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2016 Tennessee Nonprofit Compensation Survey Results

By Sam on July 26, 2017

The long awaited Watkins Uiberall 2016 Tennessee Nonprofit Compensation Survey results have been released! If you are an ABN Member, log in your account and access the survey through the ABN Resource Library under the “Human Resources” section.

The purpose of this report is to pr­ovide nonprofit leaders with comparability data that can be used in the process of determining reasonable compensation. ABN and East Tennessee Foundation were two of the five supporting organizations that helped to gather the data for this survey.

In the report, Watkins Uiberall has presented the following:

  • A description of the survey respondents (geography, field of work, and budget size)
  • Summaries and graphs of the reported data (leadership, staffing practices, benefits, and compensation)
  • Data comparing organization policies to budget size
  • Compensation data comparing the Memphis, Nashville, Chattanooga, and Knoxville Metro Statistical Areas with national averages from the 2016 GuideStar Nonprofit Compensation Report

There were several things ABN found very interesting from the report:

  • Nearly 50% of executive directors have a graduate degree; 97% of executive directors have at least a bachelor’s degree
  • 66% of organizations have a female executive director
  • 12% of organizations give automatic salary increases to employees; 32% give cost-of-living salary increases; and 73% give merit-based salary increases
  • 64% of organizations offer an employer-provided health insurance plan and only 31% of small organizations offer a health plan, compared to 89% of medium-sized and 100% of large organizations
  • 24% of organizations offer employee 401k plans, 24% offer 403b plans, and 12% offer simple IRAs
  • 71% of organizations use between 1 and 10 contractors to perform services each year
  • The most common services performed by independent contractors include:
    • Bookkeeping (63%)
    • Payroll (37%)
    • Fundraising (24%)
    • Grant Writing (24%)
    • Management Consulting (16%)
    • Marketing (16%)
    • Program Evaluation (11%)
    • Executive Coaching (5%)

We hope you find this information useful for your organization! For more helpful resources, check out the online ABN Resource Library.

Sam