I’ve been with the same organization for almost 10 years. Typical situation with non-profits…pay you little salary and work you to death. Every time I’d ask for a raise I’d get the excuse that they didn’t have the money or “that’s just how non-profit works”.
8 years in, and after having to take on other tasks when people would leave the org (at this point I’m doing 3 peoples job with no additional money) I wrote a strong letter to my boss basically saying I needed to be paid X amount of money or else I would resign. I gave them 3 weeks to decide.
Boss came back and said they would have to do a market salary analysis and they’d get back to me. I said okay.
3 weeks later they gave me the exact salary I was asking for without showing me the market results. Interesting. I’m confident the results came back above what I was asking for.
Then what started happening is my boss would start asking more of me. More! And would make side comments like “well now that you are making more…”. Finally I had enough and sat him down and said “look…my request for a salary adjustment was to bring me up to what I should have been making all these years. Not to pile more work on my already bloated job description.” He STFU after that.
I tell you all this because sometimes you gotta scare the shit out of these companies before you get what you deserve. Be brave. Stand up to them. They need you more than you need them!