Fiscal Sponsor Organizations

Hi Lisa, we take into account the following when setting up compensation of Project Directors on payroll - budget size of the project, experience level of the candidate and geographic location (although geography is becoming a gray area with remote based positions increasing). We use indeed, glassdoor and salary.com to run market rate comparisons. We don’t have a rubric for this, but consistently keep these factors on record when setting compensation.

@Jennifer Hoffman Could you say a little more about how you look at budget size? Do you break it down further based on the percentage of the work the director completes (like Lisa’s projects, this is the only staff, so all of the work is reliant on them) or even taking into account a volunteer vs employee model for total payroll cost?

I would say our practice is similar to Jennifer. We dont have an exact rubric but pretty much just do a compensation analysis and make our best judgement of how much is reasonable for That person to do That Job

We struggle with this a bit too (in that we have some highly compensated PDs). We don’t have a rubric/set policy, but we flag salaries over a certain amount and then do an analysis like Jennifer. I’ll just add that we also use/share with projects Candid’s salary data (such a cool annual report they put together!), and I recently found this report too. University of Iowa 2023 Nonprofit Hiring Trends and SalaryGuide

Does anybody have a compensation policy that they could share? We would like to write one up so we can easily point to it. We do find that think tank type organizations pay more than other types of nonprofits, which isn’t easily findable in Candid’s data.