Sarah Chesemore’s Advice on How to Be a Great Community Consultant
University of Michigan Business School Community Consulting Club
October 25, 2001
Sarah is a Michigan Business School alumna. She is currently based in McKinsey’s Detroit office. She provided observations on nonprofit organizations, advice to Community Consulting members, and insights about McKinsey’s involvement in the nonprofit sector.
Nonprofit organizations have distinctive traits
· Nonprofit organizations should assemble boards of directors whose members offer lots of skills – but they should set boundaries so the board members won’t meddle in organizational operations.
· Each grant provider seems to want the nonprofit to complete a different reporting form. This is a very inefficient system.
· Nonprofit organizations struggle to quantify their impact. It is hard to isolate impact when many variables affect the trajectory of social issues.
· If a nonprofit can afford to pay for consulting services, the consultant should feel comfortable charging a fee, and it should realize that the nonprofit is often willing to pay.
Community Consulting Club should be proactive and inquisitive
· Explore the nonprofit partnership across schools at the University of Michigan.
· Be sure to talk to board members, not just their clients’ executive directors.
· It is critical to figure out the dynamics between the board and management.
· Map out your organization’s funding cycles by source.
· Set up workshops at your client’s site to really get to know what the client’s staff does and to appreciate the complexity of the challenges they face. Use the workshops to build rapport and commitment.
· In your first meeting with your nonprofit client, share in a discussion on all the myths about consultants and nonprofits right away. Get the stereotypes out of the way and laugh about them!
· Designate a team member to make follow up calls once a month after the engagement to keep the client on track and gauge the impact of your project.
· Go to the library and research your client’s industry – it’ll go a long way towards building your credibility.
· Convey to your client how to conduct benchmarking and how to make effective use of industry data.
· Be careful how you convey criticism. Many people in the nonprofit sector are passionate about what they do, get paid little for their efforts, and have few resources at their disposal. Therefore, be careful how you present advice. Take the client’s feelings very seriously. Recognize that the client may have little time to conduct activities that seem like obvious necessities to you.
· Write down the lessons you learned on your project. Pass that information along to the next Michigan team.
Key resources exist to help students learn more about nonprofit issues
· The Foundation Consortium in California uses a coalition approach to secure more foundational funding for capacity-building to support outcome based measurement, strategic panning, and creative financing.
· Outcome-based management centers include SRI International, the Center for Social Policy, The Finance Project, and the Center for Effective Philanthropy.
Community Consulting members expressed an interest in learning more about nonprofit issues
· Outcome measurement
· Social entrepreneurship/social enterprise (Sarah recommends studying Ashoka)
· Encouraging nonprofits to adhere to deadlines and make staff readily available to Community Consulting team members
McKinsey is highly involved in the nonprofit sector
· McKinsey aims deliver “extraordinary impact in communities worldwide.”
· Over 130 McKinsey partners sit on nonprofit boards in North America.
· The nonprofit practice is headquartered in Washington, DC. Each of the firm’s 83 offices does nonprofit work.
· McKinsey leads the Great Lakes Venture Quest program.
· Bill Bradley chairs the firm’s Nonprofit Institute to examine the major nonprofit issues and how McKinsey can have an impact on those issues.
· The McKinsey Quarterly did an anthology in 2000 on nonprofit articles.
· In America, the firm does more nonprofit than public sector work. In Europe and Asia it’s more heavily slanted in the other direction.
· As a staff member, you can dedicate yourself to six months to one year of nonprofit work through the firm’s competitive Community Fellowship. However, do not assume that you can only do nonprofit work at McKinsey. Expect to focus primarily on private sector consulting.
McKinsey consults to a range of local, regional, and global nonprofits. The firm also pursues a wide variety of knowledge management practices, including research into foundation challenges, capacity building, and assistance with k-12 educational management and outcome measurement.
See the McKinsey Quarterly (available online at www.mckinseyquarterly.com) for free copies of the firm’s past studies in a wide variety of industries. If you would like to learn more about McKinsey’s nonprofit involvement, contact Sarah at .
Community Consulting Advice 1 October 26, 2001