Werth-It Fundraising Blog

I’m a fundraising consultant.  I’m self-employed.  I teach fundraising, I write about fundraising, and I fundraise.  I’ve been self-employed for more than 20 years, although I spent six years as a director of development for an organization during which time I was an employee.

Although I could work for nonprofits, I choose to be self-employed.  There are many reasons why; here are just a few:

 1) When an organization interviews me with a thought to hiring me, they treat me differently if I’m there as a consultant for a contract versus applying to be an employee.  As a consultant, they tell me the truth: all the bad points about the organization and where fundraising stands, how the board of directors really operates and what the problems are.  It’s almost as if they’re daring me, wanting me to say that their situation is terrible.  However, if they interview me as an employee, they spend the time telling me how wonderful everything is, what a delight it is to work there, and what the benefits are.  It’s two different orientations.  Personally, I prefer to hear the truth: the situation is rarely unfixable, but I’d rather know.

2) Some problems don’t really require an employee.  For example, before I became a consultant, I was once hired by an organization to bring their telemarketing program in-house.  I hired the telemarketers and oversaw the calling.  They had about 60,000 donors to call.  I did the math and realized that every donor would be called in about six months, given the space we had and the number of callers.  Once those names were gone, they could decide to call them again, or I’d be out of a job.  Fortunately, I found another job, because I could see that I wasn’t going to have more time there.  They didn’t need an employee, they needed someone for six months.

3) Being in an office is less productive.  Studies show that employees only work about 60% of the time, although temporary employees work 80% of the time.  The reason is that there’s a lot of unproductive time: meetings that run long, talking around the water cooler, etc.  Temps work more because they don’t know any people to talk to.  I’m more productive working from home because there are no distractions: no noise, no one stopping by to chat, no meetings to attend.  I can get more done.

4) Nonprofits are flaky.  I hate to say that, I love the nonprofit world, but there’s a lot of flaky stuff that goes on that I’d rather avoid.  For example, every time a new administrator comes in at some of the big national organizations, they bring their own people, firing the current staff.  Sure, they trust their own people, but it means that people get fired.  I don’t want to get fired every time the new person decides to clean house.  (There’s one nonprofit that I won’t name that has had five new executive directors and five interim executive directors in a ten-year period.  That’s what I mean by flaky.)  It’s unfair to say that only nonprofits are flaky — I also worked for a flaky for-profit early in my career - but that’s my experience.

5) I get a lot of tax deductions for being self-employed.  For example, I might drive 8,000 miles a year to see my clients.  As a consultant, that’s tax-deductible at 50 cents a mile, or $4,000.  Now, it doesn’t mean I save $4,000, it just means I don’t pay the taxes on it, but it’s still a great deal.  I couldn’t do that if I was an employee.

6) There’s always something new and interesting on my schedule.  Because I don’t do the same job year after year, I always get to try new challenges.  It makes for a more interesting career.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think consulting is for everyone.  I constantly have to market myself and find new clients.  I feel a certain sadness when my clients graduate and they don’t need me anymore.  I need to keep up with technology and social media, more than if I worked for one place that only introduced new things slowly over time.  But overall, I’d rather be a consultant than anything else.

If you have questions about fundraising, please write me, Katherine Wertheim, CFRE, at katherine@werth-it.com.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 12th, 2010 at 9:12 am and is filed under Non-Profit Organizations, Home-based Business, Staffing, Your Best You, Time Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.