2025 Salary Survey: marketing, PR and digital trends

As a charity professional, your experience of working and job-seeking in the sector will very much depend on the type of work you do, which is why our 2025 Salary Survey looks at the trends and challenges for each specialist area in turn.

You can find the figures for all departments in the full survey here, but in the meantime, here’s what we’re currently seeing in the market for those in marketing, communications, PR and digital roles. ​

​As regular readers will know, this is perhaps the last place you’d expect to see a salary increase in the wild. Even during the great candidate droughts of 2022/23, marketers have simply never been a rare enough species to put any serious pressure on pay.

Yet elusive as the marketing pay rise may seem — digital veterans claim to have spotted one in the 2000s but many are sceptical — our analysis of the ten-year trends suggests that in reality, salaries here lag only slightly behind those of other departments over the longer term.

As for this year, the main story is that we’re actually seeing significant growth. Of jobs? No. Of salaries? Also no. Of the volume of work expected for those salaries? Bingo.

Employers’ penchant for piling more responsibilities on to existing plates is nowhere more pronounced, but here it’s often with surprisingly little regard for the role of those concerned, or their level of experience, resulting in staff at all levels doing increasingly similar jobs.

That can sometimes be beneficial – giving junior staff a chance to prove themselves on bigger projects, for example – but as we’re increasingly seeing, it can also manifest as Heads of Marketing held back from planning long-term strategy by the demands of everyday campaigns, or junior execs on sub-£30k salaries bearing sole responsibility for all communication channels (and thus the organisation’s brand and reputation) – responsibilities that some may welcome, but for which they would not unreasonably expect to be better rewarded.

Blurring these lines means that rather than progressing along a linear path, charity marketers’ careers are more like running in circles, steadily accumulating responsibilities but never leaving any behind.

Nor, it seems, should they try, as we’ve seen things like top senior strategists turned down for lacking recent experience of everyday admin, which is a bit like rejecting a BAFTA-winning legend for a lack of bit parts in EastEnders lately.

With pay largely running on the spot too, many experienced marketers are leaving the sector in search of real progression, a significant loss of charity-specific expertise that even below-inflation increases might have prevented.

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Elsewhere, while you might expect the current abundance of available candidates to deliver a broader intake, that’s not exactly the case. Confident of finding exactly what they want, many organisations are narrowing their criteria and being more, not less, prescriptive. Candidates from other sectors, often courted by charities in the past, now stand little chance against those with charity experience, preferably doing the exact same role in a near-identical organisation.

And if they can’t be found at first, organisations will sooner wait than broaden the criteria or raise the offer: someone ticking every box will come along eventually.

However, they’d come along much sooner (and likely be more committed to the role) were organisations to provide some incentive to make the move, be it financial or simply better conditions, prospects or support.

Sure, in this market, simply having a vacancy will attract applications, but the strongest candidates aren’t going anywhere that doesn’t value them enough to offer even slightly more than their current wage.

Yet despite the challenging market, there are reasons for optimism too. Charities’ marketing, brand and digital flair is only growing more important to their success, so this expertise is needed – just as it is when new media and marketing channels arise. In fact, we’re already seeing high demand for pay-per-view and digital marketing technical skillsets, as well as for policy and public affairs professionals with government/third sector experience, while a blend of communications and charity expertise goes a long way in areas of international development, policy and advocacy.

If that’s you, it’s likely worth sticking around, bolstering your skills, contacts and knowledge (and making sure people know about them) leaving you well placed to benefit when charities are ready and raring to hire again.

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​For more on the market, or if you'd like our help with a recruitment issue in this field, please contact our marketing specialist Hannah Whittington who'll be delighted to assist.

Meanwhile you can find all the figures for all departments in the full 2025 Salary Survey here, or for any other queries just contact our specialists, call us on 020 7820 7300 or email info@harrishill.co.uk

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