Archive for December, 2010

On Demand - Do You Have What It Takes to Become a Consultant?



Title: Do You Have What It Takes to Become a Consultant?
Presenters:Penelope Cagney, President of The Cagney Company, Author of “Nonprofit Consulting Essentials: What Nonprofits and Consultants Need to Know” Jossey-Bass/Alliance for Nonprofit Management 2010
Duration: 1 hour

Summary
Have you ever wondered if you would make a good consultant? Perhaps you have even already started out down that road but would appreciate some guidance on achieving success in your new career. Perhaps you don’t necessarily want to be a consultant, but need to be able to identify good professional advisors to work with your organization.

This webinar will help address your questions and concerns about making a career switch in this direction or if you have already made a switch, provide tools to become a better consultant. Those who hire consultants will be better able to identify good ones and in this way make better use of their organization’s investment in this critical resource and avoid potential pitfalls.

Participants will be able to:
  • Know what skills can be transferred to consulting
  • Understand what skills must be acquired
  • Know where to get training and certification
  • Gain insight into the makings of a good consultant

    This webinar is for:
  • Anyone considering a consulting career
  • New consultants
  • Anyone needing to identify good consultants
  • Consultants crossing over to nonprofit work

    Cost:
    $99. - Click here to purchase Do You Have What It Takes to Become a Consultant? + Book if you are a jobseeker

    (you must login to your account to purchase)


  • Books are fulfilled and shipped (UPS Ground) by publisher, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
  • For orders placed more than ten business days in advance of webinar, recipients should receive book prior to webinar event date.
  • For orders placed less than ten business days prior to webinar, recipients should receive book within 5-7 business days after webinar event date.

    About the Author
    Penelope Cagney, MA, CFRE, has 25 years of experience in planning, development and governance. She spent seven years with one of the largest consulting companies to nonprofits and was a member of their long-distance learning faculty. Penelope taught graduate nonprofit management at the School of the Art Institute and Columbia College, Chicago, and was a distinguished visiting professor at American University in Cairo, Egypt.

    Cagney is the author of “Nonprofit Consulting Essentials: What Every Nonprofit and Consultant Needs to Know (Jossey-Bass/Alliance of Nonprofit Management, San Francisco, CA 2010) and editor of “Beyond Profit: the Complete Guide to Managing the Nonprofit Organization,” (Lutterworth Press, Cambridge, England, 1991). She has written extensively for publications internationally and presents frequently at many national and international conferences.

    Click here to read the New OK Green Room Article by Penelope Cagney, Do You Have What It Takes to Be a Consultant?

    • Do You Have What It Takes to Be a Consultant?




    By Penelope Cagney, MA, CFRE
    You’ve developed a special expertise and long to help others through it. Maybe you’ve always dreamed of being your own boss and having more control over your work environment. Or you’re recently retired, or are in between jobs, and need to earn some extra income.

    There are many reasons to become a consultant but not everyone has what it takes. Whether you’re considering making a career switch in this direction, or you’ve already started off down this path, you can increase your chances of success.

    Transferable skills

    To begin with, what do you have to offer? You may want to categorize your existing skill set into areas of expertise. Then ask, how might this benefit others? How can you present this so that the value is obvious.

    Before going any further, let’s clarify the difference between consulting and contracting. Federal and state governments have regulations that define who is an independent contractor/consultant and who is an employee. If a nonprofit misclassifies a worker, the nonprofit can be at significant legal risk.

    Employees do, consultants advise. Blogger Seth Godin puts it this way: “Architects (consultants) don’t manufacture nails, assemble windows or chop down trees. Instead, they take existing components and assemble them in interesting and important ways.” (Wise consultants understand, however, that there’s sometimes a gray area between doing and advising. As part of teaching we may model a behavior first.)

    The key question to answer is whether or not you can reframe what you know in terms of consultation and not execution. For instance, if you are a major gifts expert, can you develop principals and guidelines that can be adapted for many organizations as opposed to developing the relationships with donors yourself?

    If you can indeed offer something that has real value and can be classified as “true” consulting, you need to develop specific consulting skills.

    Expertise is just the beginning

    It’s not enough to be an expert. There’s an entire separate set of consulting skills to be learned.

    To begin with, most consultants must develop entrepreneurial skills they must be equipped to manage their own small businesses. They must know how to market themselves, which for consultants is a careful balance of selling services without compromising credibility. You must be subtler than a used car salesman!

    Consultants must understand the actual process of consulting because otherwise, no matter how good the advice, it won’t be heeded. The most common complaint of novice consultants about their clients is that “they didn’t listen” or “they wouldn’t take my advice.” While it’s true that nonprofits can sometimes be stubbornly resistant to a consultant’s best efforts, it may also be the case that the consultant’s inexperience is to blame. Anyone can give advice, even good advice, but few know how to ensure that their advice is taken.

    Personality profile

    While a wide variety of people come to consult at one time or another, there’s a particular type who is especially attracted to this as a career according to David Maister, recently retired Harvard University professor and expert on consultants. They typically are highly autonomous (although quite capable of working in groups), they are driven, intelligent, competitive, dislike ambiguity, and suffer from “Imposter’s Syndrome,” the ever-changing challenges of consultant work provide them with endless opportunities to prove themselves over and over again.

    How to gain skills

    Read up
    If you are new to consulting reading up on the field is of course advisable (you may want to check out my new book, “Nonprofit Consulting Essentials: What Nonprofits and Consultants Need to Know”). While there isn’t a lot written specifically for consultants to nonprofits, there are many books on the topic in general that you may find beneficial.

    Join up
    Consider joining a professional association. Here you can gain new skills and connect with colleagues. Since most consultants, working on their own, don’t have the readily available camaraderie found in large organizations, the opportunity to network is an important tool to combat the isolation that comes with the territory. Membership organizations provide education especially for consultants; webinars, conferences, literature and research. They provide guidance for practice through codes of ethics and best practices, and some even offer certification.

    The Alliance for Nonprofit Management is an association of capacity-builders with many consultant members. The Institute of Management Consultants (IMC) USA is for consultants across sectors that offers educational opportunities and certification. The Giving Institute and the Association of Philanthropic Counsel are specifically for fundraising consultants. There are other groups, too, for marketing, organizational development, prospect research, grant writing and coaching. There’s even an organization for those who do executive search, the Network of Non-Profit Search Consultants.

    You may enjoy the advantages of being accepted into a like-minded group like the Georgia Center for Nonprofit’s own consulting team (http://www.gcn.org/Solve/Consulting.aspx) or Arizona’s St. Luke’s Health Initiative’s Health in New Key consultant community of practice. The members support one another, exchange insights and experience, and share common values.

    Find a mentor
    An association is a good place to look for a mentor. You may feel more comfortable with one outside of your geographic area or particular discipline, since client confidentiality is always a concern.

    Practice
    Like your mother always told you, practice makes perfect. Seek opportunities to develop or refine your consulting skills by offering to do work pro bono or for reduced fees. (It’s neither ethically or professionally advisable to experiment on unsuspecting paying clients.) And don’t forget to give clients an opportunity to evaluate your performance so you can improve.

    Success
    What will success look like? There are benchmarks all along the way…the first contract signed, the first successful completion of a project, meeting your own financial goals. You’ll know for sure when you have the certainty that your consultation really helped an organization. There’s little that’s as satisfying.

    About the Author
    Penelope Cagney, MA, CFRE, has 25 years of experience in planning, development and governance. She spent seven years with one of the largest consulting companies to nonprofits and was a member of their long-distance learning faculty. Penelope taught graduate nonprofit management at the School of the Art Institute and Columbia College, Chicago, and was a distinguished visiting professor at American University in Cairo, Egypt.

    Cagney is the author of “Nonprofit Consulting Essentials: What Every Nonprofit and Consultant Needs to Know (Jossey-Bass/Alliance of Nonprofit Management, San Francisco, CA 2010) and editor of “Beyond Profit: the Complete Guide to Managing the Nonprofit Organization,” (Lutterworth Press, Cambridge, England, 1991). She has written extensively for publications internationally and presents frequently at many national and international conferences.

    OK Online Training - Do You Have What It Takes to Become a Consultant?
    Date: Thursday, January 20, 2011
    Time: 2:00 p.m. EST/ 11:00 a.m. PST


    Comment below if you want to be a Nonprofit Consultant


    Related Articles:

    Nonprofits Fear Losing Tax Benefit



    With the federal government struggling to regain control over the nation’s deficit, a debate is emerging over the charitable deduction and other tax policies that support nonprofit groups.

    What began as a proposal by the Obama administration in 2009 to reduce the deduction has become a wide-ranging discussion of what was once considered a sacred cow. Three blue-ribbon panels have proposed tinkering with the charity deduction, as has Robert B. Reich, the former labor secretary.

    “The administration’s proposal went nowhere, but Pandora’s box was cracked open then,” said Diana Aviv, president of the Independent Sector, a trade group for nonprofits.

    Charities warn that reducing or eliminating the deduction will cause irreparable damage to the nonprofit sector. They said the proposed changes came at a time of sustained and severe declines in donations because of the recession and cuts in government contracts for nonprofits. The charities also noted an increased demand for services.

    “It is patently absurd that at a time when government cuts are offloading more and more responsibility on nonprofit organizations, the government would further hamper those organizations and their ability to provide the social services it cannot,” said Mark Rosenman, director of Caring to Change, a project of the Aspen Institute that works to improve grant-making.

    But many tax and nonprofit experts say it is unreasonable for nonprofits to expect a waiver from the hard choices Congress will face as it works to live up to campaign promises to cut the deficit and reform tax laws.

    “It’s disappointing that the charitable sector, which is broadly committed to improving the well-being of civil society, is in this case indifferent to repairing what’s wrong in the country at the expense of protecting its marginal tax advantage,” said Rob Reich, an associate professor of political science at Stanford University who frequently writes about nonprofits and tax policy. (He is not related to the former labor secretary.)

    Estimates of how much the charitable deduction costs the government are sketchy. The one most policy makers rely on is calculated by Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation, which estimates that the government will lose roughly $237 billion to the deduction from 2009 to 2013.

    In the 2009 proposal, the Obama administration suggested that taxpayers earning more than $250,000 could make charitable deductions at a reduced rate of 28 percent, from the current rate of 35 percent.

    That proposal would have used the taxes generated by lowering the rate of reduction to support the health care overhaul, and it died amid much hue and cry from the nonprofit sector.

    Roger Colinvaux, a law professor at Catholic University and former staff member of the Joint Committee on Taxation, said circumstances were different now.

    “The conversation has changed from two years ago, when it wasn’t put forth as part of a broader tax reform plan but simply as a way to raise money for health care,” Mr. Colinvaux said. “Now, when they’re talking about tax reform in connection with deficit reduction, I think it’s much harder to attack it.”

    Ms. Aviv said that while making the rounds in Washington, she had heard three schools of thought about tinkering with the charitable deduction. One is convinced that donors are not influenced by the deduction. Another is that charitable gifts too often go to museums, universities and health research instead of human services organizations, while a third sees getting rid of the deduction as a way to lower the deficit and simplify the tax system.

    “When you pull these different impulses together, I think what you have is the makings of a potential change in this area in a way we haven’t looked at it in a very long time,” she said.

    All three deficit reduction proposals from the blue ribbon panels would eliminate the deduction in its current form.

    One of the panels, the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform would give taxpayers a tax credit worth 12 percent of their donations — but only if they contributed 2 percent or more of their adjusted gross income to charity.

    Another plan proposed by a panel of three liberal-leaning organizations — Demos, the Economic Policy Institute and the Century Foundation — is similar, suggesting a 25 percent tax credit for all charitable gifts.

    The plan philanthropic experts find the most intriguing, however, comes from the Bipartisan Policy Center panel, which suggests borrowing a system of subsidizing nonprofits similar to the one used in Britain, called Gift Aid.

    Under that proposal, nonprofits could claim a tax credit worth 15 percent of any charitable gift they received, effectively giving the donor a partial match. For instance, if a donor makes a charitable gift of $100 to a charity, the charity could apply to receive an additional $15 from the government.

    Salvatore LaSpada, chief executive of the Institute for Philanthropy, a British philanthropic advisory and research organization, said Gift Aid was generally considered a success. Adopted in 1990, the system raises about £1 billion ($1.56 billion) for British nonprofits. “The biggest problem with the system is that it is overly bureaucratic, which translates into a lot of gift aid not being claimed, about £742 million ($1.15 billion),” Mr. LaSpada said. “Small charities have said they lost money due to the cumbersome nature of claiming the credit.”

    Joseph J. Minarik, director of research at the Center for Economic Development and a member of the Bipartisan Policy committee, said Gift Aid was not the model for the proposal. Rather, he said, the goal of the task force was to simplify the tax code and reduce the inequity embedded in the charitable deduction, which, like other tax expenditures, rewards wealthier donors with bigger tax incentives.

    As for the impact its plan would have on charities, Mr. Minarik, who was the director of the Office of Management and Budget during the Clinton administration, recalled being involved in putting together the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which reduced tax rates on high-income individuals. “One of the things we heard at that time was that reducing the top bracket rates would destroy the not-for-profit sector,” he said.

    Instead, he noted, the act reduced the value of a charitable gift to the donor by 24 percent, according to research by the nonprofit trade group Independent Sector, but the next year giving rose 10 percent.

    Source: The New York Times

    2010 Fundraising Survey Results: The Worst May Be Over



    The results of [GuideStar's] fall fundraising survey may indicate the beginning of an economic recovery in the nonprofit sector. For the first time in two years, there’s cause for cautious optimism about the sector and the economy.

    More than 2,300 public charities and 160 private foundations responded to our fall 2010 fundraising survey, which we conducted with [GuideStar] partners in the National Research Collaborative - the National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS), the Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP), the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, Blackbaud, and the Foundation Center.

    Respondents were asked to compare their organizations’ total contributions in the first nine months of 2010 to contributions received during the same period in 2009. The majority of people taking the survey serve as CEO, director of finance, or directors of development.

    Some highlights include:

    • The proportion of participants reporting decreased contributions dropped 14 percent, from 51 percent in October 2009 to 37 percent in October 2010.
    • The percentage who said contributions had increased grew 13 percent, from 23 percent in October 2009 to 36 percent in October 2010.
    • For the eighth consecutive year, a majority (68 percent) of participants reported increased demand for their organizations’ services.


    Source: GuideStar

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