About

When I left my nonprofit career to become an independent consultant, I did what most people do: I Googled everything from how to set my rates to how to write a proposal to whether I needed an LLC or an S-Corp.

The answers I found were almost entirely useless.

They were written for corporate consultants billing Fortune 500 companies, or for freelancers building Shopify stores. Nothing addressed the specific weirdness of consulting in the social impact space. This is a sector where your client’s budget comes from a foundation with its own reporting requirements, where “scope creep” often means the executive director just found out about a new crisis, and where you care deeply about the mission but also need to pay your bills.

So I started building the resources myself: templates, frameworks, pricing benchmarks, and ultimately the playbook I wished someone had handed me on day one. Then I started sharing them, first with friends who’d also made the leap, and eventually here.

Chorus is a publication and community for independent consultants who work in the nonprofit and social impact space.

We publish original research, practical strategy, and the kind of candid conversations about money, clients, and professional identity that most people in this sector only have behind closed doors.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

Original research you can actually use. We survey our community and publish reports on pricing, business development, tech tools, time management, and how consultants spend money on their businesses. It is crowdsourced data from people doing the same work you’re doing.

Strategy for the real world. We address topics like how to write proposals that convert, how to handle scope creep, how to build a referral engine, and even how to fire a client. We strive to write the kind of tactical, specific guidance that makes the difference between a consulting practice that sustains you and one that slowly grinds you down.

Honest writing about the hard parts. I felt early and often the impostor syndrome, the loneliness of solo work, and the grief of stepping away from a mission I used to live inside. Here, we talk about it in a “this is what it actually feels like and here’s what I’ve learned” way.

A community of people who get it. Chorus hosts a small, curated group of independent consultants on Slack and Zoom. Members exchange referrals, compare notes on pricing and clients, and generally do the thing that’s hardest about independent work: they make it less independent.

Our Team

I’m Sam Landenwitsch. I spent 14 years in the nonprofit world as an organizer, campaigner, and strategist before going independent. I write most of what you’ll read here, often alongside co-authors from the community. The regular contributors are Susannah Hook-Rodgers and Emily Berens, both of whom have decades of experience in mission-driven social change work and are the main movers behind our Strategic Agility Reboot series.

But everything I publish is informed by the same question I started with: What do I wish I’d known?

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