What do Nonprofit Consultants actually do?

Sometime over the last few years people caught on to consultants. “What do you actually do?” became a popular refrain, then a meme, then a part of the zeitgeist. It became a part of our shared cultural understanding that consultants make a lot of money, are loosely associated with major corporations, and obfuscate when you ask them what they do for a living - but not in a cool, cloak and dagger kind of way. The consultant, cornered, throws out buzzwords about roadmaps, deliverables, and key performance indicators hoping to confuse or bore the other person into changing the topic. It usually works.

Nonprofit consultants are only a little better about answering the question “what do you do?”. The typical answer might contain the phrases “achieve their goals” and “implement technologies”, but this doesn’t help anyone outside of consulting to understand the day to day roles of a nonprofit consultant. 

I’m going to do two things here. First, I’m going to explain what nonprofit consultants do and why this is a difficult question for most people to answer. Next I’m going to talk about our nonprofit, Sable, and why we chose to become nonprofit consultants. 

What do nonprofit consultants do?

It depends on the project, and the client. Nonprofit consultants will be added to projects where they can work alongside the employees of a nonprofit and provide advice, training, and help execute on the project. The project that a nonprofit consultant will be added to will have a lot to do with their education, their training, and their passions. Some consultants will focus primarily on fundraising, while others will never be exposed to fundraising in their professional career. 

Some of the most common projects that nonprofit consultants find themselves working on are management consulting (focusing on providing expertise on how the nonprofit can improve their operations, their communication, and their leadership, among other things) , fundraising, technology, and board management. 

This is why so many nonprofit consultants have a hard time answering the question about what they do: their answer depends on their industry, their level of expertise, the nonprofit they’re partnered with, and the project that they’re focusing on at the moment. It’s not uncommon for nonprofit consultants to change projects every six months or so. The answer that you might have received in person or online is meant to capture all of this information and give you an answer in a single sentence. In trying to answer everything, they’ve answered nothing.

At our best, you can think of nonprofit consultants as the cast of Queer Eye. We roll into town,  evaluate what our partner needs to improve their lives, help them make changes, and roll back out. 

At their worst, nonprofit consultants self perpetuate. They put their own interests ahead of their clients, they give questionable, unqualified, or impractical advice, and they find projects that have the potential to be never ending. The never ending project is a very good thing for a shady nonprofit consultant. It means they can keep billing their client while moving the needle just enough to say that they’re making an impact. 

What does Sable do?

We work with nonprofits on projects that they’ve identified as high priorities, helping them by providing advice and working on tasks that are either too technical or that they just don’t have the staff to accomplish. This leads us to working with some amazing nonprofits, like Stop Abuse Campaign and South Texas Human Rights Center. 

First, we seek out nonprofits with missions that align with ours. These nonprofits typically focus on food and water security, disaster response, and violence prevention. These are the areas that we can have the biggest impact based on the expertise and past experience of our staff. We realize that we can’t be everything to everyone, so we’ve narrowed our focus down to the areas that we think we’ll excel. 

After we’ve found our partner and our project, we get to work helping wherever we can. No task is too big or too small; if it’s going to help our partner and the people that they serve, we’re on it. A small list of what we’ve done for our partners is creating internship programs, designing and executing individual giving campaigns, securing Google Ad grants and creating highly successful ad campaigns, redesigning websites, managing volunteers, working with data, and generally serving as friends, trusted advisors, and partners for the nonprofits that we work with. 

What sets us apart is that we don’t charge our partners anything to work with them, and will often support them with our own funds. Supporting us helps to make sure that nonprofits that are extremely important to their communities and the people they serve get everything they need to continue to be successful. 

We’re just one example of a nonprofit consulting firm. There are plenty of firms that are doing amazing work for their clients and that have their own way of operating. Hopefully this gives you some idea of what a nonprofit consultant does, whether it’s a career that you’re interested in, or if you’re a nonprofit looking for support.