and Executives is a mixed bag. Executive salaries dropped by 7.3% between 2017 and 2022 before rebounding slightly in 2024, but they’re still down 3.7% overall. Factor in inflation, and the real-term earnings gap is even wider.

Fundraisers initially saw a pay rise of 5.3% between 2017 and 2022, but this was wiped out by an 8.3% drop in the last two years. That means Fundraisers today are taking home less (both in real and nominal terms) than they were in 2017.

It’s a turbulent picture, and one that suggests mid-level fundraisers haven’t been able to rely on steady salary growth. If anything, real-term wages have declined.

So, What’s Driving These Changes?

A few key factors could be at play:

• A shifting job market – Fundraising is increasingly competitive, and some charities may be funnelling budgets into senior leadership roles at the expense of junior ones.

• Inflation vs salary growth – While some salaries appear to have risen, the reality is that inflation has outpaced these increases, eroding real-terms earnings.

• Skills shortages at the top – The demand for experienced fundraisers (particularly those managing teams) means senior salaries are rising, even if only to maintain value against inflation.

What Next?

The data suggests that if you’re in a senior fundraising role, your earnings have broadly kept pace with inflation—but not significantly grown. Meanwhile, if you’re earlier in your career, your salary has likely lost real-term value over time. If charities want to attract and retain talent, they may need to rethink their approach to salary progression—especially for those at the start of their fundraising careers.

What do you think? Have these salary trends been reflected in your own experience? If you’re wondering how to position yourself for the best pay opportunities, we’d love to chat.

Looking for a Fundraiser?

We can help you make an impact. Call us on 020 3880 6655 or email contactus@ferntalent.com to get started.

Year Job Title Salary 2024 Assistant £22,945.00 2022 Assistant £23,022.50 2017 Assistant £23,714.00 2024 Co-ordinator £27,541.00 2022 Co-ordinator £27,647.90 2017 Co-ordinator £28,250.00 2024 Officer £35,412.00 2022 Officer £30,073.60 2017 Officer £29,261.00 2024 Fundraiser £30,154.00 2022 Fundraiser £32,865.60 2017 Fundraiser £31,200.00 2024 Executive £30,486.00 2022 Executive £29,366.45 2017 Executive £31,666.00 2024 Senior Executive £37,451.00 2022 Senior Executive £37,277.17 2017 Senior Executive £32,611.00 2024 Senior Officer £37,153.00 2022 Senior Officer £34,609.09 2017 Senior Officer £34,561.00 2024 Manager £43,124.00 2022 Manager £40,088.50 2017 Manager £38,372.00 2024 Senior Manager £49,265.00 2022 Senior Manager £49,256.64 2017 Senior Manager £41,444.00 2024 Lead £60,152.00 2022 Lead £57,909.09 2017 Lead £44,734.00 2024 Head of £62,142.00 2022 Head of £57,550.00 2017 Head of £51,666.00 2024 Director £88,561.00 2022 Director £82,076.92 2017 Director £62,821.00

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.