For the Client Side of the Table
Working with Consultants: a free, living library of templates, guides, and case studies for the nonprofits hiring us. It launches today.
Do you have a file on your laptop called “stuff I wish my clients knew before we started?” I do. It started as a note after a project that tanked in month two because no one had ever formally agreed on who was the engagement owner on the nonprofit’s side.
Independent consulting in the social impact space has a client-side gap. Most of the consultants I know spend real energy improving our own craft: how we scope, price, run projects, and communicate. There are newsletters for that (hi!). There are communities and surveys and reports.
For the nonprofits hiring us, the support system is thinner. Most executive directors hire their first consultant the same way: they ask around, get a recommendation, skim a proposal, sign it, and figure out the rest on the fly. No one taught them how to scope an engagement, write clear deliverables, set up a decision-making structure, or close out well.
That’s the gap a group of us set out to fill.
A new (and free!) resource
Today we’re launching Working with Consultants: A Guide for Mission-Driven Organizations. It’s at working-with-consultants.ghost.io, and it’s free.
Just use your email address to sign up. Lest you cower in fear, I promise we will not harrass you! We will send an update roughly monthly or so as we add new stuff to the site.
The contributors are Emily Berens, Allison Ehrich Bernstein, Amy Chen, Jasmine Daly, Izzy Goodman, Susannah Hook-Rodgers, Michaela Howard, Danielle Lemi, Michele Levy, and me. Every piece was written by a named author drawing on actual engagements. We peer-reviewed each other’s drafts, argued about framing, and tried to write the resource we wish our clients had before they ever called us.
How to use it
The library is organized the way an engagement actually unfolds:
Finding & Selecting Consultants — when to hire, where to look, what to watch for, how to run a process that surfaces the right partner.
Budget & Pricing — what consultants charge and why, how to negotiate scope inside a budget, the hidden costs organizations don’t plan for.
Setting Up for Success — scoping the work, writing a good contract, getting the right people involved, establishing communication from day one.
Managing the Engagement — staying aligned once the work is underway, what to do when things go off track, how to wrap up and prepare the team to carry the work forward.
What Good Looks Like — real stories from real engagements.
You can also browse by content type. Guides are the essays — the thinking behind good practice. Templates are the grab-and-go tools: checklists, conversation scripts, planning worksheets. Case Studies are the stories.
For those of you on my side of the table
This is a resource you can point your clients toward. A few ways I’m thinking about using it:
Linking the Organizational Readiness Self-Assessment in my outbound emails, which does some of the qualifying work before a discovery call.
Sending the Scope Negotiation Conversation Guide to prospects who want to hire me but haven’t figured out for what.
Pointing newer engagement owners — the nonprofit staff who will actually manage me day to day — toward the Managing the Person Doing the Work guide, because nobody taught them either.
Sharing the whole site with folks in my network who run or sit on the boards of nonprofits. The next consultant they hire will do better work if the engagement starts from a more informed place.
We’ll keep adding to it with new templates, new case studies, and probably a few things we haven’t thought of yet. If you find something valuable, use it. If you’d improve something, tell us. If you want to contribute something to this community library, write it up and send it over.
A better resource for the people hiring us is, in the end, a better resource for us. Engagements go better when both sides start with the same words for what they’re doing.