Nonprofit Learning Lab publishes a guide to hiring a nonprofit consultant, and the ten questions at the center of it are good ones. They’re what I’d want a small organization to ask before it hands anyone a login, a budget line, or a donor list. So here they are, asked of us and answered as honestly as I can manage.
Ask them of every consultant you talk to. If someone’s answers come out smoother than these, that’s worth noticing too.
1. What problem are we trying to solve?
This one’s yours, not ours, and it matters most. If you can say the problem in one sentence, the rest of the hire gets easier. “We don’t know which donors stopped giving” is a sentence. “We need to get better with data” isn’t one yet.
If you can’t get to the sentence, we can help you find it. That’s often what a first conversation is for. But sometimes the sentence turns out to be about staffing, or a board disagreement, or a program question, and a data firm is the wrong hire. We’d rather say so on the first call than invoice you for finding it out.
2. What experience do you have?
I spent more than 20 years doing analytics at a Fortune 100 company. That means I’ve cleaned more data than anyone should, and I’ve built reports for people who had about ninety seconds to read them. Before that I was a wedding photographer and then a project manager, which taught me deadlines and how to talk to people who are stressed.
What I won’t pretend: VCA is a young firm with a short client list. If you ask how short, I’ll tell you. Our nonprofit work so far has gone deep rather than wide: CRM management (Bloomerang and Little Green Light), donation pages, event, auction, and raffle forms, attendee check-in and breakout systems, email list cleanup, QR codes, and board reporting.
3. What services do you offer?
Three kinds of work. Data means CRM reviews, cleanup, analysis, and reporting. Web means sites, donation and registration pages, and the forms behind them. Then there’s both together, which is the work we like best, because a donation form and the database it feeds are really one system.
What we don’t do is just as useful to know. We don’t write your appeals or your grants. We don’t do fundraising strategy, board facilitation, or video. And we’re not accountants, and we don’t pretend to be: we can track your donations, but we can’t keep your books. When you need those, we’ll point you to people who do them well, and we’ll build the lists, pages, and send calendar that help their work land.
4. How do you approach problems?
We look at what you already have before buying anything. Most small organizations are sitting on a CRM, an email platform, and a Google account that can all do more than they’re being asked to. Our default is to build on those, inside your accounts, rather than add a tool you’ll pay for every month.
The other thing: we move fast, sometimes too fast. Someone who refers clients to us told me, kindly, that our speed and turnaround can be scary. Fair. If you need time to think, say so and we’ll slow down. Fast only helps if you can keep up with what got built.
5. How do you measure success?
Before we start, we write down what “done” means in plain language, and you agree to it. That sounds bureaucratic. It’s the single best protection a small engagement has, for both of us.
For data work, success usually looks like a question you can answer afterward that you couldn’t before. What did the year-end appeal raise, separate from everything else that came in that month? Which donors gave last year and not this year? If we can’t name the question, we haven’t scoped the work yet.
6. Can you share case studies or references?
Yes, with one rule. The case studies on our site are anonymized, because no client gets named in public without saying yes in writing. References are different. A client who’s agreed to talk to you will take your call, by name, and tell you what working with us was actually like, including the parts that were slow.
7. Who will be working with our team?
Me. I’m your contact from the first call to the last invoice. The rest of the team is on our About page, and if anyone else touches your work, you’ll know who and why before it happens. If we ever bring in outside help, that person signs a data-handling agreement first. Your donor list doesn’t travel without paperwork.
8. What’s included in the scope and cost?
Our prices are published on our Services page, which is less common in this field than it should be. Reviews and analyses are fixed-price. Retainers cost the same for everyone, and nonprofits get a lower hourly rate against them.
“Additional costs” usually means software. If a project needs something you’d have to buy, we’ll say so before you agree to anything, along with what it costs and what the free alternative gives up. We don’t take affiliate or referral fees from any tool we recommend, so a recommendation is only ever a recommendation.
9. What will you need from our organization?
More than you’d guess, so it’s worth knowing up front. Access, mostly: logins shared through a password manager instead of email, and an export of whatever data the project touches. An hour with the person who actually does the data entry, because they know things about your records nobody else does. And someone who can make a decision when we hit a fork, because there’s always a fork.
The most common delay in our work isn’t the work. It’s waiting on a login. Once a contract is signed, we send a short onboarding form that collects all of it at once, so nobody spends three weeks chasing it by email.
10. How will this build long-term capacity?
Everything we build lives in your accounts, under your logins, on your organization’s own Drive. If we disappeared tomorrow, you’d still have all of it, plus written notes on how it works. The test I use: could a new volunteer run this next year without calling me?
Some clients keep us on a retainer anyway, because they’d rather spend their hours on the mission than on the database. That’s a fine reason. It should be a choice you make, though, not a dependency we built.
One more that isn’t on the list
Ask what happens if it isn’t working. Our answer: tell me. A scope can change, a project can pause, and an engagement can end early without anyone pretending it went great. Small organizations don’t have money to spend on a consultant they’ve stopped trusting, and we don’t want to be one.
If you’re about to hire anyone, start with the Nonprofit Learning Lab guidebook. It has a scope-of-work template, interview questions, and a scoring matrix, which is more structure than most small organizations bring to a hire this size. Then write your one sentence. Then make some calls.