CSR Salary Snapshot 2024

A COMPREHENSIVE COMPENSATION REVIEW

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has evolved from a nice-to-have initiative to a critical business function, with organizations increasingly recognizing the strategic importance of sustainable and socially responsible practices, even amidst shifting socio-economic and political influences. This comprehensive compensation report, based on survey responses from 272 CSR professionals across industries, provides detailed insights into salary ranges, benefits, career progression, and market trends shaping the field.

Explore key insights below and download the report to go deeper.

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EXPLORE KEY INSIGHTS

Resource-Impact Paradox

The Reality Gap

Title and Scale Drive the Salary Spectrum

CSR’s Identity Crisis—Business Function or Philanthropic Initiative?

The Leadership Pipeline Challenge

Download the full report

The Resource-Impact Paradox

A defining challenge emerges from our research: CSR professionals are being asked to demonstrate ever-increasing impact while operating under traditional resource constraints. While many respondents report increasing responsibilities, these expansions rarely come with corresponding increases in headcount or compensation.

“Our team was downsized without a timeline for rehiring. More work and fewer resources have impacted our effectiveness.”

This disconnect is particularly evident in budget management. Survey respondents frequently report managing multi-million-dollar budgets and complex stakeholder relationships while working with minimal team support.

“As an independent contributor and the only CSR person for a 10k+ employee company, the amount of work I do should come with a better title and pay.”

The root of this paradox lies in how CSR impact is measured and valued. Traditional corporate metrics, modeled on financial reporting, emphasize transactional numbers – volunteer hours, participation rates, dollars donated. While these metrics are important outputs, they fail to capture the true strategic impact of CSR initiatives on communities, companies, and employees. This creates a cycle where:

  • Senior executives, familiar with financial reporting models, request more transactional, output metrics
  • CSR professionals must dedicate increasing time to tracking and reporting these numbers
  • Limited resources prevent the development of more meaningful impact measurements
  • The strategic value of CSR work becomes harder to demonstrate
  • Future resources are allocated based on these incomplete metrics

The Reality Gap

CSR practitioners report three critical disconnects between expectations and reality in their roles:

HIGH-LEVEL EXPECTATIONS, LOW-LEVEL TASKS, with many practitioners finding themselves mired in administrative and transactional work due to under-resourced teams while expected to drive meaningful outcomes and impact

“While my role is intended to focus on global employee engagement strategy and supporting teams engaging with their communities, I find myself spending a much larger chunk of my time triaging issues related to the workplace giving platform.”

POOR WORK-LIFE BALANCE, characterized by excessive workloads and difficulty using promised benefits like unlimited PTO

“We have unlimited PTO, but rarely get the chance to use it due to being an under-resourced team”

COMPENSATION INEQUITY compared to other corporate functions, with CSR roles consistently undervalued despite requiring similar levels of expertise and responsibility

“My compensation and advancement have not progressed compared to peers at my organization. There really is no career path for this work.”

Title and Scale Drive the Salary Spectrum

Survey data reveals that job level and company size are the strongest determinants of compensation with industry and geography as secondary drivers.

PRIMARY DRIVERS

JOB LEVEL

COMPANY SIZE

SECONDARY DRIVERS

INDUSTRY

GEOGRAPHY

CSR’s Identity Crisis—Business Function or Philanthropic Initiative?

One of the most striking findings from the report is the wide variation in compensation for identical job titles, with CSR Managers earning anywhere from $85,000 to $150,000 depending on company, industry, and organizational structure. This inconsistency suggests that CSR is still struggling to define itself as a standardized business function. Unlike finance, HR, or operations, where compensation and responsibilities are relatively predictable, CSR roles remain highly fluid—often dependent on a company’s internal philosophy rather than an industry-wide benchmark. This identity crisis has implications beyond pay—it affects how CSR professionals advocate for resources, demonstrate impact, and integrate their work into core business strategy. The disparity also raises questions about whether CSR professionals are positioned for long-term career sustainability or if their roles are still seen as “nice to have” rather than essential to business performance.

CSR is seen as a cost center, not a revenue driver, so we don’t get the same financial incentives as other departments—even when we bring strategic value.”

The Leadership Pipeline Challenge

CSR professionals are clustering at the mid-career level, with 70% of survey respondents occupying mid-level roles and only 5% reaching executive positions. This imbalance highlights a significant challenge: while companies recognize the importance of CSR, they are not yet providing clear pathways for professionals to ascend to senior leadership. Career progression in CSR is often limited by inconsistent role definitions, lack of executive sponsorship, and unclear advancement criteria. Many respondents report managing high-stakes programs without the title, authority, or compensation typically associated with such responsibilities in other corporate functions.

CSR leadership roles feel like they’re disappearing. Many of us have been stuck in the same role for years with no clear advancement path.”

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our testimonials

What our clients say about us.

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We engaged Realized Worth to benchmark what companies are doing around paid time off to volunteer. The final product was a robust report and a series of recommendations for us to consider. Our work with RW was incredibly helpful and will undoubtedly be impactful in our future planning. Their research-based approach provided the Foundation with meaningful findings that we will use as we consider updates to our programming and policies. The team was a pleasure to work with and we look forward to engaging with them again.

Dan Kamins
Director of Employee Engagement and Volunteerism, MetLife Foundation
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The moment I heard Chris Jarvis present on the neuroscience behind volunteering and how to incorporate program components to increase employee engagement, I was hooked. I immediately knew we had to partner with them to help shape our infrastructure and programs to drive greater employee engagement.  Realized Worth’s ability to explain and translate the academic principles of volunteering to execution tactics is invaluable.  We have just started to work with Realized Worth and are already seeing the positive benefits of our partnership. The entire Realized Worth team is passionate about helping us increase volunteer engagement as demonstrated in their thoughtful approach to project planning and execution for quality impactful deliverables to support our Community Impact Champions. Our employees are excited and complimentary about our new direction and structure.  I can’t wait to see what else is possible as we develop our relationship with Realized Worth.

Sylvia Bartley PhD
Medtronic Foundation, Senior Global Director
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Chris Jarvis and his team at Realized Worth provide meaningful input and direction for the strategic development of scalable employee volunteering programs. Realized Worth brings best practices in employee volunteering to bear with a full understanding of the processes needed to be successful at both the visionary and tactical levels. Additionally, because Chris and his team are extremely passionate about the power of volunteering for good, they bring high energy and a contagious level of enthusiasm to their presentations. This approach helps to stimulate creative ideas and positive outcomes for social and business purposes.

Diane Solinger
Manager, Social Responsibility, Google
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The Realized Worth team has built a training program for Accenture US that will offer our volunteer leads training and certification in corporate philanthropy. Through the years, we met and got to know the RW team and they listened and understood where we struggled with our volunteer engagement. After multiple discussions, they were able to develop something impactful for our program that will raise engagement and excitement for our volunteer strategy. Chris, Angela, Corey, Sabrina, and the entire RW team has been wonderful to work with and has been an extension of our core Accenture CSR team. We are excited for all our people to get to know them through the training videos and the work RW has produced for us.

Gina Rude
US Accenture CSR Manager
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Realized Worth effectively partnered with Altria’s Corporate Citizenship team for about a year to help us upgrade our employee volunteering program. We sought to make our strong volunteering tradition more flexible, build intentional leadership and inclusion skill development into our volunteering, and help us respond better to volunteers’ diverse community interests. We came out of the project with much more than we expected, including a new level of energy and recognition of the unique potential of volunteering. Of everything we do with our communities, volunteering may be the most transformative once we build the reflective habits to see what it teaches us, as the Realized Worth team made possible.

Kathryn Fessler
Altria Client Services, Director of Corporate Citizenship
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