How Consultants Shape Nonprofits: Shared Values, Unintended Consequences

Groundbreaking research illuminates the pivotal, problematic role of consultants in the nonprofit world.

The nonprofit sector leans heavily on consultants to guide strategic planning, advise on fundraising strategy, gather data on program effectiveness and more. How Consultants Shape Nonprofits explores how consultants, while working diligently to customize solutions for their clients, reinforce status-quo practices and ideas while prioritizing the opinions of people in power (nonprofit funders, leaders, etc.) over those of lower-level staff and communities. Consultants thus leave unaddressed some of the most pernicious problems in the nonprofit sector. The book’s important conclusions about the complex role of consultants in the nonprofit world are based on more than a year of ethnographic research and nearly 200 interviews with practitioners. Dr. Reisman concludes with guidance on how consultants, nonprofit leaders, and donors can better collaborate, and overcome traditional ＂blind spots＂ in the nonprofit-consultant relationship.

Leah Reisman (PhD, Princeton) researches nonprofits with support from the NSF, the Mellon Foundation, and the Wallace Foundation. Her work has appeared in the Stanford Social Innovation Review and the Chronicle of Philanthropy. She is a Program Officer at The Barra Foundation in Philadelphia, and a Research Fellow at the John Brademas Center at NYU.