Communications skills are less valued by charities now than during the pandemic, research shows.
One in 10 charity comms professionals said they believed their roles had become less important to colleagues during the past year, double the proportion who said so in 2021.
The data is included in a survey of nearly 800 communications experts conducted by the membership body CharityComms and the recruitment firm Charity People, published this week.
At the same time, the proportion of comms staff saying their expertise had become more valued in the past year fell from 53 per cent in 2021 to 42 per cent in 2022. It was more than 60 per cent in 2020, the research shows.
The survey also found that 30 per cent of charity comms employees work remotely full-time, although 85 per cent say they miss the “social aspects” of spending time in the office with colleagues.
The survey data shows that the average charity comms salary rose by just £481 to £39,390 in 2022, an annual increase of 1.2 per cent at a time when inflation had risen to more than 10 per cent.
About two-thirds of the survey respondents said they were happy in their jobs, while one in six said they were unhappy, both broadly in line with the preceding two years, with 43 per cent saying they planned to move to another employer in the next 12 months.
Nick Billingham, managing director of Charity People, said charities needed to learn from the research to retain their best comms staff.
He said: “The risk of losing talent to businesses with an increased sense of purpose across other sectors is very real, an issue which I am sure we will see transpire increasingly over the course of 2023 unless we see a real commitment to intentional action focused on pay, benefits and workload.”