We are often asked to help find a great executive director or development director. While we have many strategies to attract candidates, the most important one is paying a good salary with real benefits.

We applaud charity: water which continues to lead the way in bringing private sector strategies to the nonprofit sector—still sadly mired like a stick in the puritanical mud of our past. While charity: water’s founder and CEO Scott Harrison may have detractors (leaders always do), he has created an NGO that is making a huge impact and successfully accomplishing its mission.

Harrison’s latest innovation is providing equity bonuses to his top employees using donated stock. Check out this New York Times article HERE.

We love charity: water’s brilliant new tactic of securing grants of stock from donors, and giving the stock to top employees as bonuses—a win-win. Businesses get to donate stock, receive the tax benefit at the face value of the stock, and not pay the capital gains tax that they would have incurred had they sold the stock to make the donation.

Nonprofit employees, who typically do not have the chance to build up their personal investments—critical for retirement—are rewarded now and in their future and can build up retirement savings—tragically missing from so many soon-to-retire nonprofit sector executives. This is a real coup considering most people who decide on a career in the nonprofit sector forgo personal income in exchange for doing good (though we would like to see the nonprofit sector be more on par with the private sector).

Like it or not, we live in a capitalist world. Private sector organizations attract and keep talent by considering the job conditions and paying well. Nonprofit sector leadership must get over the shame associated with thinking about “filthy lucre.” Research how to hire a good development director and you will find myriad articles recommending finding someone with passion over experience as a justification for paying staff less. Say what?

Obviously you need passion, but you need to compensate folks too. Can you imagine a Silicon Valley firm looking for a chief business development officer making the argument that someone right out of college with loads of passion could line up the business partnerships and investors needed to scale the company? Not!

Image by charity : water

If we want to solve the world’s most difficult problems, we need to attract top talent to the organizations that will make that happen. That means being competitive in the job market. Bravo charity: water and Scott Harrison. You have won us over once again.

“Growth for Good facilitated our strategic planning process and some essential group decisions around our messaging, theory of change, and staffing structure. Now we have a comprehensive three-year plan that focuses on key priorities and very actionable tasks.” – Jeanne DuPont, Rockaway Waterfront Alliance, executive director