Prior to 2021, the nonprofit sector had no comprehensive report of how much individuals were being paid in specific roles across organizations in the US. Idealist has changed all of that with the Nonprofit Salary Explorer, an ongoing survey of nonprofit salaries, complete with data visualizations of median salary ranges to help workers chart a career path in the sector.

Previously, hiring managers at nonprofits looking to recruit new talent had no nuanced compensation resource to reference. Because other compensation reports grouped thousands of different titles into one generic “nonprofit” category, it was difficult for professionals to understand the nuances of how compensation varied across the sector. If more granular nonprofit data was provided, it almost always came from IRS 990 forms, which only include salaries for the highest-paid positions at nonprofits, giving an inaccurate portrayal of salaries in the sector. Further, these long and difficult-to-navigate reports cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars—a significant cost barrier that rendered them inaccessible for most social-impact professionals looking to gain a complete understanding of how organizations determine compensation. In 2019, as if to articulate the hunger for this data, a group of museum employees “went rogue” and compiled a spreadsheet listing their salaries to share around their organization and promote pay transparency.

The opaque nature of nonprofit salaries has for years led to a lack of transparency, ongoing pay equity issues, and an absurd myth that nonprofit employees don’t get paid at all.

We at Idealist decided the time had come for us to build a world-first robust system for collecting and visualizing data for nonprofit salaries, and so we set out to build the Nonprofit Salary Explorer.

We knew there were substantial risks of opportunity cost inherent in this project; it was going to require time, research, strategic thinking, design, software engineering, and data science resources. Our goal with this initial version was to build something that would be free of charge to curious job seekers who wanted to know the typical salary for their current role, what they could make in a different role or location, or—for private sector professionals—what salaries would be like if they switched over to the nonprofit sector.

A generous grant from Fidelity Charitable Trustees’ Initiative helped offset costs and enable the focused effort this project required.

Since July of 2021, Idealist has collected over 38,000 anonymous salary submissions. By inviting our community to take our Salary Survey, Idealist now has the most comprehensive database of nonprofit salaries, all submitted by professionals who have worked full time at a 501(c)(3) nonprofit within 3 years of taking the survey.

Many members of our community have been able to get a pay raise using data from the Nonprofit Salary Explorer, demonstrating its ability to serve as an invaluable tool for salary negotiation.

Over the course of the next few articles, we’ll take you through the full process that helped build the robust salary platform that the Nonprofit Salary Explorer is today. There are many ways to tell this story, but we’ve broken it down into the major themes of work:

1. Introduction (this article)
2. Market Research & Data Science
3. Design & User Testing
4. Software Engineering

With that, let’s begin the journey!

Next: Part 2 - Market Research & Data Science →