Dr. B.J. Bischoff is the owner of Bischoff Performance Improvement Consulting, a Sonoma firm specializing in building the capacity of nonprofit organizations and public sector agencies to better serve their stakeholders. She assists her clients with strategic planning, training resulting in performance improvement, fund development, and community relations. She is Past President of Impact100 Sonoma and serves as a Sonoma County Board of Supervisors’ appointee to the Sonoma County Portfolio of Model Upstream Programs Review Committee. Contact her at [email protected].
Sonoma nonprofit executive directors earn about $95,000 a year
The results of the 2012 “Fair Pay for Northern California Nonprofits Compensation and Benefits Survey” are in and things are looking up for the employees of our local nonprofits. Nonprofit Compensation Associates has produced an annual survey among the 48 counties in Northern California for the past 33 years and was generous enough to provide a customized report summarizing the results regarding the 29 nonprofit organizations in Sonoma County that were included in the study. The study reports that salaries are up two to two-and-a-half percent over the prior year.
The purpose of the “Fair Pay” study is to showcase local nonprofit compensation and benefits practices to provide nonprofit leaders with the information they need to evaluate their organizations’ compensation and benefits practices. According to the publishers of the study, competitive compensation, attractive benefits packages, and equitable practices enable nonprofit organizations to attract, recruit, and retain well-qualified professional and support staff.
Since only seven of the 29 Sonoma County organizations featured in the study are in Sonoma Valley, there isn’t enough data to draw exact conclusions about Sonoma Valley-specific nonprofits. However, Rita Haronian, creator of the software that analyzes the survey responses, said, “Sonoma Valley organizations tend to be on the smaller side in terms of annual operating budget, and so not surprisingly, some of the managerial positions pay a bit less than the Sonoma County group overall. That doesn’t mean they are underpaying, though, because they would probably be close to the average of the other Sonoma County organizations if we looked only at similarly-sized organizations. Pay for non-managerial jobs in the Sonoma Valley looked generally close to the results for Sonoma County as a whole.”
The average annual cash compensation for a Sonoma County nonprofit executive director is $95,309. Nonprofits with budgets up to $685,000 pay their executive directors an average of $80,000 per year, while organizations averaging $3.6 million budgets pay almost $105,000 per year. The average nonprofit program director earns about $69,900 per year, while the average office manager makes $43,100 per year. Approximately one-third of the Sonoma County nonprofits in the study reported that they have a development director, making an average of $70,500 per year.
According to Rita Haronian of Northern Compensation Associates, “To run their organizations effectively, nonprofit managers need to know what the current employment market looks like for the specific jobs at their organizations. Employment markets are local by definition, and this is why the survey reports compensation data by specific location within Northern California. The 2012 survey’s sample of 29 Sonoma County organizations is not large, but does provide enough data to give us salary information for some of the more frequently found jobs among local nonprofits. Since the recession hit in 2008, organizations have reported a variety of ‘belt-tightening’ policies: layoffs, reduced employee benefits, pay freezes, and pay reductions. The 2012 survey reports a tapering off of these policies, with 66 percent of survey participants giving salary increases during the current fiscal year and an average overall increase of around two percent to two-and-a-half percent.”
The complete “Northern California Nonprofits Compensation and Benefits Survey” is based on responses from 402 nonprofit organizations that employ over 28,000 individuals. Over 99 percent of the participating nonprofits provide their full-time employees with paid time off in some form, while 85 percent indicate that their part-time employees are eligible for paid time-off. Approximately 95 percent of the surveyed nonprofits offer some type of medical insurance to full-time employees, while 77 percent report that their part-time employees are eligible for medical insurance coverage, as long as they work a minimum number of hours per week (on average, 23 hours per week).
About 34 percent of the surveyed Northern California nonprofits report that they have a formal policy that allows for incentive pay for their executive directors. On average, male executive directors in Northern California earn significantly higher pay than do females. The average pay for all executive directors in the Northern California sample is $131,209 per year. The average male executive director earns $139,866 per year, while females earn $122,711 annually. Anyone interested in purchasing the complete study may go to www.nonprofitcomp.com.
Dr. B.J. Bischoff is the owner of Bischoff Performance Improvement Consulting, a Sonoma firm specializing in building the capacity of nonprofit organizations and public sector agencies to better serve their stakeholders. She assists her clients with strategic planning, training resulting in performance improvement, fund development, and community relations. She is President of Impact100 Sonoma and leads the Sonoma Valley Presidents Council. She serves on the Sonoma Upstream Investments Portfolio Review Committee as an appointee of the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors. She can be contacted at [email protected].
