#NPCons

Sometimes the voices at play in this sector sound like Gilda Radner’s character, Emily Litella, from the old days of Saturday Night Live. “What’s all this I hear about abundance?”

These days, we seem to hear about abundance more and more:

• Building on strengths
• Seeing the glass as half full
• Asset-based work
• Seeing community potential vs. community need
• Focusing on abundance vs scarcity

So what IS all this abundance stuff about? Is this just a new fad, the new buzz word?

Or are the outcomes really different when we focus our consulting clients on abundance vs. scarcity? Different in what way?

And if there IS a difference – and it is worth considering an abundance framework for our consulting work – what would change about the way we do our work if that work was rooted in an abundance framework?

What does abundance thinking mean for

• Board work?
• Community Building?
• Planning work?
• Resource Development?
• Social media / community engagement work?

Does the work itself change? Do the tools change? Do WE have to change? (And if so, to what? And how?)

Lots to think about as we head into the chat on Tuesday, July 20 at 1pm US Pacific time. See you there!

The following is our best attempt to summarize at least some of the salient issues that arose in the intense and brilliant June 15, 2010 Tweet Chat.  You can see the full archive of the chat here. Topic: Evaluating the Consultant’s Own Effectiveness Many thanks to Nick Perona (@rawr_nickzilla) for the hours it took to [...]

After the chat draws to a close, let’s use this space to continue the conversation and learning together. When the chat is over, we will a) assemble key points and post them here, and b) post the whole chat to the archive. Thanks for the lively discussion!

These days, this sector is filled with talk of evaluation and measurement and metrics. As consultants to community benefit / nonprofit organizations, we are often the ones encouraging our clients to measure their performance. We teach clients how to move from measuring “outputs” to “outcomes” – the results that matter for their clients and their [...]

As consultants we are frequently encouraging our clients to “walk the talk” of their values. In particular, we are encouraging transparency – one of the many overused buzzwords this young century has promulgated. It’s one thing to encourage our clients to walk their talk. It’s a whole ‘nother thing to walk that talk ourselves as [...]

NOTE: The chat scheduled for April 20 has been rescheduled to April 27 (see sidebar on right) due to a failure of Twitter’s search function. See you all next week! Perhaps it’s the changing economy. Or perhaps this has always been the $64,000 question.  But these days, everywhere we turn, we seem to hear the [...]

During today’s #NPCons chat, the suggestion for an ongoing consultant’s learning community was made by the brilliant Alison Rapping, as follows: “Can we create our NPCons Resource Group; international, smart, passionate?!! BigTent, Conference Calls, Webinars – if we can do this much on Twitter imagine the possibilities!” So what do you think? If we had [...]

For as long as I’ve been a consultant – going on 20 years – there has been background chatter about licensing consultants. The same words are always used when that discussion arises: “Anyone can hang out a shingle and say they are a consultant.” And the fact is, that is completely true. One doesn’t have [...]

If you are consulting to Community Benefit / “Nonprofit” Organizations in these difficult economic times, there is a good chance you are being asked to help them “survive” in some way. If you are good at what you do, you may be working with them to aim beyond survival, on towards sustainability. And if you [...]

We could think of no better topic to head into the holidays than “The Fun Theory!” Inspired by the video at the end of this post (and the wonderful other videos sponsored by Volkswagen here), we were approached by our guest co-moderator for this week’s chat, Kristen Parrinello, who suggested the topic. Thanks, Kristen (aka [...]