How We Sliced the Pie

Three years have passed since we last reported on the results of the CASE Advancement Compensation Survey. On the surface, much remains the same. But a closer look at the data reveals some interesting information. Take some time to study the figures on pages 16 through 27 for insights into the state of the profession. Once you've discovered the average salares for various advancement areas, you can also learn how to create a competitive benefits package for employees.

A compensation survey such as ours offers a snapshot of an entire profession. This survey gathers data on the relationships between salary and other factors, such as experience (years in advancement, with current institution, and in current position), level of education, racial and ethnic background, age, discipline (including whether respondents work in more than one discipline), and level and nature of management responsibility. These data can help track a profession's growth and development, as well as provide insights into what people do.

CASE's compensation survey is a continuously open database. To ensure that all information is timely, the data are truncated at 18 months. Thus, the data analyzed here include information from everyone who took the survey in the 18 months before January 2008.

Data in this issue are drawn from 9,314 respondents who are employed full time in the United States, which is a large enough sample to show meaningful trends. At the time of analysis, Canadian responses and those from part-time advancement officers were too few to allow statistically valid analysis.

The online survey is continuously available and easy to update, so advancement professionals have ongoing access to timely compensation information and can submit or renew their information periodically.

As individuals update their compensation data, their previous entries are removed from the active database and archived. All respondents have access to a free summary report and may purchase subscriptions for generating custom reports.

The 2008 survey is the seventh since 1982. The fifth survey, conducted early in 2002 and reported in the July/August 2002 CURRENTS, was CASE's first online survey.

Because of rounding in some charts, not all percentages add to 100. For articles that report salary differences between managers and nonmanagers, CURRENTS editors define "managers" as those who have responsibility for budgets and supervise one or more people.

Peter B. Wylie, a data analyst and consultant based in Washington, DC, and John Sammis, president of Data Description Inc., provided detailed statistical analysis. Wylie is the author of Baseball, Fundraising, and the 80/20 Rule: Studies in Data Mining (CASE, 2008), Data Mining for Fund Raisers (CASE, 2004), and a number of CURRENTS articles on advancement and data mining. Other CASE staff members from the communications and marketing, member services, research, the information center, and information technology departments contributed to this compensation survey. -The Editors