#NPCons

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 such a group / place online to learn from each other, what could it accomplish? What would it look like?

Thoughts? Let’s do this!!

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 [...]

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 [...]

If you think the topic of pricing is sticky for consultants in general, try being a consultant to Community Benefit Organizations!
In the business world, clients might ask you to reduce your fee, but would they even consider asking you to do the work for free?  And yet Community Benefit Consultants face that situation all the [...]

Research by Dr. Barry Schwartz (as he described at TED here) has shown that neither rules nor incentives are as powerful in motivating us to be our very best as is the desire to be virtuous, to do what is right by other people.
Dr. Schwartz talks about this as the practical wisdom each of us [...]

As we all know, it is not always easy to track and keep up with a Twitter conversation. And when a chat is as lively as our last one was, look out!
That is why we feel so blessed to have Megan McFadden from Everywun who volunteered once again to sort through all those tweets in [...]

One of the most interesting conversations we continually face is the question of competition vs. collaboration.  We hear drumbeats for organizations to cooperate, collaborate.  And then we hear drumbeats, just as loud, that suggest “competition is a source of innovation.”
A conversation at Social Edge has been going on for over a month on this issue, [...]

Our first chat for consultants to community benefit organizations provided for some  great and thought provoking conversation.
Below is a summary of the questions and the comments/answers from our Chat on the 21st.   (You can see the whole chat in its raw-and-unedited entirety here.)
Many thanks to Megan McFadden(@Everywun) for compiling this summary. Twitter chats happen FAST [...]