Five Questions to Ask When Hiring a Consultant for Your Nonprofit

We’ve talked to you about strategic planning and the importance of planning for the fallout from this year’s election. But how do you decide which consultant to hire – if at all?

 After more than four years of consulting, we’ve reviewed more documents written by other consultants in the field than we can count. Each op-ed, annual report, donor deck, policy paper, and strategic plan represents thousands of dollars invested and hundreds of hours spent. And too many have ended up collecting dust on shelves, were unintelligible, unimplementable, or imploded because they were written by the wrong person, with the wrong message, and no sense of the audience in mind. 

 Because their consultant, in other words, did not share their values and did not genuinely see themselves as a member of the organization’s team. 

 Chances are you’re stressed. You’re working to make the world a better place, and on top of that, you’re dealing with your board, staff, fundraising, etc. Work with a consultant who lessens that stress, not complicates things further.

We have come up with five questions to ask when hiring a consultant. These questions will help you avoid the pitfalls of unusable recommendations, indecipherable spaghetti charts, and unreadable content:

1.) Do we really need a consultant for this?

 Penchina Partners is the odd kind of consultancy who will tell you when you don’t need a consultant. Since we come from the nonprofit sector, and we have hired consultants ourselves, we take the value of every dollar invested in outside help seriously. And the truth is not everyone needs one. How that consultant helps you evaluate the cost-benefit of whether you should hire them will be a telling conversation.  

2.) Have you worked at a nonprofit and served on a non-profit board?

Nonprofits are emotional, deeply human, passion-fueled enterprises; you can’t capture that in a textbook, and a cookie-cutter approach just won’t work. We have been hired multiple times to translate a strategic plan drafted by MBAs into something that’s clear and implementable in a nonprofit setting. Work with someone who knows the pressure you carry on your shoulders to make payroll four months out. Who has navigated the stresses of generational change in the workplace. Who has felt the exhaustion of the three-hour board meeting. If your consultants share those experiences, their counsel will be that much more helpful and effective. 

3.) How do you define “strategy”?

 The word strategy has been lost to the black hole of jargon. We are stunned at how many people confuse tactics for strategy. We have seen tactical successes still lead to strategic failure. More often, strategic successes occur despite tactical failures. If your consultants start by describing an action or activity as a strategy, they’re not for you; if they haven’t asked you to define success, something is off.

4.) How should the board be engaged in this?

 The board-executive director relationship is a complex one. Not defining the lines of authority and responsibility costs many organizations huge amounts of time and energy. We have seen dozens of organizations proceed with intensive work only to be told far too late in the process that the board isn’t satisfied with the outcome. Prevent that by determining if they will need to be included, and if so, who from the board should be, and when in the process – whatever the scope of work.  

5.) How should the staff be engaged in this? 

 As with the board, the role of staff in a consulting engagement should be considered carefully. Who from various levels of the organization has the insight and standing to provide feedback into strategic decisions? These are the people who bring the day-to-day experience to the conversations, and their role in testing assumptions is critical. The biggest pitfall we caution against is tokenizing junior staff; they often bring a fresh perspective that can radically reevaluate how to address a challenge.

After the interview, take stock. Do you feel they are genuinely committed to your work? Do they have the experience to prove it? Do you gel with them? Do you trust their judgment? Can you be vulnerable with them and be challenged by them? Can you laugh with them in those moments when you realize the sheer absurdity of some aspect of what we do each day?

We’ve been there. We’ve seen it. We love solving problems. We love helping our clients enhance their work. 

If you think you may need a consultant, ask us these questions. We have answers.