 And thank you everybody else here on the call for being interested in philanthropy force and how we might help people find the right consultant for their nonprofit. So who am I? I'm Sean Hale. I've been doing nonprofit administration nuts and bolts for more than 20 years now by day. I'm a consultant now for the past year and a half. I help nonprofits build strong administrative functions. So finance, HR, IT, those sorts of things. And I'm also the co-founder of philanthropy force. And that's a tool that helps nonprofits find their next consultant online. We already have hundreds of consultants listed and it's free to nonprofits. And well, let's dig in. How do we find the right consultant for your nonprofit? Cause that is a question that we get a lot from nonprofits and from foundation leaders. And when they're not telling us that they want to have more options for the nonprofits, they are telling, and because they're not getting enough through word of mouth, they're asking us how do they vet their candidate pools so they can really be sure they're getting the right match? And folks, one quick note. You don't need to worry about taking notes today. If you don't want to, we're going to be publishing all the content from today's presentation in a series of three articles on the philanthropy force website very soon. And I'm happy to send you an advanced copy of those articles. Just send me an email. My email address will pop up at the end. And I'd be happy to share that with you if you don't want to take extensive notes. And I do want to do just a really quick legal disclaimer and basically please don't sue us. This is good general information, but a key component of that can be bringing in a professional if you want to make sure that you kind of identify and manage exceptions to that. For example, in most nonprofits, a margarita machine in the office on Fridays might be a great way to boost staff morale, but it might really backfire at an organization like Mothers Against Drunk Driving. So one of the things we're going to skip over is this poll that's really for a nonprofit. So it's everybody here as a consultant. So why would a nonprofit want to move beyond word of mouth? Well, one reason is money, right? If you're going to spend, you know, $5,000, $10,000, $50,000, you want to get a great match, right? For your nonprofit, not just a match. And why wouldn't we want to just keep going with a friend's reference? Well, a good match from your friend might not be the best match for your nonprofit. Every nonprofit is unique and has unique needs. And there is a nice, there's a beautiful sea and ocean of consultants out there. And so you can, with the right search, find some, several that are highly tuned to what your nonprofit really needs. And some of you might be wondering over the course of this presentation, well, why would a nonprofit want to do all this extra work, right? Because like doing vetting and thinking about these stuff, instead of just going with that recommendation for my friend, that's extra work. Well, there are a lot of reasons. And some of those you'll see woven throughout the presentation. But near the top of the list is that human beings, so all of us, we have a lot of biases. And those biases all too often lead us to make poor choices. For example, we human beings, we tend to favor the person that gives us warm fuzzies. And warm fuzzies, that is a great criteria for picking friends and for picking romantic partners. But warm fuzzies are usually not the best criteria to use for a match for a consulting gig, unless maybe it's a fundraiser. But sometimes even then, that should just be one criteria among many. And so we have good processes, like the processes we're gonna talk about today to help us acknowledge and reduce our bias. So we can make good decisions when we're out there looking for the right consultant. And those making the decisions that way, using these tools is gonna give you great fruits in the long run on your searches and on your consulting engagements. So first step, defining your project, right? And by answering questions like, who, what, when, where, why, and how, that's gonna increase your odds of actually finding the right consultant when you know the answers to that in advance. And PS on larger projects, think about hiring a consultant to actually help you figure out all the project details. You might not be very well versed in strategic plans and even what goes into making an awesome strategic plan. And so a good consultant, you can bring them in for a limited basis to help you design that and make sure you're asking all the right questions internally and to help you really understand the problem and the opportunity. And because very often, the problem or the opportunity end up being somewhat different from what you thought originally when you engage somebody who's living this, who's working in that area day to day. The next thing you wanna do is to dive into the project details, right? So if you're a nonprofit, it really helps to start off with asking yourself about the kind of smart goals for this particular engagement, right? Specific, what is it that we'd want to accomplish and why is this goal important? M, measurable, right? How much, how will we measure success, right? Is success a finished website? Is it a 50 page plan? Is it mission clarity? A stands for achievable. Is this whole project, is it realistic? And have we accounted for things like financial and other constraints? R stands for relevant, right? Is this goal consistent with the nonprofit's mission, values, and strategic plan? And finally, T, time-bound. When are we supposed to finish this thing? Of course, activities, you wanna start naming what activities might go into this. It doesn't have to be perfect. You may not know all the activities up front, but start to name those as you're building out your kind of project description, your budget, right? How much money do you anticipate this is gonna cost? And have you done a little bit of research to get a sense of what it might cost? Financing, this is a really important detail for you and also for the consultants who you start engaging with to be able to communicate. Is the financing already secured? Is it partially raised? Is none of it raised? That's part of good communication with everybody. Timeline, right? What are the major dates, the major milestones in this project? Do you have a hard and fast date that you need something delivered on July 1st or is December okay? Organizational roles. Knowing and naming and being really clear about who has decision-making power? Who has advisory power? Who's gonna be the point of contact for the consultants? Things like that. Naming as much of that as possible in advance. And also what is the consultants role? Because different consultants bring different things to the table. Are you looking for an advisor? Some of them do analysis or research for you? Someone to diagnose? Someone to propose solutions? Someone to implement solutions? Something else being clear about that role can help you find the right consultant and help also that consultant find you. And folks, the list on this page, it's not comprehensive. You don't always need every single thing on this page. And there are probably things that you might need that aren't on this page. For example, I get hired to provide ongoing financial advisory to nonprofits, among other things that I do. And a traditional timeline really doesn't come into play a whole lot. There's a monthly block of time that I dedicate to each of those clients. And folks, as a nonprofit, you wanna share these details freely internally and also when you're reaching out to applicants. Because these are the kinds of things that help those great matches happen when you start saying who you are and what it is you're looking for. You also want to define in advance what criteria you're looking for in a consultant, right? And you wanna do this before you begin publicizing or doing the search, because otherwise, how do you know what you're looking for, right? And it might include things like skills and credentials, experience in the field, number of years of consulting, emotional intelligence, personal lived experience can be very, very important, right? It might be a critical ingredient for this consultant to have meaningful lived experience with the population that you serve. Affinity for your mission, right? Do they, you need somebody who can demonstrate that they understand or maybe even love and articulate or can at least articulate your mission. How important might that be that they be deep into the K-12 space or whatever your issue or area is? Location, must they be local? And if so, why? Or is a regional or national consultant okay? If you cast the net bigger, you can have more opportunities to find somebody who's an awesome match, but sometimes you truly need somebody who understands your community, even things at the neighborhood level sometimes. Can they do the work remotely? Does it need to be on site? You might need somebody who plays well with others. Sometimes that's less important, but sometimes it's critical and forthrightness. Do you need somebody who's gonna speak hard truths when necessary or is it okay to have somebody who might sugarcoat the message? Different projects are gonna call for different skills in different areas. And I wanna pause here and make a special note about unicorns because unicorns are magical, beautiful creatures. They have magical powers. They perform miracles. And sometimes I've seen over and over again actually how nonprofits sometimes expect to get a unicorn. And that's totally a reasonable expectation if you as a nonprofit have a magical treasure chest, right? And yes, you can hire a unicorn consultant, somebody who's gonna check all the boxes and does all the hard work for you and it's perfect in every way. But if that doesn't happen to describe your nonprofit, be sure to prioritize your criteria. That's gonna be the case for 99% of us, right? You wanna know what criteria are required to have and which ones are preferred, just nice to have. And you wanna do this now before you meet any consultants, before you even reach out to anybody because doing this is also gonna help you to acknowledge, manage and minimize bias. And it's also gonna help you to manage your own expectations. So a key tool in the search for your next consultant is the evaluation matrix. And this is kind of like a scorecard, right? It helps you to compare apples to apples because this helps you to use the same criteria for each candidate and thus helps you to minimize bias, right? Because we should plan to have multiple applicants. Now, some of you might be asking yourselves, why would we wanna minimize bias, right? Or remember, we humans are biased and earlier I talked about that person who gives us warm fuzzies or maybe we'll wanna, we also have a tendency to pick the person who we wanna have a coffee with because they're just so fun and exciting. Too often, we humans also have more serious unconscious bias as well. And research has shown that we often judge people unfairly because of such things as physical appearance, age, gender, national origin. So those are all reasons why we want to take these extra steps to reduce the bias so we can actually get the right consultant end up in a process where we get the right consultant in the room with us, right? And again, we wanna do this now because after we start seeing applications, bias can start creeping in, for example. Maybe you notice that one of the consultants went to the same university you did, or maybe they went to a rival university. That can have unconscious or sometimes even conscious bias, right? And creating these things together, right? Your consultant criteria, your matrix and also developing your interview questions can help make sure that you are minimizing your bias and that you are kind of treating apples to apples with these consultants as much as possible. So this evaluation matrix, it might look like the image that you're seeing on the screen right now. This is one that we've created. I'm happy to email it to you and we'll be posting it on Plantherforce shortly, but I can email it to you today if you like. And the basic idea is that across the top row, you're gonna be putting in your, plugging in your required skills and experience, also your preferred skills and experience. Along the left-hand side, you're gonna plug in the different candidates who've applied and you're gonna be using a number system to help you really confirm which of these consultants has the required skills and experience, those who do, great. Now we'll look at your preferred, you move forward in the process and we're gonna look at your preferred skills and experience and okay, we'll end up with hopefully two or three or four that we're gonna move on to the interview stage. So that's kind of how that works and we're happy to provide more information on that, digging into that a little bit more offline. Or during question and answer. The next step in your process, and again, this is before you go out and launch your search, is getting buy-in from your stakeholders, right? This includes your program participants, right? The people that you serve, especially if they're gonna be involved in this project, you wanna get them involved because the more that they have a real voice, you're gonna get better program design and better participation from them. And also you wanna be sure that you get buy-in from your key decision makers, right? Whether it's board or executive director or key staff, funders. The last thing you wanna do is spend dozens and dozens and dozens of hours finding the right person and then have a critical decision maker deny support at the last minute, right? And I'm not telling you necessarily need 100% buy-in or 100% consensus, but at minimum, you need a critical mass and you need to know the way of the land on these things. A lot of people ask, should we do a request for proposals or not? And the answer really is it depends. And more often you'll see that with bigger projects where more details required, more formality, budgets of 50,000 and above. However, it's really important that you keep in mind as a nonprofit that requiring a full RFP can create a real barrier to entry. Many of the most qualified and most experienced consultants will not participate in an open RFP process. Why you might ask yourselves? Well, for one, it's a big time investment and these folks, they don't necessarily wanna compete against dozens and dozens of other proposals because that means there's a low chance of payoff. Also, if you as a nonprofit are allowing dozens of proposals and you're just kind of broadcasting this opportunity everywhere, that signals to them very often that you haven't done your homework to find good potential matches, right? This also usually means that there's not a discovery process for the consultant. So it's hard for the consultants to understand your nonprofit, your unique challenges and your unique opportunities. And finally, why do so many experienced qualified consultants ignore RFPs because the winner is frequently the lowest bidder rather than the best match? And so why bother to put your best foot forward if the job is gonna go to the lowest bidder anyway? So what can you do instead? Instead of an RFP, if you have a big project consider doing a targeted approach. Identify four, five, six consultants who look like a strong match. So do research upfront and we'll talk about this a little bit more in a minute. Do some research upfront, find four or five, six good candidates, reach out to them personally and share those project details with them, right? And you can do it by email. You don't need a beautiful printed presentation like on the screen, email's great. Invite this person to be one of a handful of hand-picked candidates to put in a proposal. An approach like this it's gonna get you greater appreciation from the consultants. It's gonna start to build a positive relationship with them from day one. It's gonna be better for your reputation as a nonprofit and it's gonna get you more participation from those highly experienced candidates and ultimately better matches. So let's talk about the search, right? We've put all those other things in place. We have all of our ducks in our there we're ready to dig in on the search. And the best thing I can tell you to start off with is to cast a big net. If you wanna get the best candidate need to start with a big pool of candidates. So you have that best choice, a best opportunity of getting an excellent match. We're gonna skip this little poll here and talk about nonprofit consultant directories. And here in Texas, we don't have a regional one. A lot of other states do. I know there's one in Colorado and there are some in a lot of other states have one associated with their state nonprofit association. There are also some national ones I wanna mention really quick. Philanthrophorus, full disclosure. I'm a co-founder of Philanthrophorus. You also have CGT and non-profitists. All these reach out to a national audience and those are all good places to cast your net and see who you can get into your, who might be a good match for your nonprofit, right? Where else might you search? Professional groups are a great spot, right? You have informal professional groups on Facebook and LinkedIn. Some of them are organized by specialty and others by region, but that can be a great place for you to reach out and get the word out. You also have formal professional groups, things like the association of fundraising professionals or the grant professionals association. Those are great places for you to find good candidates. And of course, there are your personal networks, right? So yours as a nonprofit professional, your staffs, your board, your stakeholders. You wanna be sharing this opportunity with all of them if what you're doing is trying to build a big pool of candidates. So now you have your big pool of candidates. How are you gonna narrow the field, right? And folks, I wanna give you a special tip here, pro tip. If you are especially serious about reducing bias, you're gonna have a special person in your organization who's gonna help you out at this point. Before you ever look at a single application, you're gonna have somebody at your organization who's not otherwise associated with the search, print out all the resumes, take a big marker and cross out the names and the addresses, the school that they attended and any other information that might generate bias and that really isn't relevant to, which one is the better match for your organization? Because again, you may have feelings about unconscious or unconscious about people with certain names, people who live on a certain side of town, people who might have gone to a certain university. And so by crossing those things out, it increases opportunities of getting the right match and this unconscious bias not finding its way into our processes. And so you're gonna use the matrix that you created to screen those resumes, right? See who has the required criteria, move them along to the next stage and you see which of those remaining ones have a good amount of the preferred criteria and among those you're gonna advance two, three, four, five to the interview phase. So now we're at the interview phase and to get the best match, you really do wanna continue to compare apples to apples. You wanna continue to be mindful about unconscious bias and you're gonna have a matrix in questions for the interview stage as well, very similar to the matrix that you developed for the resume review stage. And you'll want to, again, if you're really serious about minimizing bias and getting the best candidate, you'll use the same panel for every interview, right? The same people, because if somebody's in like half the interviews and not the other half, how are they gonna really be helpful comparing apples to apples if they've only seen half the apples, right? So you'll wanna get the time on everybody's calendars well in advance and continue to use the same matrix, the same questions for every candidate. Here's another quick pro tip for you. Ideally, you'll get an HR professional to help you design interview questions so that you can avoid illegal, irrelevant or unhelpful questions like, when were you born? Cause that can lead to age discrimination or have you ever been arrested? Because arrested is not the same as a conviction and so many arrests are not even relevant to the job. Questions like, are you a US citizen? Which can lead to discrimination based on national origin? Questions like, do you have a disability? That can get you into trouble with the ADA or family status, right? Are you pregnant? Things like that. There are those questions in many more you never wanna ask, especially in an interview. And an HR professional can help you avoid those. And if there is some element in there that is important to you, to help you tease out what's important there and get that into your process rather than the discriminatory kinds of questions. Like maybe you need somebody who can be available to take a call at any time. Well, great. That's the question you need to ask. Not, do you have children? Another pro tip for you. And this is also a very, very strong request. Speak frankly about the organization's weaknesses and challenges because the consultant's gonna figure it out sooner or later anyway. So what happens if you don't tell them up front? It's gonna damage trust. And you might not end up with the right match, right? And so your consultant might walk away once they find these secrets out. They might walk away halfway through the engagement because they don't have the skill for now an engagement that's changed because it involves firefighting or they might not have the enthusiasm to do it even if they have the skills or they might walk away because you broke trust with them and they're gonna think what other surprises are coming for me, right? If you're still not sure about whether or not it's a good idea to lay all the cards out there, especially with your finalist consultants. Think about the time that this has happened, I think just about everybody, the times where you or a friend went into a new employment situation and whether it was day one, week one or month one, you found some ugly skeletons in the closet. How did you feel? What did that do for your warm fuzzies about that employment situation? So final steps, right? So we narrowed it down to one, maybe two candidates at this point, right? Because we went through the interviews, we did a great job. So we wanna check references on folks, right? And so go back to that same metrics and you're gonna change that out for questions you wanna ask the person's references, standardized questions again, so we can do apples to apples. And ideally you'll have the consultant give you references from similar organizations and or similar projects, background checks. You only wanna do those if they're necessary. And sometimes those are necessary, right? If they're gonna be dealing with HIPAA protected data or financial data, they're gonna be dealing with vulnerable populations like children, then yes, by all means to a background check. But it's really important to consider the context of that background check, right? For example, let's say the background check comes back on somebody, criminal background check and turns out that they have a 20 year old DWI. And this is somebody that you're thinking about hiring for bookkeeping support. There's no relationship between that DWI 20 years ago and then being able to do a good job as a bookkeeper. However, a DWI from two months ago for somebody you're considering to be a driver's safety instructor, that could be really relevant. So again, think through the context really clearly. Oh, there's some kind of conviction here. They're not qualified because too often good people get left out because of not having really good consideration at that stage. Now it's time for the contract, right? Because you've got your finalist, you checked the references, now it's crystal clear this is the right person for you. This is a big milestone in your project, congratulations. There's still more work to do, right? You still have the engagement and how you as a nonprofit engage with a consultant is also gonna be important, right? So you as a nonprofit, you wanna be sure that you maintain timely thorough communication that you continue to speak honestly with them, especially around things, weaknesses that might be relevant to the project. You wanna be welcoming to this consultant and you wanna be sure to treat them with dignity and respect. And I kind of have to say these things because sometimes nonprofits forget them. And of course, one more thing here. Please remember to send a brief thank you note to all the applicants just to, you know, close up the circle of communication to let them know that you have found somebody, thank you for applying that kind of thing. You wanna do this because it's good courtesy of course but it also it helps your reputation as a professional and as a nonprofit. The consultant is a lot more likely to speak better about you in the community. So that's important. And they're a lot more likely to apply for future opportunities, right? Because so many of them, they might not have been the right match for this particular gig. They might be the right match for the next one and they probably have friends who might be good matches for the next one. And so you wanna maintain that goodwill all around. One last slide here before we wrap up. Does your organization value justice, equity, diversity and inclusion? Or maybe you're intrigued by all the studies that show how diverse teams get better results or maybe you feel strongly like we do at philanthropy force that everyone deserves a seat at the table. If you meet any of those criteria or just are curious, we're gonna be publishing a third article in our series on how to hire the right consultant. This one is written by Sherylen Payton. She's a specialist in diversity, equity and inclusion. And this article is gonna help you intentionally weave justice, equity, diversity and inclusion practices into your next consultant search. And just send me an email and I'm happy to share those articles with you and also the evaluation matrix. And there's my email address, hail at philanthropyforce.org, P-H-I-L-A-N-T-H-R-O-F-O-R-C-E.O-R-G. And hey, I'm done. It's time for questions and answers. So I'm looking at the chat here. Let's see, consultants represent. Yes, knowing your audience is a good thing. Good. Eli jumped out. Got it. Number one question I get from my event attendees is where would I find a consultant who could? Yeah, yeah. Good, good, good. So did we answer everybody's questions? Sarah, Debra? Hi, sorry. I'm trying to think. I'm going back through. I grabbed some notes from some of your points you made earlier, but all of those are like, oh, that's a good point. Oh, I hadn't thought of it that way. And I honestly don't have any follow-up questions on any of them. Wow, thorough presentation. Okay, I can check that box off. This was the world premiere of that presentation. Really? I think it's very complete. Thank you, thank you. See, Debra wrote in the box. Thank you for bringing in DEI and Justice. So relevant. Yes, thank you. Yeah, that was an insight we got early on. We've continued to kind of gather feedback and support from people we've interacted with. And so it's a road for philanthropists, right? I can't tell you that we have figured out the whole thing, but we're certainly trying to weave that into the work that we are doing and help nonprofits weave that into their work as well as they seek to interact with good consultants. Okay. Do we get out early? Am I gonna go have lunch before my next call? Yeah, we can wrap, right? Okay, we'll give, that sounds good to me then. So Sarah, Debra, thank you both for being here today. And I'd be happy to hear from either of you afterwards. So just, yeah, reach out and thank you again. Thank you so much. It was great to meet you. Yeah, bye-bye. Bye.