Late last year, we launched a survey with Shiree Teng and CompassPoint to learn more about how nonprofits are working with consultants. We wanted to know: Are nonprofits able to find the help they need? How is the working relationship between nonprofits and consultants? Is the work sticking? We had a small (264), but diverse (in size, age, and focus) set of responses. The majority of respondents had an operating budget greater than $1 million, with almost 20% in the […]
consulting
Nonprofits, Please Take our Survey on Consultants!
Last year, Shiree Teng approached us with an itch she’s been wanting to scratch for years now. Shiree has been a social justice and community activist for over three decades, and she’s spent a good part of the past few decades focusing on organizational effectiveness, learning, and evaluation work. One of the things she observed, especially in her role as an advisor to the Packard Foundation’s Organizational Effectiveness Program, was that nonprofits seem to use consultants quite a bit. If consultants […]
Group Process on Steroids
We often describe our work to others as “group process on steroids.” It’s like organizational development, community organizing, and other related practices done really, really well. Except that it’s also somewhat different. What exactly does that mean?! It means doing whatever you can and leveraging whatever tools are at your disposal to enable groups to work skillfully together, to help them come alive. Where exactly do the steroids come in?! (My business partner, Kristin Cobble, took a pass at this […]
The Facilitator’s Dilemma
I really loved Rebecca’s post on what she learned from facilitating our strategic planning process this past Fall. I want to riff on a point she made about the facilitator’s dilemma of sticking with the schedule versus letting conversations happen. Rebecca wrote: I sometimes got visibly anxious when one of our three-hour sessions was clearly not going to result in the outcome I’d designed towards. In one particularly tense moment, Eugene turned to me and said “Rebecca, I know we are not […]