Charities keep up manpower investment in hard times
July 2010
The top 500 charities show no signs of cutting salary costs despite economic climate.
The total number of charity employees grew by 11,000 from 2004/05 to 2008/09, according to data from CharityFinancials.com with the most significant increases seen in the operational functions.
Figure 1 shows that with the exception of one year in 2006/07, the number of staff increased each year with the greatest rate of growth experienced in 2008/09.
Increases have primarily been in operational activities, whereas increases in administration staff or fundraising staff have fluctuated over the five-year period.
In 2007/08 the number of all types of staff grew over the previous year, administration staff by 2.5 per cent, fundraising by 4.9 per cent and operational staff by 5.0 per cent. However in 2008/09, although there was an overall increase, the top 500 as a whole shrank admin and fundraising staff by 1.9 per cent and 4.0 per cent respectively, but increased operational staff by 4.4 per cent.
Mark Pincher, data analyst at CaritasData comments: ’These findings show that the primary focus during the recession has been providing services and operational activities rather than increasing fundraising activities. In the last two years charities have endeavoured to deliver on their objectives at a time when funds have not been coming in at previous rates and demand for many charities services has increased.’
Charities that have experienced the greatest changes in the number of employees include Save the Children (UK), the National Trust and Barnardo’s. A list of charities which had the greatest increase of staff numbers is shown in figure 2.
Furthermore, salary costs have increased at the same time as staff numbers are increasing. Salary costs have increased from £3.7bn in 2004/05 to £4.4bn in 2008/09 with the average cost per employee ranging from £19,900 in 2004/05 to £25,000 in 2008/09. This is most likely to be down to pay rises which, according Andrew Walker's article 'Rewarding insights' in Caritas, issue 25, December 2009 averaged 2.8 per cent over a comparable period ( a total of 391 charities were surveyed). The survey found that, as with previous Charity Reward surveys, pay in the charity sector is well below that of other sectors. For example, pay for CEOs in charities averages 21.4 per cent below the all sector median of £90,000.
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