"Have the consultant do it"?

The title of this post is written with tongue in cheek, but it does get to what's often a fine line between consulting and contracting. Even when talking with other nonprofit consultants, we don't always agree on where we should draw the line between performing tasks for our client organizations and empowering them to perform these tasks themselves.

As a prime example, when I started as an independent consultant, back in December 2003, one of the main things I did was grant proposal writing. Now, I will rarely accept those types of assignments. Basically, over time, I came to realize that the client was better served by my helping them gain the capacity to write grants in-house. One of my favorite things to do is when I teach workshops on proposal writing (next workshop is August 24 in Santa Cruz!).

Of course, there are times when it's quite legitimate to hire a contract proposal writer to supplement an organization's own capacity, and I'm happy to assist in those situations. But I believe that fund development is so central to any nonprofit organization's survival, that outsourcing it should never be more than a step along the way to building their own abilities.

There are other tasks, however, that are should almost always be outsourced. Among these, in my opinion, is facilitating a strategic planning session. Your organization may have leaders with excellent facilitation skills, but at a planning retreat they are needed as participants. A good facilitator should be neutral, and not a part of any political dynamic that exists in the group, or have a stake in any decisions that the group makes. A good facilitator empowers everybody in the room to speak and be heard, something that's not always comfortable or possible when there's a boss-worker dynamic present.

So, the next time you're in a meeting, and you hear the words, "We'll have a consultant do it," think carefully about what you are asking a consultant to do, and whether it is truly empowering and adding to your capacity to meet your mission.

Welcome to Capaciteria

Capaciteria? Yes, Capaciteria, "Serving up peer-rated nonprofit capacity resources 24/7." According the site's home page, Capaciteria is...

... a comprehensive, searchable database directory of administrative resources that help nonprofits leverage their own capacity. It promotes peer review because MEMBERS can comment on and rate individual resource links as well as add useful new links.

The site appears to still be very new (although I suspect it's been up a while) and some of the categories don't have much information in them yet, but if enough users join and input their links and rate the other links, this could be a very useful site, given time.

Right now, you can still search, or dig through the directory, and find some great resources, but the concept of the site is that each resource will eventually carry a rating. The ratings will come from us, the end users, who are ourselves experts in the nonprofit field.

Whether or not Capaciteria becomes an indispensable resource, or just another e-ghost town, will depend entirely on whether or not users are enticed to contribute. I'll withhold my feelings on its odds of success for a while, watch it grow (or not), and see what happens. Meanwhile, check it out and let me know what you think.