These days, we seem to hear about abundance more and more:

• Building on strengths
• Seeing the glass as half full
• Asset-based work
• Seeing community potential vs. community need
• Focusing on abundance vs scarcity

So what IS all this abundance stuff about? Is this just a new fad, the new buzz word?

Or are the outcomes really different when we focus our consulting clients on abundance vs. scarcity? Different in what way?

And if there IS a difference – and it is worth considering an abundance framework for our consulting work – what would change about the way we do our work if that work was rooted in an abundance framework?

What does abundance thinking mean for

• Board work?
• Community Building?
• Planning work?
• Resource Development?
• Social media / community engagement work?

Does the work itself change? Do the tools change? Do WE have to change? (And if so, to what? And how?)

Lots to think about as we head into the chat on Tuesday, July 20 at 1pm US Pacific time. See you there!

Topic: Evaluating the Consultant’s Own Effectiveness

Many thanks to Nick Perona (@rawr_nickzilla) for the hours it took to assemble this!

Question 1: Why Evaluate?
Before considering HOW we measure our effectiveness, we should probably consider WHY to measure. At its highest potential, what would evaluating consultant effectiveness make possible – for the client and for the consultant?

Responses and conversation included:

• For the consultant, evaluating effectiveness allows opportunity to compare what the client sees as effective versus what consultant thinks is effective.
• Allows the consultant to measure the extent of their role in client’s success in addition to the benchmarks the client was helped to achieve.
• For the client, measurement of consultant effectiveness could determine whether client is moving closer to achieving their vision.
• At its highest potential, evaluating consultant success makes possible achieving an organization’s vision, while ensuring the consultant is continually improving his/her ability to do so.

Question 2: What to Measure?
What would consultants have to measure to accomplish that? What might be indicators of success?

Responses and conversation included:

• Success as defined by the consultant can be very different from how it is defined by the client. Importance of consultant and client arriving at a single definition for their success and then measure against it?
• Importance of establishing trust and an ongoing relationship between consultant and client, facilitating further collaboration. Once a mutual definition of success is established, it becomes far easier to arrive at “deliverables” on the part of the consultant and metrics for that success on the part of the client.
• Question raised: How can qualitative indicators be quantified? For example, an organization can measure “learning” by weighing what it knows / can do after the engagement versus prior to the engagement.
• Noted by @SpurDave (Dave Svet): Ethnographic Research (Wikipedia link here) as a valuable tool for creating success indicators. Dave suggested Margaret LeCompte’ss Ethnographers Toolkit.
• Organizational learning and social change as important aspects to measure, as the effects continue to add value after the consultant leaves.
• Question re: Grant proposal writing. If client is energized about the process and creates change within their organization to qualify for the grant, but doesn’t win the grant in the end, how to measure the consultant’s success?
• Need for mutual client/consultant definition of success. Before work begins, consultant and client arrive at indicators of success for that engagement. May include the grant AND other aspects of “success” in the process of grant preparation.

Question 3: Deliverables vs. Results
Is a consultant’s job to provide “deliverables” or the result of those deliverables? Put another way, do clients want “a drill” or do they want “a hole”? Or “to hang a towel rack”? Or really, “a dry towel”?

Responses and conversation included:

• The consultant’s responsibility to work with the client to determine their ultimate goal: Is it the “towel rack” they want? Or a “shelf”?
• @MarkRiffey noted (with tongue perhaps halfway in cheek): “Clients dont want social media, they want more/better relationships/interaction. They put up with social media to get it ”
• @JDeanCoffey (Jara Dean-Coffey) noted: “We work to increase clients’ adaptive capacity to think, assess, determine & act. And to do it without us. Process is also a tool.
• Once these goals are established, the consultant brings his/her own tools to work with the client, but the client also has their own resources, tools, organizational strengths upon which to build success. The consultant helps align the work at the end result but most of the “heavy lifting” comes from the client.
• As @SeattleDrury (Peter Drury) noted: “If the consultant is working harder than the client to achieve success, then the outcomes will not be sustainable.”
• The need for a true desire on the part of the client to create change. Organizations may recognize internal problems but may be fearful of the change necessary to get them where they want to be.
• If stakeholders and key decision-makers are involved in the process every step of the way, they can help identify the “pain” to be addressed during the engagement.
• Is it the consultant’s place to focus on outcomes when a client wants outputs (a deliverable)?
• How to measure whether our work is contributing to the client’s big picture mission / vision / outcomes? Are there ways for a social media or grant writing or board development consultant to move deliverables beyond “I finished the project and that’s all that matters; it’s up to the client to use it how they wish”? Can the same narrowly focused project be positioned to accomplish the client’s larger outcomes? What up front discussions would have to happen for consultants to be able to fit their work into the client’s ultimate goals?
• As @CharlieKalech noted in a question to @JoppaThoughts (Erica Holthausen): Is your goal to finish your assessment or to convey your findings & make it meaningful towards their goal?

Question 4: Measurement Methods / Tools
What are you currently using to measure real results / outcomes / effectiveness?
How are you discovering the outcomes clients want beyond deliverables? How is that creating your scope of work?

Responses and conversation included:

• Are consultants measuring their own “outputs” or “outcomes?” Are they measuring the consulting equivalent of cans of food distributed at a Food Bank vs. a reduction in the number of hungry families in the community?
• If in some circumstances outputs are all there are to measure, should that be the only metric for success? If so, how can a consultant measure the ultimate outcomes / impact of his/her work?
• How can we measure whether the engagement has led to the client being transformed, or the extent to which they are aiming towards their vision?
• @JoppaThoughts (Erica Holthausen) noted: “Our projects short term, so maybe more output oriented. Client goals are long-term, more outcome oriented. *think*”
• The need for pre-engagement discussion came up here as well. Open-ended questions early on, involving the board and key decision-makers in the discussion of outcomes at the beginning of the process. What change do you want to see? What do you want to be different when we’re done?
• @SpurDave (Dave Svet) suggested: “Count quantitative outputs to compare qualitative changes. Goes back to pre-test, post test and control group. Example: More condoms distributed can result in happier, wealthier, smaller families. [Another example, later] All pet shelter clients = control. Before social media, after social media and how you compare to others. All DV shelter clients = control. Current situation is pre-test. Result of work is difference with post test.

Question 5: Reflection
Any key learnings from today’s chat? What stood out for you? Any aha’s?

Many people quoted @SeattleDrury and @AskDebra in their “biggest takeaways.” Those quotes were summed up by @JoppaThoughts: “Biggest take away: Idea that nothing we do is sustainable if we are more invested & working harder than the client.”

@amykincaid Lessons learned are probably about fit, and about expectations up front! I’m going to work on measures/ing work with individual clients, but then also for our portfolio as a whole.

@NancyIannone Seems like consultants searching for ways to measure community impact by orgs as much as the organizations themselves

@ltwhite (Leslie White) Takeaway – thinking outputs v. outcomes. How to apply to my type of consulting (risk assessment/management)

@wrightmomentum (Susan Wright) Challenge & opportunity to discover co-creative effectiveness/evaluation.

@socialchngediva (Ericka Hines) Make assessment a part of the planning in early stages. And research that for soft stuff like “leadership development”

Lastly, the following sums up how many folks thought of the chat:

@JoppaThoughts (Erica Holthausen)
Participating in #NPCons — and learning from, joking with and debating my colleagues is just another reason #whyIlovetwitter! This is sacred professional development time!

@SeattleDrury (Peter Drury)
I humbly confess I need a support group and training for managing to follow #NPCons ! Crazily powerful – and also crazy to follow! 8^)

And the Best Reflection of the Day Award goes to @socialchngediva (Ericka Hines)
#NPCons is like a brainiac cocktail party where all of the convos are uberpowerful and you dont want to miss anything.

What’s Next
First, this isn’t all the conversation, but many of the highlights. We encourage you to read  the complete transcript of the chat here.

The meatiness of this chat suggests the need for deeper conversation. Whatever topic, quote, thought you see above or in the archives here – or if you have new thoughts to add – let’s see what emerges as we have more quiet reflective time to think about these important topics.

When the chat is over, we will
a) assemble key points and post them here, and
b) post the whole chat to the archive.

Thanks for the lively discussion!

These days, this sector is filled with talk of evaluation and measurement and metrics. As consultants to community benefit / nonprofit organizations, we are often the ones encouraging our clients to measure their performance.

We teach clients how to move from measuring “outputs” to “outcomes” – the results that matter for their clients and their communities. We can often be heard saying something like, “Don’t tell me how many people you served. Tell me what was different for those people after you served them!”

We try to teach our clients that measurement can be aspirational (Are we getting closer to our goals?) rather than punitive (We are measuring because others are making us do so.) We provide self-assessment-tools for boards, for fundraising, for overall organizational capacity.

The Elephant-In-The-Room
If we consultants are going to walk our talk – as we discussed during last month’s chat on transparency – are we measuring our own performance?

• Are we walking the measurement talk? Assessing our own effectiveness?
• If so, how are we doing so? Do we do it regularly, as part of our work, or when we’re doing our annual plan? (Let’s save “Do you have a plan for your practice?” for another walking-the-talk chat…)
• Do you ask clients to measure your performance? Against what metrics? Are there clearly articulated goals for the work? And are those “output” goals (i.e. deliverables) or are they “outcome” goals (i.e. the difference those deliverables are making, and for whom…)
• Are you using a self-assessment to measure your own effectiveness? If so, what are you measuring?
• If we are going to measure what matters, what DOES matter? What would great “Consultant Result Measurement” actually measure? What might that look like?
• What would it take to aim all our work – from proposal to project evaluation – at outcomes rather than deliverables?

That’s the elephant we will be talking about in this month’s chat.

And what better topic to announce that this month we will begin extending the chat in two ways:

1. The chat will be 90 minutes. If you have to leave after an hour, no worries, because…
2. The discussion will continue here at the NPCons blog. In that way folks who miss the chat (or portions thereof) will be able to take part in the discussion. And we will be able to develop thinking over the course of days and weeks, rather than just an hour.

So we’ll see you at Twitter on Tuesday, June 15 at 1pm US PT. And then we’ll see you here at the blog when the chat is done!

It’s one thing to encourage our clients to walk their talk. It’s a whole ‘nother thing to walk that talk ourselves as consultants!

This month’s Twitter Chat for consultants to Community Benefit Organizations will focus on the inter-related issues of “walking the talk” and “transparency.”

• If we are going to walk our own talk, what talk is that?
• Have you clearly articulated the values that will guide the work you do – guide the decisions you make?
• What does “transparency” mean for your clients?
• What does “transparency” mean as a conusultant?
• How much transparecny is enough?
• If we are to be transparent, what exactly does that mean we will DO?
• And how will that help our clients?  How will it help the communities they serve?

Join us on Tuesday, May 25th at 1pm US Pacific time. This one promises to be a lively discussion! (But then aren’t they all?)

Many thanks to Matt Nathan for suggesting this month’s chat topic!

If you are new to the #NPCons chat, check out info about how to participate here.  And you can find archives of past chats here.  We hope you will join us!

Perhaps it’s the changing economy. Or perhaps this has always been the $64,000 question.  But these days, everywhere we turn, we seem to hear the same questions:

• How does one market a consulting practice to nonprofit organizations?
• What is successful?
• Where are potential clients (both online and offline)?
• How do we find them? More to the point, how do we find GREAT clients?
• And once we find them, what is effective in marketing to them?

We hear these question often from new consultants. With more seasoned consultants, the same questions are expressed a bit differently:

• As I grow personally and professionally, how can I identify new business strategies when the old ways just don’t seem to fit anymore?
• How do I bring my clients along with me?
• How do I move beyond the needs of current clients, and grow into the next stage of my work?
• How do I create the kind of “fit” that moves from “marketing” to “GREAT client relations”?

We see this second set of questions a lot with the consultants we work with at the Community-Driven Institute.  They are learning entirely new approaches to consulting practices that are sometimes 20 or 30 years old – successful practices that just aren’t reaching for the consultant’s highest potential to create catalytic change in their communities.

• Once we learn how to move ourselves forward professionally and personally, how do we market that new “thing” to clients?
• How do we talk about it?
• How do we find clients who “get it” when we talk about work that may be different from what they are used to?

Closing the loop, those questions begin circling back to the same questions new consultants ask – the questions that opened this post.

• Where are our new clients?
• How do we find GREAT clients?  (Ok, how can we find ANY clients?)
• How do we approach them?
• What strategies work?

That will be the topic of this month’s Twitter Chat for Consultants to Community Benefit / Nonprofit Organizations.  Join us on Tuesday, April 27 at 1pm US Pacific time, and share both your questions and your wisdom.

We look forward to seeing you there!

(Many thanks to Debra Askanese @AskDebra and Chanelle Carver @ChanelleCarver for suggesting this month’s topic!)

“Can we create our NPCons Resource Group; international, smart, passionate?!! BigTent, Conference Calls, Webinars – if we can do this much on Twitter imagine the possibilities!”

So what do you think? If we had such a group / place online to learn from each other, what could it accomplish? What would it look like?

Thoughts? Let’s do this!!

And the fact is, that is completely true. One doesn’t have to go to school or get a degree or a license to consult.

If we DID go to school, though, our learning would fall into three areas:

1) Content: For Community Benefit Consultants, that might include governance or technology or planning or resource development or evaluation or social media or etc. and etc.

2) Business: Especially for independent consultants, there is the business side of our own bookkeeping and marketing and our own social media and planning…

3) Process: Often termed the “soft stuff,” this is the people side of our work. How do we actually interact with the client as we do our consulting work? How do we engage a client to want to learn? How do we encourage a client, get them excited to grow and change? How do we get clients to see possibility and reach for it?

There are books and classes and college degrees that provide information about the first two areas of this list.  But where do we learn about the process of consulting?

This will be the topic of this month’s Twitter chat.

How and where do we learn the being part of being a consultant?

• Where do we learn to translate content into learning and growth for our clients?
• How can we ensure our own culture of ongoing learning? From where? With whom?
• Where do we learn how to engage and inspire and encourage and teach and lead? Where do we learn whether to inspire or prescribe? Where do we learn how to model for our clients the kinds of actions and behaviors we hope to see in them and their communities?
• Where do we learn how to facilitate – and where do we practice that skill (or do we practice anywhere but with our clients?)?
• How can we learn from other consultants? What structures are best for facilitating that learning?

As we consider what ongoing learning might look like for consultants, Debra Beck has posted a Nonprofit Learning Manifesto that inspired this month’s chat. There is great food for thought here – how do we encourage the same learning for ourselves as we encourage for our clients?

This promises to be an engaging discussion. Please join us!
Tuesday, February 23 at 1pm US Pacific time.
See you there!

If you are good at what you do, you may be working with them to aim beyond survival, on towards sustainability. And if you are really good at what you do, you are working with them on moving beyond “sustainability” and out towards “thrivability.”

That, of course, begs the question: What are you doing to help your own consulting practice thrive?  What sustains the work YOU do?

How are you moving from surviving to sustaining to thriving in your consulting work?

We’ve heard consultants who teach their clients how to “sustain and thrive” throw up their own hands in despair at how the economy is wreaking havoc on their business.

We’ve also heard consultants who tell us business has never been better.

Where do you fall in the spectrum? And what are you doing to move your practice from survivability to thrivability?

Tune in on Tuesday, January 26 at 1pm US-Pacific time, and let’s all find out together!

Why do we put “nonprofit” in quotes? It’s all about the difference between surviving and thriving! Can we think of our consulting work in the same powerful way?

Many thanks to Jean Russell for her unwavering efforts to move this whole world toward thrivability.

So what is The Fun Theory? It is the idea that people are more likely to change their behavior to do what is best for them and for others, if instead of prescribing what they “should” do, we encourage them by making it FUN!!!

Whistle while you work. Inspire vs. prescribe. Many hands make light work. Let’s PARTY!

• What do you do in your consulting practice, to encourage behavioral change by making things FUN? How have you used FUN to help clients transform?
  
• What have you done to take a mundane activity and make it both FUN and effective at getting the results you wanted?
• If a condition of your consulting contract with a client – whether you were teaching governance or working on a capital campaign or crafting grant proposals – included a provision that your interactions with the organization must use FUN to achieve the organization’s goals, how would you go about doing that?

We hope you will come have FUN with us on Tuesday, December 1 at 1pm US Pacific time!