Advancement services salaries rise in a climate hungry for data
If salary is a way to measure value, then institution leaders seem to be valuing advancement services more than ever. These professionals' average salaries are nearly even with communications and marketing professionals', second only to development. And average salaries are higher for those new to advancement than those with more experience. Advancement services also seems to have a positive influence on salaries of those who work in more than one discipline.
By Andrea Jarrell
When U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings met recently with private education advocates, she spun an old maxim in a new way: "In God we trust. All others bring data." Spellings' joke bespeaks an age in which we measure outcomes to prove them and quantify goals to reach them. Increasingly, data drives institutional decision making by providing the answers to key strategic questions: What's the feasibility of our campaign goal? How do our target audiences perceive our institution? What are our predictors of giving? How are we performing compared with our peers?
Considering advancement services' role in collecting and analyzing the data that can answer such questions, it stands to reason that institution leaders might increasingly place a greater value on those with such skills. CASE's 2005 Advancement Compensation Survey revealed, in fact, that advancement services salaries have risen relative to other advancement disciplines.
In 2002, CURRENTS reported that advancement services salaries lag behind the traditional "big three" disciplines of development, communications and marketing, and alumni relations. But in 2005, the results tell a different story. Overall, advancement services salaries run neck-and-neck with communications and marketing salaries for the number two spot behind development—an average salary of $57,300 for advancement services versus $57,400 for communications and marketing. And other survey results seem to indicate that advancement services staffers are gaining more than earning power—they're gaining institutional power.
Snapshot
One thing hasn't changed since 2002: Respondents reporting advancement services as their primary area of responsibility still comprise the smallest advancement discipline, just under 9 percent of the population. About 60 percent of those who work primarily in advancement services are managers, with an average salary of $65,600. (This proportion of managers is second only to alumni relations, in which 65 percent of respondents are managers.) Nonmanagers in advancement services earn substantially less, about $45,000.
Survey respondents who selected advancement services as one of their disciplines had the opportunity to choose and rank five areas of responsibility in which they spend most of their time. (See Figure 1.) The most common choice was overall management of advancement services, selected as the number-one responsibility by 30 percent of the respondents, who earn an average salary of $75,800. The 19 percent of respondents who said donor stewardship is their primary area of responsibility earn $51,800 on average, and the 10 percent who selected information technology and prospect research earn average salaries of $54,400 and $49,500, respectively. Gift accounting ($51,000 average salary) was selected as a primary responsibility by about 5 percent of the population.
Expertise trumps experience?
Years in advancement is the factor most closely correlated to salary across advancement: The more experience a person has, the higher the average salary. But an exception to that finding for advancement services managers might suggest the field's growing stature. (See Figure 2.) The $70,200 average salary of advancement services managers with three or fewer years' experience surpasses those of their colleagues with three to five, six to 10, or 16 to 20 years' experience. Only those in the 11 to 15 year range and those with more than 20 years' experience earn more ($72,600 and $73,500, respectively).
These high average salaries for newcomers in advancement services might reflect the stiff competition for workers with information technology and data analysis skills. In short, a "show me the data" climate might have led to "show me the money" hiring in which IT expertise is valued more than advancement experience.
Other influential factors
In many ways the advancement services salary trends revealed by the survey mirror the rest of the advancement field. About one-third of advancement services staffers have either a master's or doctoral degree, and they earn more on average than those with just a bachelor's degree. The average salary jump is higher between bachelor's degree holders ($54,200) and master's degree holders ($66,000) than between the latter and Ph.D.'s, who earn $73,100.
Average salary increases with age until age 45, but as in the other disciplines, salaries begin to fluctuate somewhat after that point. Those ages 46 to 50, 51 to 55, and 56 to 60 earn less on average than their peers in their early 40s, who earn $64,300 on average. Only those age 61 and older earn more—$78,900 on average.
The gender gap is as evident in advancement services as it is in the whole of advancement. Just fewer than three-quarters of advancement services respondents are women—a somewhat higher percentage than overall. But in keeping with the survey's big-picture findings, men in advancement services have higher average salaries than their female peers, $68,300 compared with $53,600—a $14,700 difference. The gap was slightly larger in the advancement services management ranks, where men earn average salaries of $77,100 compared with $61,200 for women.
Small but mighty
While advancement services remains the smallest single discipline at 9 percent of the population surveyed, another 14 percent of respondents report working in advancement services in combination with one or more other disciplines. What's interesting is that combinations of disciplines that include advancement services often pay more, on average, than those that don't.
As noted in "The More the Merrier," those who work in combinations of three disciplines that include advancement services earn more on average than those who work in other combinations of three—including the "big three" of alumni relations, development, and communications and marketing. Advancement services also correlates with higher average salaries for those working in some two-discipline combinations: The highest-paid pairs are advancement services combined with development or communications and marketing. (The combination of advancement services and alumni relations, however, has the lowest average salary of any pair.) Although those who work primarily in development still earn more than those in any other single discipline, these findings are contrary to the conventional wisdom that advancement officers must move into development to really boost their salary.
Visionaries wanted
Campuses have become vast warehouses of data, yet the ability to access it in a useful way is a common frustration. Institutions pay for wealth indicator research that yields thousands of potential giving prospects, yet that information gets little use. Offices of institutional research, alumni relations, student affairs, career services, and admissions might run separate constituent surveys in the same year, and various academic departments might track graduate school application and success rates. Yet these potentially valuable predictors of giving and marketable indicators of institutional value languish in separate data silos.
Gone are the days when the advancement services staff simply maintained the database and generated reports and receipts. In the same way that business officers are making their numbers a useful component of institutional strategy, advancement services experts are bringing big-picture thinking to data management.
In this bring-data world, advancement professionals—whatever their discipline—need both institutional vision and the ability to understand and interpret the data to make their vision a reality. As professionals with these skills move from the back to the front office, it should be no surprise if their salaries continue to rise.
This article appeared in the July/August 2005 CURRENTS.
Advancement Profiles
Leeann Thompson
Manager, Advancement Services, and Coordinator, Annual Giving, Marymount College, Palos Verdes, California
Years in advancement: Three
Salary: $40,000 to $45,000
Previous job: Executive assistant at EBSCO Subscription Services
Next career move: "To stay at Marymount and oversee the successful conversion of our database to a newer version and acquire additional training in data mining for our fund-raising needs. I also would like to become more involved in using our Web site as a fund-raising tool."
Ultimate career goal: "To find that $10 million donor hiding in our donor database!"
Why she does what she does: "When I was a kid, my job—as it is now—didn't exist. But I've always enjoyed working with data, numbers, and computers; digging up facts; researching people; and making things work out at the bottom line. Imagine my joy when I found out I could do this as a profession, and someone would pay me!"
Sylvia Barnett Fournier
Director of Prospect Research, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence
Years in advancement: 24
Salary: $50,000
Previous job: Research manager at Brown University
Next career move: "I'm intrigued by the advances in knowledge management, data mining, and databases, so my future might lead in that direction."
Ultimate career goal: "Having moved up through the ranks, directing a small research shop in higher education is exactly where I wanted to be. Ultimately, I'd like to work part time in this field, which means using the next few years to mentor younger researchers who will take research to the next level, whatever that might be."
Why she does what she does: "Research puts to good use my addictions to reading, writing, and investigating. It's the constant learning that gets me up in the morning. I am very grateful to be working in such an atmosphere of creativity and intelligence, rubbing elbows with fund raisers and students, and ultimately playing a small part in helping to shape the history of this institution and this city."
Mary Klemm
Manager, Foundation and Alumni Services, Lake Michigan College, Benton Harbor, Michigan
Years in advancement: 20
Salary: $43,500
Previous job: Admissions secretary at Lake Michigan College
Next career move: None planned. "I enjoy working at LMC as well as living in this community."
Ultimate career goal: "To continue to be a contributing member of the college's institutional advancement and planning team."
Why she does what she does: "My position allows me to do many different things and interact with many different constituents—accounting, gift processing, special events, alumni relations, the foundation board, internal and external constituents. No two days are ever the same."
Advancement profiles were written by Julie Nicklin Rubley, a Vienna, Virginia-based freelance writer.
