The Covid pandemic has had dire consequences for the nonprofit world. Streams of earned revenue and government aid have dried up during long lockdowns across America, and philanthropic funding has been insufficient to keep up with continuing needs. As a result, many organizations laid off large portions of their workforces and canceled programs while others exhausted their emergency funds and accumulated debt.
As nonprofits and foundations begin to pick up the pieces, their leaders will probably look to their colleagues, peers, and consultants to help chart a path forward. But are these helpers themselves equipped to help nonprofits recover from the unprecedented tragedy of the pandemic? How must they rethink their strategies to meet the challenges of the day?
I have spent several years studying strategy consultants who focus on nonprofits. Based on my research, here’s where I suggest consultants spend their time.
Help Nonprofits Adopt New Approaches
Nonprofits hire consultants for myriad reasons, such as signaling legitimacy to grant makers, reinforcing leaders’ decisions, or solving problems. In the coming months, it will be the problem-solving role that is most needed.
In my study of strategy consultants, I found that consultants were, in general, deeply committed to customizing their work to their clients’ particular needs. For example, consultants used standard approaches and tools with their clients, but they frequently customized and created new tools to suit clients’ needs and identities.
In a post-Covid reality, consultants’ commitment to customizing their work will be vital. Standard approaches, especially those formulated before the pandemic, may no longer apply to today’s predicaments, especially given our new remote connections and shifted patterns of social interaction. In this situation, responsiveness to nonprofits’ needs will be crucial in justifying investment in consultants and advisers.
Because nonprofits will continue to face the challenge of doing more with less, it will also be critical that consultants make their recommendations detailed enough for nonprofits to readily take action.
However, in my research, I found that some consulting firms stopped short of advising clients on implementation steps, leaving it up to the nonprofits themselves to determine how to put consultants’ recommendations into action. While it is ultimately up to nonprofits whether they adopt consultants’ recommendations, it’s more likely to happen if the clients have detailed plans with which to work.
In practice, this means consultants must translate general recommendations into detailed action plans that specify activities, timelines, roles and responsibilities, and necessary resources. They must also lay the groundwork for success by helping build buy-in with nonprofits’ supporters, staff members, leaders, and others. For example, if a theater is to shift to outdoor-only performances, at what point does it give up its lease? Who is in charge of investigating permits for public parks, and by when must these permits be confirmed? Which longtime donors need to be convinced, and who is in the best position to convince them?
Spread the Knowledge
As we emerge from the pandemic, the need for guidance and professional advice among nonprofit leaders will likely be nearly universal. However, the availability of funding for consultants will probably be constrained. So those of us in the business of giving advice should find ways to help even nonprofits that cannot afford to hire us.
Consultants should seek out strategies to spread the news about promising ideas and models, and journals and periodicals should streamline their processes for sharing information. Grant makers can make a difference by expanding their support to consultants who are producing knowledge that can be shared and by giving them incentives to share findings widely.
An emphasis on disseminating successful strategies does not mean that consultants should compromise on their commitment to customizing.
Consultants can maintain their commitment to customizing work to a nonprofit’s circumstances while also using their unique position — their accumulated experience of work with many distinct organizations in similar situations — to identify insights that are likely to be broadly relevant.
After all, while each nonprofit is indeed unique, many share important similarities related to mission, structure, and funding sources. For example, during the pandemic, some social-service nonprofits tapped funds earmarked for crisis relief to shift their offerings to better address their clients’ needs. A similar approach could now improve how other kinds of nonprofits meet the needs of the people they serve.
Most consultants already rely on insights from their clients in the course of day-to-day work, but many struggle to find the time and resources to share their insights regularly. Grant makers can help address this challenge by building into their awards sufficient funding to enable consultants to share what they learn working with a single grantee with a broader audience, ensuring that the impact of a consultant’s work transcends individual engagements.
Reconsider Old Practices
For many nonprofits, the pandemic-precipitated crisis presents an opportunity — albeit a painful one — for organizations to reimagine what they do and how they do it.
As they work to support nonprofit recovery, consultants should harness their skill in navigating uncertainty to help nonprofits dream about new possibilities. While this is challenging in the context of widespread trauma and mass layoffs, nonprofit staff rarely have the time and distance from their daily work life to dream big.
We should not assume that all organizations should reinvent themselves. We likely still need soup kitchens in their current form, though we learned some new things about mass food distribution in 2020. However, this opportunity for rethinking should not be wasted. With skillful and empathetic facilitation, post-Covid recovery may provide such a precious opportunity.
To do this effectively, though, consultants may need to reconsider some of their own practices. In my research on strategy consultants, I found that even as consultants customized their work to clients’ needs, they also perpetuated conventional approaches by defining common practices as best practices when comparing their clients to peer nonprofits. They also consistently focused client attention on certain variables: mission, organizational structure, networks, and strong leadership.
But focusing on widely used approaches makes it hard to innovate and often masks a fundamental question: Are popular practices still the best way forward?
Indeed, the scale and depth of the pandemic-precipitated crisis suggest that consultants should not assume that old strategies will best support nonprofit recovery. The world in which organizations operate has changed in important ways, with a renewed focus on equity, a surge of digital engagement, and a confounding mix of both yearning for and fear of in-person gathering. How, then, should consultants shift their approaches and messages to meet today’s needs?
First, consultants should recognize the downsides of common approaches. For example, in museums, despite grant makers’ and consultants’ emphasis on the importance of earned revenue for financial health, those museums that relied more heavily on earned revenue likely suffered more in the pandemic than those that relied on contributed revenue. This doesn’t mean that museums shouldn’t diversify their revenue streams, but it does mean that we should critically reflect on conventional wisdom before reproducing it in a postpandemic world,
Indeed, many existing approaches — such as our methods for recruiting board and staff members, creating organizational structures, and making decisions — ought to be re-evaluated to ensure they advance racial equity. Consultants are in an ideal position to facilitate these courageous conversations, re-evaluate past assumptions, and explore alternatives.
Instead of relying on conventional wisdom, consultants might look beyond their traditional networks for new examples.
Consulting is a notoriously relationship-driven profession. Without widely accepted certifications and standards on which to rely, consultants draw on networks of colleagues and clients for legitimacy and to help generate and vet ideas. However, these networks can also limit the ideas to which consultants — and their clients — have access. In helping nonprofits recover, consultants shouldn’t assume that their networks have the answer; they should consider looking further afield.
While busy schedules afford little time for such exploration, during the pandemic, some consultants reported a lull in work as nonprofits’ budgets shrank. They might use some of this time to revise approaches and broaden horizons. Are there international models that merit consideration? Examples from other types of organizations, or other parts of the nonprofit world?
Consultants should, of course, avoid assuming that everything will be different postpandemic or that Covid-era social patterns, such as a preference for digital programs over in-person interactions, will become the new normal. They might look to social science for insight into which social patterns are likely to stick after the pandemic and which may revert (see these examples). It would help, of course, if journal publishers made such work more easily accessible to nonacademics.
A Call to Action
The work ahead for consultants will require herculean effort by already overstretched professionals. Success will require honest communication and strategic collaboration so that consultants, nonprofits, and foundations can work and learn together to jointly identify promising ways forward.
Above all, this call to action underscores just how important professional advisers, facilitators, and strategists are in the work that lies ahead. Courageous and insightful consultants can help the nonprofit world emerge from these crises with new creativity and resilience, and ensure that nonprofits continue to play their vital role in our social fabric.