Guest bloggers, Julia Reich, a designer and brand strategist at Stone Soup Creative and Marlene Oliveira, a copywriter and communications consultant at moflow and founder of the Nonprofit MarCommunity recap their #15NTC session on nonprofit consulting.
At last month’s Nonprofit Technology Conference, we hosted a session on making the move from in-house nonprofit professional to consultant serving the sector. During the session, we combined very short presentations on specific topics with speed-dating style opportunities to ask questions, matching groups with a mix of established consultants in the room. Here are some of our tips and takeaways!
Think about the financial aspects:
- Have six months to one year of your living expenses saved up; leave yourself room to learn, take risks and be selective about clients.
- Be prepared to invest in your business: infrastructure, systems, marketing, professional development and professional services.
Working from home successfully is about structure and boundaries:
- Get ready at the start of the day as if you’d be going into the office.
- Keep typical business hours to be available and responsive to your clients when they need you.
- Have a dedicated place in your home for “work” – even if it’s a closet. Don’t work from your couch.
Establishing a niche/your brand:
- When it comes to figuring out your brand, start somewhere and fine-tune/adapt along the way.
- To find your starting point, ask yourself these four questions:
- What expertise and specific services would you like to offer?
- What sub-sectors would you like to serve?
- Who is your ideal client?
- How can you bring your personality into your brand?
What to shoot for in marketing:
- Position yourself as an expert.
- A lot of marketing is about building relationships. You need to stay in front of people and be top of mind when they have a need for your services.
- Choose marketing strategies that are so natural to you that the lines between “marketing” and “work” are blurred.
How to price your services:
- Charge professional fees for professional services.
- When deciding what to charge, consider the value you offer, your experience and specialty, timelines, research involved, etc.
- Avoid hourly rates in favor of project fees and retainers.
- Clients want all three of these things: fast, good, and cheap. Two is all they get.
For a more comprehensive list of the tips we shared – and the consultants who shared them – along with our recommended books, blogs and other resources, check out the session’s collaboration notes.
Now, over to you: are you considering the switch to consulting? What questions do you have about consulting to nonprofit organizations? Are you already a consultant? Share your tips below.
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