Engaging Consultants to Increase Your Organization’s Impact
Running an organization is hard. When that organization is also tasked with solving or alleviating some of our society’s most challenging problems and issues, it gets even harder. And when you’re doing it on a nonprofit budget, it can feel like a gargantuan task. Those complex, high-level problems continue to be moved to the bottom of the pile, while the “on fire” tasks take precedence. We get it! Those are the moments it can be highly beneficial, both to your organization and to your mental health, to call in a consultant. Some of these situations include:
When you need specific expertise you don’t have in house
You’re lacking capacity to catalyze a project
You’re feeling stuck or stalled on a strategy
You have a short-term, time sensitive project that you need to outsource
Hiring a consultant in those moments can ensure that you get to continue doing your important day-to-day work, while those bigger projects gain some traction and momentum with experts who do that work every day. Consultants bring expertise, capacity, energy, and perspective to work that can feel stalled, stuck, mundane, or bewildering.
Hiring a Consultant vs. Doing the Work In-House
Sometimes it can be difficult to determine when you need a consultant at all, versus when the work should be someone’s full-time job. Here are a few considerations for navigating that decision.
Hire a consultant when something is brand new, hire staff when you’ve been able to pilot a strategy. Bringing in a consultant when something is brand new is a great time to explore options, get expert opinions, and design and pilot new strategies. You can certainly hire staff to design programs or initiatives, but hiring a consultant to gather information, test some ideas, and make recommendations gives you the flexibility to try new things and “fail forward.” Hire staff when you’re ready to expand on your pilot, scale, and move into implementation.
Hire a consultant to solve specific challenges, hire staff to manage relationships. Strong relationships are critical to any successful organization, but that’s even more important and true in the nonprofit sector. While Elevate in particular strives to build strong relationships with all stakeholders involved in a project, organization staff have the ability to provide stability, longevity, and commitment to people that a consultant just can’t do within the parameters of a shorter-term project.
Hire a consultant to bring specific expertise, hire staff to integrate into the rest of the organization. Because consultants are often experts in a specific process or topic area, and because our projects are time-bound, it can mean that our ability to understand the nuances of your organization can be limited. Bringing on staff who understand the ins-and-outs of your organization’s processes, infrastructure, and culture to manage long-term integration and sustainability ensures you get the best of both worlds.
What Consultants Can’t (or Shouldn’t) Do For You
Despite the many benefits consultants can bring, there are a few things that consultants can’t (or shouldn’t) do for you and your organization.
We can’t create buy-in for a solution. If you’re engaging in a relationship with a consultant, it’s important that the right people are at the table to generate buy-in and commitment to an idea. We can help you identify those stakeholders, we can help you build a strategy for engagement, but we can’t sell the idea and gain commitment for you. We lean heavily on our clients to leverage their relationships with those decision-makers and stakeholders to ensure long-term success of a solution or intervention.
We can’t manage your staff. Collaboration is one of Elevate’s top values, and we are happy (in fact, we prefer) to collaborate with staff who will be implementing a long-term strategy. But consultants aren’t managers, and it’s up to the organization to make clear the expectations of a staff person’s engagement with a consultant.
We can’t be your spokesperson. We are happy to share our expertise and opinions with stakeholders. We love building the capacity of our clients to cast a vision and advocate for a solution. But our work can’t (and this is a situation where we also shouldn’t) be used to prove a point, or decide an argument, or give someone an opportunity to say “I told you so!” to someone else. If that’s the goal, what you likely need more than a consultant is a mediator or facilitator.
Tips for Creating a Strong Relationship from the Beginning
Every consultant has different opinions and preferences on what constitutes a strong start to an engagement. These are some of the things we’ve learned over the years that help ensure our project gets off on the right foot and we have a strong foundation for our relationship.
Be clear on your goals, but don’t prescribe a solution. When I was a new mom, I panicked every time my baby coughed. I was talking to a family member, saying, “She probably has RSV, or is it COVID? Maybe she has pediatric pneumonia, OR ASTHMA, oh my gosh, does she have asthma?!” This family member gently reminded me to take a breath, first, and to share her symptoms with the doctor, but to leave the diagnosis to the professionals. (Turned out to be good advice - her cough was seasonal allergies.) The consulting relationship is similar. It is critically important to be able to communicate your goals and desired outcomes, and to be able to accurately and completely communicate the issues that caused you to call us in the first place. But if you walk into the relationship telling us what the solution is, or being married to a specific intervention, it’s possible that we might miss a bigger issue or neglect a better solution. We welcome your ideas and your partnership, but be wary of getting married to one specific solution.
Communicate your budget parameters or expectations up front. Of all of these tips listed here, this may be the most important. There have been so. many. times. when we have been told to “shoot for the moon” or “just scope it and see what it costs,” just to be told later that we needed to rescope for what the client originally had in mind - sometimes cutting the project scope in half. Knowing your budget expectations or parameters helps us scope to meet your needs - it allows us to design a comprehensive solution that ensures you see progress on the challenge you’re facing, rather than trimming down a too-large scope and risking cutting out critical elements. Also, perhaps more importantly, this conversation allows us to kick off our relationship from a place of transparency and trust.
Decide how involved you want to be. As consultants, we’re often asked to show up and wear different hats. Some clients need additional capacity and expertise, but have little capacity or interest to be highly involved. Other projects require or desire a high level of learning, collaboration, and reciprocity within the consulting relationship. Know what your capacity and preferences are, and communicate those with us up front.
Understand your (real) timeline. As nonprofit professionals, it’s often difficult for us to battle the culture of urgency that is inherent in our work. So many of the challenges we seek to alleviate in this sector are growing and worsening by the day, and we’re juggling so many different priorities and problems that it can be hard to plan ahead and delay solving non-urgent (but still important!) problems. Often, our clients come to us the minute they need something, but unfortunately, we (and so many other consultants) book up a few months in advance. Starting a consulting engagement before you actually need it, and being realistic about the timeline in which we can accomplish a goal together will benefit your organization and the work by ensuring we have ample time to gather information and design highly effective solutions. (And if you’re doing evaluation work, earlier is ALWAYS better!)
Know when to use a closed process (i.e., an RFP) versus an open or more relational process. Many times, we’ve been asked to submit a proposal via a highly-structured process, or as a response to a highly formalized Request for Proposals (RFP) process, only to later learn we were the only consultant being considered for the work. While it’s great practice to document your goals, desired outcomes, and parameters and share that with us, a formal, closed process may actually inhibit your ability to get a strong proposal that meets your needs. We’re highly relational and we love to have a dialogue about the proposals we submit, even after we submit them. If you need a high level of objectivity in your process, we understand and are happy to comply. But if not, communicating that we have the ability to ask questions and discuss your needs (beyond what’s listed in the RFP) ensures we can get you what you need.
Deciding to engage with a consultant is a big decision - one that involves inviting someone you don’t know into your organization and your work. At Elevate, we strongly believe that our clients are the experts in the communities, populations, and issues they work with day in and day out, and we seek to honor and lean on that expertise heavily in our collaborative approach. But we are proud to bring strong, systematic, proven strategies and processes that can be adapted to support service-oriented organizations in a variety of ways.
Elevate’s consultants and associates are skilled professionals with years of experience. We look forward to engaging in this relationship with you to help you solve problems and increase your impact. Contact us today to schedule a discovery call!