Greetings, fellow Washington nonprofits.
The Benefits Benchmark Survey is our first attempt to put together a comprehensive listing of benefits offered by Puget Sound area nonprofits. We put this survey together because we couldn’t find the data to determine whether we were doing enough to compensate our hard-working staff. This is especially important as we struggle with the high cost of living in the Seattle area where most of our staff live. This is obviously an issue that many nonprofits in the Puget Sound region face.
As part of our commitment to racial equity and social justice in our organizational practices, we conducted this survey to ensure, as a historically white-led organization, we acknowledge that we have HR practices that uphold white supremacy in how we hire, support, and empower our staff, resulting in barriers for people of color. By increasing
transparency, improving objectivity, and equitably distributing resources, we will evolve to challenge and dismantle these systems.
While this is not traditionally thought of as a “benefit” in the HR sense of the word, we wanted to include a question to get a sense of the value organizations are placing on the commitment to racial equity.
We hope you find this data useful regardless of where in Washington you happen to be. We plan to do another survey, so we hope you continue to participate. Because this was our first year doing this, we deliberately kept it relatively small. In the second round, we hope to increase the number of survey participants to increase the validity of the results.
We started this project hoping to find data for our own use; specifically as part of an effort to retain our employees, who are the most important resource we have at Washington Environmental Council and Washington Conservation Voters. We want to create a high-quality benefits package not only for employee retention, but also because we believe that doing so is one small step in creating the kind of world we wish to see, one where treating people kindly is valued above dollars and cents. We hope that you will find this information useful for those same reasons.
Please contact us if you have any questions about the project. You can reach Administrative Director Sean Pender at sean@waconservationaction.org.