Nonprofit managers unaccustomed to dealing with high-powered lawyers, project managers or other professionals must be similarly prepared to take charge when hiring outside consultants.
To assist its grantee-partners with this process, the Jim Joseph Foundation in San Francisco recently put out a guide to best practices for selecting consultants for jobs from strategic planning and research to event facilitation, fundraising and grant writing. Leaders of the Jewish education nonprofit have since compiled the recommendations in a format designed to be accessible to others in the nonprofit sector going through this process as well.
“More and more grantee-partners have asked us for input in how and when they select consultants, and we were happy to share our expertise in one place, in this digestible format,” Aaron Saxe, senior program officer at the Jim Joseph Foundation, told The NonProfit Times.
Major pointers include:
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- Use the Request for Proposal (RFP) process to clearly set expectations and gather the information. A well-crafted RFP provides clarity regarding your expected timeline, budget, communications, project deliverables and more. Announcing the RFP with plenty of time before the project starts will usually yield better, more thoughtful, and more detailed responses. When evaluating a potential consultant’s proposal, check to make sure they answered your questions with specificity and didn’t just use a template.
- Have one-on-one conversations with consultants interested in working on your project. Do they ask detailed questions and show interest? Do they communicate well, address your concerns, and follow up in a timely manner when they say they will? Do they “get” you and what you are trying to accomplish? “You can learn a lot both by the knowledge the consultant shares and the ways in which they share it,” write the authors.
- Find out who will be doing the work. This is particularly important if you are considering giving the job to a larger firm. If so, find out exactly which member(s) of the firm will be working on your project and how they plan on communicating with you. “While the overall reputation of the firm is important, so too is that of the specific individual or team assigned,” the authors wrote.
- Talk with people who have worked on similar projects with the consultants you’re considering hiring. Ask for references from people who have worked both with the firm being considered for hire and with the team or individuals who will be leading your project.
- Be thoughtful about when to hire consultants unaccustomed to working in your particular field. Also recognize the benefits of a fresh perspective. “Our experience is that if the consultancy needed is very specific to Jewish content, it often (not always) is best to hire a consultant with a track record in that space,” the authors wrote.
- The same consideration applies to the specialty or field in which your nonprofit operates. On the other hand, casting a wider net may be the way to go for jobs related to strategic visioning or other projects of a more general nature. Such cross-pollination of knowledge and ideas can bring unexpected benefits, so long as there isn’t a steep learning curve for the project you’re planning to undertake.
- Determine beforehand how many proposals you intend to consider. Reviewing proposals is an important process, but the process should be managed to keep it from becoming unwieldy. For larger projects, the authors recommend whittling down responses to a pool of two to four finalist candidates and making your selection from that pool. For smaller jobs, inviting a limited group of pre-vetted consultants to apply might make more sense than putting out an open RFP.
Said Saxe, “Concepts related to leveraging the RFP process for information, conducting due diligence on who will be doing the work, and understanding when (and when not) to consider consultants outside of a specific area of expertise are relevant to any nonprofit that wants to undertake an efficient and ultimately effective consultant selection process.”
