Consulting Philanthropy: Where to Draw a Line?
Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.
Consultants regularly receive requests to donate their time and expertise. If we boil consulting down to its very essence, it is about the exchange of skills and experience for compensation. Generally, the compensation is financial, and the unit of measure is measured in time (hours or days), or deliverables (anything from a blog post to a full-blown client engagement).
When consultants are asked to donate their time and skills it’s commonly for those smaller scale items—present a webinar or provide a blog post, article or something similar. There are some exceptions, and I’ll get to those a bit later.
In my experience, most of the requests are also (deliberately) unclear. There is rarely an express statement that the work is expected to be pro bono, or that it is viewed as a volunteering effort; there is just no mention of fees on offer or requests for rates.
I guess the hope is that the consultant won’t ask.
Is it appropriate?
Every profession has these kinds of requests, and many organizations rely on pro bono contributions to be able to support their members. So why does it bug me?
Simply put, because some of the people expecting consultants to work for free have no right to have that expectation. And based on the conversations that I have been having recently, more and more organizations are making such requests of more and more …
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