#1 Stats: Salary vs Job Title

14 Nov

Written By

We’ve often wondered if there’s an underlying logic behind job titles for fundraisers in the charity sector.

After all, one charity’s ‘Head Of’ can be another charity’s ‘Senior Executive’. And someone with the uncomplicated job title of ‘fundraiser’ can get paid in excess of £50k at one charity and less than £25k at another.

Although it would be lovely to live in a world where your job title doesn’t matter, and it’s what you do that counts, unfortunately, we don’t.

Many people turn down jobs because the title is ‘manager’ rather than ‘head of’ when the role is in fact leading a team and reporting to the director of fundraising. So it is, in all but name, a ‘head of’ role at most other charities.

This got us thinking – within fundraising, what are the most common job titles, average salaries and what is the ‘ranking’ of job titles by salary?

For simplicity's sake, we’ve kept it to Greater London-based roles, advertised directly by charities, across three charity job boards.

This means all the following information may be useless, but when we get around to doing this again, we can compare the numbers and draw something a little more useful.

First things first, we’ve discounted job titles where there were less than a handful advertised. We’ve included the upper limit where a range was included and removed the highest and lowest salaries (to create a truncated mean).

And it’s worth reiterating that this is all based on jobs that are currently advertised.

The Results

Assistant

Mean: £23,714
Median: £24,000
Standard Deviation: £487

Coordinator

Mean: £28,250
Median: £26,000
Standard Deviation: £5188

Officer

Mean £29,261
Median: £29500
Standard Deviation: £3414

Fundraiser

Mean £31,200
Median: £31,500
Standard Deviation: £5731

Executive

Mean: £31,666
Median: £31,000
Standard Deviation: £3524

Senior Executive

Mean £32,611
Median: £31,000
Standard Deviation: £1414

Senior Officer

Mean £34,561
Median: £34,250
Standard Deviation: £1707

Manager

Mean £38,372
Median: £40000
Standard Deviation: £4525

Senior Manager

Mean £41,444
Median: £42,000
Standard Deviation: £3166

Lead

Mean £44,734
Median: £44,000
Standard Deviation: £11,313

Head of

Mean £51,666
Median: £49,000
Standard Deviation: £11,587

Director

Mean £62,821
Median: £60000
Standard Deviation: £6260

We wondered whether coordinator, officer, and executive were interchangeable. (anecdotally, we suspected that (at least in terms of salary) a coordinator was the most junior, then the exec, then the officer.)

Whilst coordinators do get paid less, it seems that officers, on average, get around £1000 less than executives. And bizarrely, senior executives get paid around £2000 less than senior officers and only around £1000 more than execs. Go figure.

Initially, we thought it was a surprisingly small difference between the average salary of a manager and a senior manager, but the £2000 pay rise for the addition of the word senior seems to be consistent, so fair enough.

Moving up the chain of command, things start to get a little more variable.

The standard deviation between salaries of ‘Heads of’ and ‘Leads’ (or team leaders) is in excess of £11k in both cases, suggesting there isn’t much consensus across the sector as to how much someone with this job title should get paid.

This makes sense. If you’re leading a 20-strong DM team at a charity with £300m of voluntary income, you should probably get paid more than a ‘Head of’ major donor role, where you’re leading a team of two.

So, after all that, nothing too surprising. As we had all the data in an Excel spreadsheet, we thought we’d add a graph for the hell of it: