Overrated Career: Nonprofit Manager

December 11, 2008 RSS Feed Print

The Appeal: Many people want a career in which they can "make a difference." For many, that means a career helping manage a nonprofit organization that works, for example, on environmental issues, children's rights, or antipoverty campaigns.

The Reality: Many of your supervisees end up being volunteers, who, on average, tend to be less competent and reliable than paid employees. Also, much of the job often involves fundraising, which many people dislike. Plus, you're often expected to be so dedicated to the cause that you're willing to work long hours for little pay. Despite all that, nonprofit management jobs that pay a good salary are difficult to find, especially now in our slow economy—people donate less in tough times.

An Alternative: Do what Bill Gates and Warren Buffett do: Earn your pay in the private sector, and then donate time or money to your favorite nonprofit.

Tags:: careers,; nonprofits

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I am in the process of hiring a non profit manager, nowhere in the job description is fundraising, we've left that up to our volunteer board members! Our non profit manager will essentially run a retail business where the profits benefit our cause (which is providing spay/neuter vouchers to decrease animal overpopulation) we are offering our manager paid vacations, health insurance and a 40 hour flexible - even telecommuting - work week. I am commenting only to show that there are start ups out there who have jobs available that are both exciting and beneficial to a cause.

Jan of TN 4:47PM February 22, 2012

For anybody who is proud of achievements that s/he has made in the field of nonprofit management, this short essay is offensive and less than completely true. Many nonprofits have highly skilled professional staffs. Of course, fund raising can be one of the least enjoyable tasks, but at least it is preferable to many positions in the for-profit world that require convincing people that the product you sell is essential for their happiness or that your product is far superior to its competition, both of which are mostly false and dishonest the majority of the time. There are other modern democracies that rely on taxation to support doing good. By this method, a number of them really do avoid the development of an underclass of impoverished people, such as we do have in most parts of our nation. The nonprofit world is our characteristic approach. The main shortcoming in the field is that most nonprofits are governed by board composed of persons with scant actual knowledge of the complexity of the problems that the agencies exist to solve or the skills necessary to resolve them. Most boards also do not have a clear job description of their role, with the result that they attempt to do management, utilizing the knowledge they accumulate by an average of one hour a week of involvement, which is inadequate, or, conversely, leave everything to professional staff managers, thus unaware that their duty is to ensure that the agency is impacting the needs of those that it exists to serve, collaborating with other agencies having the same mission, and developing and utilizing appropriate methods of testing the agency's effectiveness, thereby having a basis for evaluating the work of the CEO.

Timothy Ray of FL 4:02PM April 07, 2010

It looks like the author simply means that many people who have not started their careers and are considering starting a non-profit may have perceptions about the career (in general) that aren't true.
It's very romantic to, for example, want to save a particular type of bird or insect, but the reality of creating or managing an org to do it would require skills that have more to do with selling, fund raising, etc. than with the environment.
I don't take this article to mean that directing a non-profit isn't awesome, I take it to mean that the reality of it isn't what a layman would first think of. For example, Wesley stated many cool things about about his job, but failed to mention what the non-profit org actually does (help the homeless, provide scholarships, etc), which is the only thing someone on the outside sees.
So, it's not that different sets of jobs were actually rated or ordered: as stated on the main page of the article, these are subjective.
A better title would probably be "jobs where the reality differs greatly from the layman's initial perceptions, which may lead to dissatisfaction when the reality sinks in if this is what you plan on doing after high school, and don't know anything about it yet."

Ryan of WI 5:57AM September 27, 2009

Overrated Career: Nonprofit Manager

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