Apparently we needed to talk about money

One week in on Working with Consultants — what 1,274 visitors and 138 new members told us about what you actually want!

A week ago I sent the launch announcement for Working with Consultants, the free resource library a group of us built for nonprofits navigating consultant relationships. I spent most of the last week refreshing the analytics dashboard.

The headline numbers, for the curious: 1,274 unique visitors, 3,551 page views, and 138 new members. That’s so freaking cool. My collaborators and I thought this site would be of interest to the broader community, but getting this response is incredible. We’re so excited folks are finding it useful. If you’re one of them, thank you!

But one thing stood out.

The site has 25-plus pieces across five sections: finding consultants, budget and pricing, setting up for success, managing engagements, and what good looks like. Going in, I had no real prediction about which section would draw the most interest.

Allison Ehrich Bernstein’s “Budgeting and Pricing Models“ was the most-viewed individual piece in week one — 302 visitors — and the single biggest driver of new signups, bringing in 41 members on its own. My “Market Rate Benchmarks for Nonprofit Consulting“ came in second on both metrics, with 171 visitors and 26 new members. The Budget & Pricing tag page itself had 107 visitors. Three of the top six pages on the site were about money.

The next-most-read individual post — “When Should You Hire a Consultant?“ by Michele Levy — pulled 84 visitors. After that, the long tail flattens fast.

This is one week of data and I don’t want to jump to conclusions.

But the pattern is loud enough to act on. The pieces that turn visitors into members are the ones that answer the question nonprofits feel awkward asking out loud: what is this supposed to cost?

This is something I’ve been hearing in our consultant community for a while. Rate-setting is one of the topics most under-served by what’s publicly available, and nonprofits walk into the budget conversation with very little to anchor on.

The data behind that piece is a year old

The Market Rate Benchmarks piece — the one that just spent a week pulling traffic — is built on a survey we ran in our community about a year ago. It’s still useful and the headline findings haven’t gone stale overnight. But “a year ago” is starting to feel like a long time, and the v1 had real gaps.

We didn’t ask anything substantive about travel: when consultants pass costs through versus build them in, what hourly rate (if any) they charge for travel time, how site visits get scoped into a project budget. That’s a real question on both sides of the table, and we left it unasked.

Others surfaced after we published. Respondents told us they wanted finer-grained sector breakdowns than we collected — strategy/planning vs. digital vs. coaching is too coarse to support the comparison most consultants want to make. They wanted concrete examples of how peers actually pitch retainer relationships, not just the headline that 46% of us use them. They wanted more on value-adds: how to structure them, when to bill for them, and what to call them on an invoice.

So we’re going to do another one soon. I want to think carefully about what to ask, and to draw on what this past week has taught us about which questions nonprofits and consultants actually want answered. The plan is to field a new survey later this spring and publish a new report with better questions, more sector specificity, a real chapter on travel, and the things our last respondents wished we’d asked the first time.

If there’s a pricing question you’ve been waiting for somebody to put real numbers on, reply and tell me. I’m collecting them for the survey design.

The other thing the data argues for is more case studies in the budgeting and scope-negotiation territory. If you’ve got a budget conversation that went sideways — or one that went right because somebody set it up well — reply to this email. Those are the case studies we don’t have yet, and the data says people are looking for them.