Editors’ Note: Leah Reisman introduces some of the major themes from her new book, How Consultants Shape Nonprofits (Stanford University Press/ SSIR Books, 2024).

Consultants are everywhere in the nonprofit sector. Ranging from multinational organizations like the Bridgespan Group to tiny single-person shops, nonprofits and philanthropic foundations of all kinds hire consultants to solve organizational problems, plan for the future, navigate transitions, and, sometimes, validate executives’ ideas. Despite their ubiquity, however, consultants and their work for nonprofits are poorly understood.

My recent book, How Consultants Shape Nonprofits, takes a deep dive into these organizations, focusing on consultants’ day-to-day work and their influence on nonprofits. Via 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork and 180 interviews with consultants, their clients, and funders, the book shows that many consultants to nonprofits, especially those in smaller firms, engage in what I call empathetic customization – they customize their methods, including the conceptual frameworks they bring to bear on nonprofit models and the ways they muster data in their work, to fit their clients’ particularities and specific circumstances. They do this because many consultants think of themselves as “nonprofit people” and have backgrounds in nonprofit or public sector work, so they are eager to identify with and display sensitivity to their clients’ circumstances. This approach helps make consultant advice actionable for nonprofit clients, but it can also lead to profit problems for consultants, as customizing processes often leads consultants to do more work than they are compensated to perform.

However, it’s important to contextualize this story within the history of a growing and evolving field. Management consulting first spread to the nonprofit sector from the corporate world in the 1950s. This process is best described by historian Christopher McKenna in his 2006 book, The World’s Newest Profession – led by the firm Cresap, McCormick, and Paget, corporate management consulting firms began marketing their services to large nonprofits like universities and hospitals, recognizing the nonprofit sector as an untapped source of potential clients. By applying similar processes, diagnosing similar problems, and offering similar sets of recommendations to a range of prominent nonprofits, the firm contributed to the perception of nonprofit organizations as a distinct and coherent sector of organized activity. Later, consulting activity grew in the nonprofit sector as particular areas of practice (namely healthcare) became more and more corporatized.

These beginnings suggest that the findings about nonprofit consulting that I describe in the book (which is based on research conducted between 2017 and 2019) may be a more contemporary situation, as the market for consulting to nonprofits grew and diversified. The following (edited and paraphrased) excerpt from How Consultants Shape Nonprofits sheds light on this trajectory – note that in the book I use pseudonyms in lieu of names for all consulting organizations and individuals:

The current state of consulting firms that serve nonprofit organizations may be a fairly recent phenomenon, a product of a maturing field. A senior executive in a large firm explained that the field was quite young—while corporate management consulting began in the 1920s, it wasn’t until the 1990s that consulting to nonprofits expanded beyond individual independent consultants. In this context, consultants described a field in which practice is shifting rapidly. As a consultant from a small firm put it, early in her tenure at the firm she “felt like we were ignoring our clients’ needs in writing plans.” She explained that while she and her teammates would follow their agreed-upon project structures, what they produced did not reflect the dynamic nature of nonprofits: “organizations are messy and changing throughout planning; we’re more in tune with that [now].” She suggested that the firm’s work used to be more driven by standard process and less attuned to the complexity of client nonprofits’ work. This changed, she added, as more senior staff with nonprofit backgrounds joined the firm. She explained that as the small firm became more attuned to building consensus and to the complexity of client nonprofits’ needs, consultants started providing extra work beyond its contracted amount. This could take the form of adding additional meetings and brainstorming sessions with clients, which created financial problems: “That’s how we end up outside our scope and losing money, because we’re willing to engage on a deeper level.” With a shift toward process-oriented work came difficulties related to balancing consulting firms’ budgets.

Members of large nonprofit specialist firms told a similar story of early naivete replaced, over time, by appreciation for the nonprofit sector’s unique characteristics. A senior consultant in a large firm that spun off from a corporate management consulting firm explained that early in the firm’s existence, its model revolved around importing tools from its corporate parent company into the nonprofit sector. In his words, “we used to think that you can substitute nonprofits for companies, and basically, it’s the same thing.”…However, over time, firm members realized that this approach was insufficient: “We’ve learned it is not as straightforward. Not every tool translates well, and the way we tackle social sector problems looks different.” The firm adjusted its approach to address the many distinct elements and actors that drive problems and solutions in the nonprofit sector.

Another team member explained how this adjustment manifested in WorldAdvisors’ practice: “The work used to be much more consistent—bringing the rigor of for-profit work to nonprofits.” However, over time WorldAdvisors diversified its services and created intra-firm practice areas, to provide specialized content expertise to the nonprofit sector. Another consultant suggested a different explanation for the diversification of services among large firms—that they were forced to create more modular offerings during the 2008 financial recession, because funder clients were not willing to accommodate high-priced consulting engagements at that time. She explained diversification as a self-preservation strategy in the context of economic downturn. A senior consultant from a large firm suggested that this trajectory, a shift over time away from corporate standards, may characterize the field as a whole. “The field has grown and become more sophisticated over the past couple decades. People appreciate in the social sector that we should care about what works [and be more rigorous about our approaches].” 

While this post-hoc reasoning should be taken with a grain of salt, it may be that in the early years of the consulting to nonprofits field, some consulting firms were less attuned to the complexity of nonprofit practice and how it differs from that of for-profit corporations. This led, in consultants’ telling, to firms directly importing tools from the corporate sector into nonprofits, and solutions that, while mismatched to the specificities of nonprofit needs and the complexity of work in the nonprofit sector, mirrored the work of high-status large consulting firms.

Since that time, the field of consulting to nonprofits appears to have grown, diversified, and become more sophisticated. Some consultants have disabused themselves of the notion that tools from the corporate sector can be applied directly and consistently to nonprofits, developed an appreciation of the distinctions between corporate and nonprofit work, and specialized by investing in sector-specific expertise and staff with nonprofit sector backgrounds.

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While, taken at face value, this trajectory appears to be largely positive for the nonprofit sector, it also has unintended consequences. Interestingly, because corporate consulting firms and larger nonprofit specialists like WorldAdvisors are the most visible providers in the field, these firms still-more-standardized processes are often considered superior by nonprofits (and their boards), regardless of the fact that these approaches are, in consultants’ own telling, often less effective in serving nonprofit organizations. Applying one-size-fits-all corporate strategies to nonprofits risks pushing the nonprofit sector toward corporate practices. However, this tactic also decreases the likelihood that consultant recommendations are actually useful to and implementable by nonprofit clients.

But sector-specific strategies and a commitment to nonprofit uniqueness can also have hidden downsides. Despite their well-intentioned drive to customize their work to client specificities, in How Consultants Shape Nonprofits I show that the assumptions baked into consultants’ models and approaches lead them to reinforce and re-embed some of the nonprofit sector’s most durable problems and hierarchies in the course of their work with client nonprofits.

As they work to help their clients thrive within the idiosyncrasies of the current nonprofit sector, consultants often conflate best practices with common practices when comparing their clients to similar peer organizations, reinforcing conventional approaches to social-purpose work. And in efforts to build buy-in into their clients’ plans, they consistently prioritize the opinions of people with power over nonprofits—funders, executives, and powerful partners—over the opinions of people over whom nonprofits have power—such as lower-level staff and communities. They do so for both strategic reasons—by conflating fundability with feasibility and using strategic plans as fundraising tools—and for practical ones, given that the perspectives of powerful individuals are often easier to access and seem more immediately consequential than, for example, community voices. In doing so, consultants re-embed pernicious power hierarchies between funding organizations, nonprofits, and communities into their client organizations’ plans. In endeavoring to help their nonprofit clients move forward (and, in doing so, maintain consultants’ reputations and revenue streams), consultants paradoxically run the risk of doing the reverse—reproducing conventional ideas and problems in the nonprofit sector, rather than directing nonprofits to new ideas or those from the business world. Examples of the conventional, problematic ideas that consultants inadvertently reproduce in their work and that I unpack in the book include funders’ influence over nonprofits’ ideas and activities, a preference for decisive, hierarchical leadership, and defining successful nonprofits by the state of their finances, rather than their social impact. Common practices aren’t always bad practices, of course—but an over-commitment to nonprofit uniqueness can restrict opportunities for innovation and cross-sector learning.

These findings have important implications for nonprofits and consultants alike; they provide watchwords for nonprofits in considering and vetting potential consultants, and a framework for consultants to reflect on and evaluate their work and impact. While consultants can be critical partners to nonprofits navigating the myriad challenges of organizational life, a commitment to reflection on practice and awareness of both the affordances and unintended consequences of consultants’ approaches are critical to productive partnerships.

-Leah Reisman

Leah Reisman is a Program Officer at the Barra Foundation in Philadelphia, and previously served as Health & Wellness Director at Puentes de Salud. She is the author of numerous articles, and of How Consultants Shape Nonprofits: Shared Values, Unintended Consequences (Stanford University Press/SSIR Books, 2024). Leah holds a courtesy appointment as a Research Fellow at the John Brademas Center at NYU and received her Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton University in 2020.