#NPCons

My friend and colleague Garth Nowland-Foreman likes to say that “Sacred cows make the best hamburger.”  So for this month’s chat, I went searching for a topic that would go well with fries! After putting out a call for Consulting Sacred Cows – the “shoulds” we are all taught as if written on stone tablets – [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]