What made this engagement meaningful was SAM's recognition that compensation is not just an HR issue. It is a mission infrastructure issue. When an organization is coordinating partners across the cradle-to-career continuum, the internal team needs clarity, consistency, and a compensation model that helps attract and retain the talent required to deliver community impact.
Spartanburg Academic Movement (SAM), a collective impact nonprofit advancing cradle-through-career academic success for children across Spartanburg County, had built a compensation philosophy grounded in transparency, equity, and pay parity. But a philosophy is not a plan.
Confirm whether SAM's salary bands actually matched its stated compensation philosophy of transparency, equity, and pay parity.
Understand where SAM stood against comparable organizations, both locally in Spartanburg and nationally among StriveTogether peers.
Identify which roles needed the most urgent investment to stay competitive.
Collected SAM's internal compensation data, job descriptions, and contracts, and surveyed staff directly on their current pay to establish an accurate baseline.
Built a weighted comparator set of local Spartanburg-area organizations and national peers, including StriveTogether network partners, using a minimum of three comparators per role and weighting by organizational revenue and size so no single organization skewed the results.
Ran a statistical job-matching and benchmarking analysis across every role, then evaluated SAM's full benefits package, including retirement match, professional development, health and wellness, and flexibility, against the same comparator set.
SAM's work starts long before a resume ever crosses a desk. As a collective impact nonprofit coordinating partners across the full cradle-through-career continuum in Spartanburg County, the strength of SAM's own internal team, and the compensation model that attracts and retains it, is what makes that continuum possible for the children and families it serves.
You can't build community impact without investing in the people who deliver it.
Stronger Consulting partners with mission-driven organizations to turn complex challenges into clear, practical action, from strategy through implementation.
Back to all case studies