2022 Survey of Nonprofit Consultants Rates
 
Heather Yandow, founder of Nonprofit.ist shares some topline findings from this survey.
 
Rough Transcipt
[00:00:00] This week on the Holywell Podcast, we're trying to answer a simple question, but it gets really tough. How much should you pay? How much should you charge for a nonprofit consultant? And who better than our friend? Uh, Heather Yau, the founder of nonprofit, is nonprofit ist and consultant. Nonprofit consultant, I'll say at Third Space Studio to join us again, friend of the pod and friend of the organization.
[00:00:51] How's it going, Heather? It's going great. I'm glad to be here. Well, I think we have been quietly in the, the back room planning this for a little bit and you know, clearly whole whale and nonprofit is, have formed a formal partnership and we have enjoyed sending a lot of folks into that platform to go find quality nonprofit consultants.
[00:01:13] But as we go through, you have partnered and created in partnership with other folks, and maybe you can explain a nonprofit consultant survey. Asking a very sensitive question, which I'm surprised what we have 300 people answer how much they're charging and a bunch of info, huh? Yeah. Yeah. So more than 350 consultants shared with us.
[00:01:33] Wow. All of their details. And this was a survey that was, Started a few years ago by Rebecca and Ska. And I attended a webinar about it early this year and just thought, this is fabulous data and I wanna figure out how to get more data and get more curious about what that data is telling us. So the survey we are, we're crunching it right now.
[00:01:55] We're gonna do a, a webinar about it for nonprofits members on August 2nd, which will be fabulous. And then the full report will roll out later this year. Great. So we can tease folks with some numbers getting right into it. What was the biggest wow to you? And you're like, I did not think that was gonna happen.
[00:02:14] That's counterintuitive. So one of the things I'm still trying to make sense of is we ask people, what's your hourly rate and how much do you bill a year? Trying to get a sense, because we have, as consultants often have control over both of those things, how much we wanna charge for our per hour how much we wanna work, and so therefore how much we can bill every year.
[00:02:37] So, One of the things that's really curious to me, and I haven't quite made sense of it, is it seems like the data is telling us that if you get advanced education, so if you have a bachelor's, master's, doctorate, you tend to charge more and earn more. But that's not necessarily true about some of these.
[00:02:59] Licenses or certificates that are related to consulting work like CREs or MPAs. And so that's one of those head scratchers is that, seems like that would, that would align with. More schooling, more experience, and therefore lead to greater being able to charge more and earn more. But it's not necessarily true.
[00:03:18] So that's one of the surprises in the data. Yeah, I think what we found from what I'm looking at is there's a higher correlation to how long you've been a consultant, and that seems to be the biggest determining factor aside from. The type of thing you're consulting on and, and sorting by. All right. Are you doing strategic planning versus accounting versus something else for, for nonprofits?
[00:03:45] Maybe you can talk to us a little bit about that. Yeah. What we see is a direct relationship between how long people have been in the consulting world and how much they're able to charge per hour. So if you've been consulting less than a year, you tend to charge around a hundred bucks. If you've been consulting 20 plus years.
[00:04:05] You tend to charge around 200 bucks. The interesting thing is when we then look at how much you bill annually, what you're, what you're bringing in we see that that rises by amount of time consulting until you get after 20 years. And then it drops a little bit.