Creating A More Equitable Movement- Compensation In The Farmed Animal Advocacy Sector (Faunalytics)

The farmed animal advocacy movement has professionalized and grown within the nonprofit sector over the last 50 years. This Faunalytics study benchmarks salaries for the movement.

Key Findings

The median pay across all U.S. farmed animal advocacy positions in our sample was approximately $80,000, but organizations with higher revenue and more staff tend to pay more than lower-revenue, smaller organizations. Organizations with a revenue over $1 million paid a median salary of $84,000 across all job levels compared to a median salary of $68,350 for organizations with a revenue below $1 million. Organizations with 1 to 10 employees paid a median salary of $70,000 across all job levels compared to a median salary of $81,800 for organizations with 11 or more employees. See Tables 1 to 5 below for details.
Advocates from marginalized groups earned 85 cents for every dollar that a non-marginalized advocate makes. On average, advocates who are members of marginalized groups (identifying as BIPOC, having a disability, and/or being LGBTQIA+) received salaries that are 15% lower than the salaries of non-marginalized advocates. This statistically significant difference (p <.05) isn’t due to employment differences such as job level or years of experience, which we accounted for in our analyses. Even though most participating organizations had transparent and formal pay practices, this finding suggests that these strategies alone may not be enough to prevent or eliminate these pay gaps. See Figure 1 below for more.
Pay corresponds with job level to a greater extent at higher-revenue organizations. At organizations with a revenue over $1 million, the median salary was $67,250 for individual contributors, $84,500 for management, $114,000 for leadership, and $128,000 for executive directors. In contrast, median salaries at organizations with a revenue under $1 million were much flatter, around $70,000 at each job level.
Most U.S. farmed animal advocacy organizations we surveyed provide a medical plan, but dental, retirement, and vision benefits are less common. While 78% of participating organizations offered a medical plan, only 56% provided dental benefits, 52% offered a retirement plan, and 44% provided vision care benefits. For paid time off, all participating organizations offered a minimum of 15 vacation days, 84% offered at least five sick days, and 80% offered at least 10 holidays.
Median executive director (ED) salaries were generally lower than EDs of social advocacy and environmental organizations, especially for EDs of lower-revenue farmed animal advocacy organizations. Comparing our sample of EDs against U.S.-wide ED data from Candid, EDs of lower-revenue farmed animal advocacy organizations (< $1 million) make $20,000 to $25,000 less than EDs of social advocacy and environmental organizations with a similar revenue, while EDs of higher-revenue farmed animal advocacy organizations ($1 million +) make approximately $2,000 and $7,000 less. Our median ED salaries tended to be higher than the median for Candid’s category of “animal-related organizations” ($70,000 vs. $65,262 for organizations < $1 million and $128,000 vs. $98,375 for organizations > $1 million). However, we suspect this is due to Candid’s category being dominated by direct work with animals (e.g., animal services, zoos, and aquariums).
36% of farmed animal advocates said they were somewhat or very likely to leave the movement if offered a similar role with better pay, particularly if they belonged to a marginalized group. 45% of marginalized participants were somewhat or very likely to leave compared to just 29% of non-marginalized participants (p = 0.05). While we don’t know whether this marginal difference would appear in a sample of advocates who haven’t obtained higher education, it suggests that our movement is at risk of losing talent, especially those belonging to marginalized groups.
When given an opportunity to discuss barriers to pay, most organizational leadership said that they want to increase pay and know their employees are worth more, but can’t afford it due to funding constraints. Most organizations sampled have a formal pay process (70%) and determine raises based on cost of living (70%), although a few participants said that considering cost of living standards made determining equitable pay more challenging (e.g., when employing individuals from different countries and regions). Despite such barriers, most participating organizations are transparent about pay with their staff (78%), which is an important step in establishing pay equity. To gain a more comprehensive understanding of organizational barriers, we suggest reading our accompanying blog on this subject.