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The report, commissioned by NAFCU and conducted by research firm Burns-Fazzi Brock, revealed that CUs spend an average of $964 per volunteer each year on volunteer training, including travel and registration expenses, as well as insurance coverage, spouse/partner travel and other perks.
But that figure varies widely when broken down by asset size, with CUs of $20 million or less spending $260 or less per volunteer, compared with credit unions of $150 million and above spending $2,500 or more. For credit unions with assets of $1 billion or more, that number skyrockets to $4,450 per volunteer each year. Those with less than $10 million in assets, on the other hand, only spend $176.
The report also breaks down the various kinds of expenses that CUs pay for their volunteers, including expenses for conferences, travel, meetings, education, and more. But the study’s authors admit that some of those categories could overlap. Additionally, figures about “volunteer training” don’t specify whether or not they include conferences such as CUNA’s America’s Credit Union Conference or the NAFCU Annual, which may have educational or training elements for board members. Similarly, the difference between conference expenses, meeting expenses, travel expenses and education expenses is not specifically defined.
“It’s really something for the person who’s completing it to define,” said Jim Patterson, a partner at Sherman & Patterson Ltd and a co-author of the study. “It’s possible that someone would include the NAFCU conference as training—which I probably would—t someone else may not have considered that as a part of it. It’s only a guess on my part, but I’d think most people would consider that part of the training by the nature of the events they have.”
There isn’t currently any sort of historical data available to see how volunteer compensation has changed over time, but that may be coming in future iterations of the study. Jack Clark, president of Clark Research Associates and a co-author of the study noted that not only have the study’s authors generally had to prioritize the current study over any historical modeling, but the study now includes state charters as opposed to mostly just federal charters, meaning historical data might not be reflective of the current picture.
Because NAFCU has long served a few state-chartered CUs, a small number of those institutions have taken part in past studies. Clark said not to expect any large-scale changes to the data in future reports now that NAFCU has opened its doors to all state-chartered credit unions, but said that the decision to include state charters moving forward was made because “you compete against all credit unions, not just federal competing against federal and state against state,” he said. “It makes sense to include them.”
NAFCU representatives did not offer comment on the results of the study.
Patterson pointed out that the figures for larger credit unions may be more reflective of certain behaviors than for smaller CUs, since he said smaller CUs are less likely to participate in these sorts of salary surveys.
“For example, if we look at credit unions—32% of all federal and state-chartered credit unions are $10 million or under; 13% of our sample is in that asset group. On the other end, 9% of all credit unions are $400 million or more in assets; Eighteen percent of our sample is in that category. So we tend to have more representation of larger credit unions and less representation with small credit unions, however we as a survey company weight that data to bring them back in their proper proportions.”
