How can we support you this year?

by General

Happy 2017! I hope the year is off to a great start for you.

At Catalyst:Ed, we’ve had an introspective start to the year. I’m incredibly proud of what we achieved as a team in 2016, our first full year of operations. We helped almost a hundred K-12 education organizations address some of their most critical challenges and grew our network to more than 400 outstanding experts, each of whom brings deep know-how in an area vital to education (see our 2016 highlights below). Yet the larger upheavals of the last few months have also led us to question whether we were doing enough to bridge divides and bring equal opportunity to all. How can we democratize access to expertise and make it available to all organizations – big and small, urban and rural – fighting for better outcomes for all kids? How can we amplify the impact of the best talent in the sector? How can we mobilize our assets – our network, our know-how, our technology and processes – in service to the work being done by educators, community leaders, entrepreneurs and funders in so many different areas? These are just some of the questions that we will be grappling with this year. If you have any thoughts for us, just reply to this message – I’d love to grab a coffee or set up a call.

We’re also pushing ourselves to think about how best we can support you in your work. As you’re taking stock this new year, I’d love to hear from you on your challenges and pain-points. What’s keeping you up at night? What resources do you wish you had at your disposal? Whether you have a specific project that you’d like to discuss or want to just brainstorm ideas, we’re always happy to hear from you, and we promise to do whatever we can to help. Let us know by filling in this form, and I will personally respond to you.

Finally, thank you once again for your support through this year. Every conversation that we’ve had has been an affirmation of the important work happening across the country and a reminder about the often hidden talent and expertise that exists in the sector. We are incredibly grateful for the trust you have placed in us and for the continued opportunity to work with you.

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Catalyst:Ed connects K-12 education organizations with a national network of experienced and expert education leaders for missio-critical projects. We provide organizations with an infusion of crucial expertise and amplify the impact of the sector’s best talent. More broadly, we are creating an ecosystem of support and expertise that education organizations can tap into – quickly, reliably and affordably.

2016 HIGHLIGHTS

We’ve matched over one hundred projects for schools and school systems, nonprofits, foundations and state agencies, around the country. See a list of project areas where we offer support here. We also helped clients source interim senior talent to cover staffing needs during long-term absences or staff transitions.

Our network has grown to more than 400 experts, all of whom have gone through a rigorous three-stage vetting process. Our consultants bring experiences from leading education organizations as well as consulting firms like McKinsey, Bain and Bellwether. In 2016, we consolidated our expert selection into three cycles, allowing us to further increase the rigor of our process. We also expanded our network to include both consulting firms and independent consultants in order to offer our clients a range of options.

In our post-project evaluation process, 100% of our clients said they would use our service again. Clients appreciated the stellar talent in our network, the rigor of our scoping and matching process and the cost savings (they’ve been able to access talent at costs that are typically less than a third of what’s charged by large consulting firms). 96% of engagements have been rated positively.

We launched our Afterschool Expert Hub in partnership with the National Afterschool Association to provide specialized services to the 10,000+ afterschool programs across the country. We are planning to launch 1-2 more Expert Hubs focused on other high-need areas in 2017. Stay tuned for more.

As we continued to receive feedback from our users, we made lots of little improvements: redesigned our website, added to our technology platform, overhauled our project listing form, and added a host of features including pre-scoped project templates, an evaluation scorecard and “roadside assistance”.

Finally, we’ve been investing time in some crucial work on our values – both defining them and identifying ways to imbue them in every aspect of our work. We’ll be sharing more in the next few months!

Announcing the launch of the Afterschool Expert Hub

by General

We have exciting news to share with you. Catalyst:Ed has partnered with the National Afterschool Association (NAA) to develop the Afterschool Expert Hub. Nested within the larger Catalyst:Ed network, this unique service will specifically focus on meeting the needs of the 10,000+ afterschool and expanded learning program providers and partners around the country by helping them connect with experts for projects and professional development.
 
What is an Expert Hub? Think of Expert Hubs as smaller networks within the larger Catalyst:Ed network – each Expert Hub will be focused on a specific domain or geography, while still leveraging Catalyst:Ed’s wider expert networks, technology platforms and processes to position projects to be successful. The Afterschool Hub is the first of many hubs that we hope to develop over time. Each Expert Hub will be created in partnership with a lead organization (typically a networked organization such as a foundation or an association) that has both a vantage point of organizations working in the area and an interest in supporting their work and mission.

We see Expert Hubs building organization and sector capacity by (1) helping organizations access expertise quickly, easily, reliably and affordably and (2) generating data and information on the demand for and supply of expertise across different areas. Potentially, an Expert Hub may also evolve into a platform to create community and learning opportunities for consultants and professional service providers working in the area. Ultimately, our envisioned “networks-within-network” structure will enable organizations like NAA to provide a unique service for their constituents while benefiting from cross-flows of information and expertise across networks.
 
Why afterschool? Research shows that opportunities for out-of-school learning (including before and after school, weekend and summer programs) predict children’s development, educational achievement, and school success. We also know that kids from low-income families are less likely than their more-advantaged peers to have access to these out-of-school learning opportunities. Given this context and the Catalyst:Ed mission, we were very excited when NAA approached us about working with them to develop the Afterschool Expert Hub. In NAA, we saw the ideal partner: mission-aligned, strategic and deeply invested in the success of its membership and the out-of-school-time (OST) community as a whole. By helping OST program providers around the country tap into the right expertise to meet critical challenges and leverage opportunities for impact, we aim to build sector capacity, create efficiencies and improve program quality so more kids can have access to more enriching learning opportunities.
 
How will the Expert Hub differ from the wider Catalyst:Ed network? In many ways, Expert Hubs will be identical to the wider Catalyst:Ed network – same processes, same technology platforms, same templates. Each Expert Hub will, however, have its own dedicated pages within the Catalyst:Ed website, with content and scopes tailored to meet the specific needs of organizations working in the area. It will be supported by targeted communications and outreach to the organizations to generate awareness and inspire action. We will also have a separate expert recruitment and vetting cycle, especially during the launch period of each Expert Hub, to ensure we are seeding it with appropriate experts. We will work closely with our partner organizations to generate this expert list.
 
Our thinking on the mechanics of the Expert Hubs will evolve as we learn more about what’s working and what isn’t (the flip side of being a pioneer is that there aren’t any models for us to emulate!). If you have any feedback or suggestions for us, please do drop us a line. 

Thank you so much for being with us on our journey!

[Ask Catalyst:Ed] Fixed price or hourly? Structuring your project contract

by General

Here are two things that happened earlier this week:

From an email:
Expert: “Hey, the project scope says the project will have a deliverables-based contract. Can you explain what that means?”

From a scoping conversation with a client:
Catalyst:Ed: “Do you have any thoughts on whether this should be a fixed price contract or an hourly contract?”
Client: (silence)

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Contract terminology can get confusing. So here’s a quick primer (and we’ll do a blog post with a deeper dive into the not-always-fun world of consulting contracts sometime soon).

Contracts typically tend to be of three types:

  • Deliverables-based (aka fixed price contracts)
  • Hourly contracts (aka time-and-materials or variable contracts)
  • Retainers

Here’s where the rubber hits the road – the specific type of contract you sign for a project determines how you get paid.

For deliverables-based contracts, the client agrees to pay a fixed, pre-negotiated amount when the consultant completes and hands over the deliverable. The contract, in such cases, will lay out:

  • The deliverables (interim and final)
  • The timeline for completing the deliverables)
  • The amount payable by the client for each deliverable

Here’s what that could look like for a hypothetical strategic planning project:


Project start date: 07/01/16

Deliverable Format Due date Amount Invoice date

Report summarizing key research findings

Word doc

08/01/16

$5,000

08/15/16

Draft deck with key findings, recommendations and next steps

PowerPoint presentation

09/01/16

$10,000

09/15/16

Final deck with key findings, recommendations and next steps

PowerPoint presentation

09/15/16

$5,000

09/30/16

Implementation plan with key tasks, milestones, responsibilities and timelines

Excel spreadsheet

10/15/16

$2,500

10/30/16

The expectation here is that the consultant gets paid the fixed amount once the deliverables are submitted, irrespective of how much time she actually ends up spending on putting the deliverable together.

In hourly contracts, on the other hand, clients pay consultants based on the actual amount of time spent on the project. The payment period can be monthly or fortnightly. For a monthly contract, the consultant adds up the total amount of time spent on the project in the previous month (in education, time is often billed in 15 minute increments). The total number of hours is then multiplied by the agreed-on hourly rate to arrive at the invoiced amount.

A related type of contract that we often see in education is the hourly contract with a “not to exceed” clause. The expectation here is that the client pays the consultant based on actual hours spent up to a certain pre-agreed amount.

And finally, we have retainers. In these kinds of contracts, the client agrees to pay consultants a certain amount every month, with the expectation that the consultant will put in a certain amount of work. So, what kind of contract is best for the client and what kind is best for the consultant? Well, it depends on the project. When we scope projects for clients, we typically categorize 60% of projects as fixed price ones and 30% as hourly ones, with the remaining 10% being categorized as retainers.

In a perfectly predictable world populated by robots and with full information, a fixed price contract would work in the same way as an hourly contract. Unfortunately, we live in a world where circumstances change, individual capabilities vary and new information is often revealed. In general, when the project scope is clear and deliverables are well-defined, fixed price contracts work well. They offer clients the assurance that the work will get done without the budget getting out of hand. Consultants often find them easier to administer [1], plus they benefit if they end up doing the work more efficiently than they had originally budgeted.

For projects with a more ambiguous scope, hourly contracts might work out to be much better. For instance, one of our nonprofit clients needed several different grant proposals and reports written during a period of staff transition and did not know how easy or difficult it would be to find the necessary information. In this case, the hourly contract protected the nonprofit from paying too much if the information was easy to access, while at the same time, protecting the consultant from being paid too little if finding the information required a lot of legwork [2].

Retainers are best suited for interim and part-time consulting roles. They offer consultants a stable source of revenue while capping the monthly cost to clients.

Finally, here’s a handy little chart laying out the differences.

Fixed price Variable Retainer

Also known as

Deliverables-based

Hourly OR Time-and-materials

Monthly fee

Best suited for

Well defined projects

Projects with evolving or ambiguous scopes

Interim or part-time roles

Invoicing timeline

After “product” is delivered

Usually monthly

Usually monthly

I hope this was helpful! Feel free to add your thoughts or additional questions in the comments section below.

Notes:
[1] Fixed price contracts require more time up-front in estimating the amount of work needed to complete the work. However, they require less effort in terms of ongoing time-tracking.
[2] Even though time-tracking is not required for fixed price contracts, it’s a good discipline to follow if you’re a consultant. You’ll often be surprised at how “off” you were when you estimated that the work would take X hours to complete.

We hope you found this post useful! We’d love to have you join the conversation:

  • Respond: What’s your take on the different kinds of contracts? Any hard contracting lessons learned over the years? Share your thoughts in the comments below or tweet us at @_catalyst_ed. #edchat
  • Share: Here’s a pre-populated tweet to help you share our post: New post from @_catalyst_ed: The difference b/w fixed price and hourly contracts #edchat #consultants bit.ly/2cM5AV6
  • Connect: Join us in our mission to make education consulting more impactful. We’ll be sharing lessons from our journey on this blog. To subscribe, sign up here.

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“Ask Catalyst:Ed” is a new section on our blog. This is where we’ll be posting quick, practical responses to all the great questions that we receive from our community of users.

Here’s how we see this working:

  • Use the comments section of blog posts to send us your questions. You can also email them to us at info@catalyst-ed.org to tweet them to @_catalyst_ed.
  • The questions can be anything related to consulting in the education sector. We’ll be covering questions from both education organizations as well as consultants. Deep and mundane questions are equally welcome!
  • Every week, we’ll pick up a question and do our best to answer it using this blog. If you want regular updates, don’t forget to subscribe to our list here.
  • Please feel free to jump in and respond with your own perspectives and advice in the comments section of each Q&A. We do want this to be a community resource – and a conversation rather than a broadcast!

About us: Catalyst:Ed connects education organizations with vetted experts for short-term, mission-critical needs. More than a directory of experts, we set up projects for success by investing time and resources into scoping out projects (at no cost to organizations!) and matching projects with experts who are the right fit. To learn more about how Catalyst:Ed can help you gain quick, reliable and affordable access to expertise for your most pressing requirements, please visit our website. Ready to get help? Schedule a needs assessment call. Want to join our network of experts? Apply to join here.

How to write a compelling proposal

by General

If you ask consultants about the least favorite part of their jobs, proposal writing usually ranks in the top three. Drafting a proposal can be an unpleasant task for many reasons: it can seem impersonal and one-sided, you often don’t have as much information about the project as you’d like and pitching yourself in writing can feel uncomfortable.

But there are consultants who have learned to love the task. The act of writing a proposal forces them to slow down and pay attention: to internalize the needs of the project and determine whether they are the right fit. The proposal also becomes a launch pad for a meaningful discussion with the client and ensures alignment between client and consultant before the real work starts. Finally, for consultants who don’t have extensive networks or a readily recognizable brand, a thoughtfully crafted proposal becomes the opening that invites a second look from a high profile.

At Catalyst:Ed, a platform that connects education organizations with vetted experts for short-term, mission-critical projects, we’ve come to appreciate the power of a well-crafted proposal. It’s part science, part art. And we’ve put together this quick primer – gleaned from our collective experiences – on proposals for the newly-minted and still-hesitant among you.

The ingredients

Request for Proposals or RFPs (also known as project scopes in Catalyst:Ed lingo) typically ask for some variation of the following:

  • Proposed approach and work plan
  • Capability statement
  • Budget and payment schedule

While these terms can sound officious and intimidating, they essentially translate into a description of three things:

  1. How do you intend to tackle the project requirements and by when
  2. Why you’re the right fit for the project as evidenced by the skills and experiences that you (and your team) bring to the table
  3. What you’d like to get paid for your work and when

Putting these elements down on paper is good discipline. Even if the client and you have a long-standing relationship and you’re asked to do this “one quick project”, it’s probably a good idea for you to follow this structure and put down your thoughts before you get started on the work.

Putting it together

So let’s say you’ve decided to take the plunge and write out the proposal. What are some things you need to keep in mind that can maximize your chances of being selected?

Gauge your fit: This seems pretty obvious, but is worth repeating. Look at what the project is seeking. Ask whether (a) you’re interested, (b) you’re available and (c) you have most of the required skills and experiences. Note that we say, most, not all. Like job descriptions, proposal requirements sometimes include nice-to-have qualifications as well. It might be well worth it for you to respond to an RFP as long as you can check off most of the boxes.

Respond to the RFP you have, not the one you’d like: Far too often, clients reject proposals because they feel the consultants “just didn’t get it”. So here’s a tip: Read the RFP. Reflect. Repeat. Then, when you are ready to draft your proposal, (a) make sure you’re providing all requested components, (b) proposal an approach that makes sense given the task at hand and (c) underscore skills and experiences you have that are directly relevant to the project and show that you’ve worked with similar organizations before.

Research the organization: A quick Google search can often reveal a lot about the organization, its leadership and its driving philosophy as well as any larger challenges that it might be facing. These, in turn, can help you understand the “why” behind the project, gauge your own fit and tailor your proposal to what the client’s looking for.

Chunk it up: Break up large, complex projects into manageable phases, each with its own associated tasks, timeline, deliverable and budget. Thus, a strategic planning project might be divided into three phases:

Phases I. Current state analysis II. Draft and final recommendations III. Implementation plan


Key tasks

  • Task 1
  • Task 2
  • Task 3
  • Task 1
  • Task 2
  • Task 3
  • Task 1
  • Task 2
  • Task 3


Deliverable

Deck summarizing research findings and key insights

Final deck with findings and recommendations

Worksheet with detailed project plan


Timeline

2 months: 9/1 – 10/30

1 month: 11/1 – 11/30

2 weeks: 12/1 – 12/15

Chunking up projects offers several advantages: First, it makes it clearer to the client and to you how the work will get accomplished. Second, the mid-project milestones create opportunities to review progress, realign expectations and – when things go well – create a sense of momentum.

Pull together the right team: The pros know that consulting is sometimes best played as a team sport. More complex projects, in particular, may require a mix of skills and experiences – and even if you’re an independent consultant, it might be a good idea to pull together a team to be competitive. At Catalyst:Ed, for instance, we introduced an evaluation expert to an early childhood expert for an impact evaluation of an early childhood program. Individually, they were competent, but together, they made a dream team. When looking at the project requirements, think about what you bring to the table – and then think about who else you might partner with so that as a team, you bring the full set of capabilities needed to drive a project to success.

Aim for a price in the right ballpark: Pricing is a whole other topic that we’ll delve into in another blog post. But here are some quick guidelines:

  • Ask yourself “What will it take for me to get the work done”. This will involve some measure of breaking the work down into specific tasks and estimating how much time each task will take. Multiply total hours by your hourly rate to get to your desired budget.
  • Ask yourself “How much will the organization be willing to pay for this work”. Sometimes, you might find this information in the RFP (about 50% of the scopes we create at Catalyst:Ed have an estimated budget range associated with them). If the info is not readily available, substitute research and common sense. True story: A nonprofit with an annual budget of $750,000 received a proposal for a strategic planning project with a budget of $125,000. Needless to say, the client did not select the option, and reached out instead to Catalyst:Ed to source other, more reasonably priced options.
  • Find a balance between your desired budget and the client’s feasible budget. You can do this by paring down the scope of work – maybe do one workshop instead of two or substitute a survey for full-length interviews. Or you can offer a discount on your usual hourly rate. Or you can bring in someone at a junior level and outsource some of the more mundane tasks (scheduling!) for a lower price.
  • Finally, don’t worry about offering the lowest price. In 9 cases out of 10, we have seen the client picking the option who offers the best value rather than the option who offers the lowest price. Organizations are savvy and care about the quality that they are getting. Instead, offer the price at which you are prepared to do the work.

Tap into your enthusiasm: Clients can usually zero in on proposals where the consultant is truly excited about the opportunity to work on the project. It might be the thoughtfulness that has gone into the crafting of the proposal. It might be the passion for and knowledge of the domain area. Or it might be the additional suggestions that expand the potential impact of the project. I wouldn’t recommend faking the enthusiasm – it’s too much work! – but if you’re genuinely excited about a project, don’t be afraid to let it show.

The “fixings”

What about the format? Here are a few quick thoughts:

  • We’ve seen folks submit documents and presentations. In general, documents work better. They leave less open to (mis)interpretation.
  • Use formatting (bullets, bolds, italics) to enable easy reading. But please use your judgment. Too much formatting can be a distraction. And please avoid the urge to bold, italicize and underline the same sentence.
  • Tables, graphics, etc. are nice-to-haves, not must-haves, so include them depending on your own skill and the project requirement. Having said that, if you specialize in a specific area, it might be worthwhile to invest some time in developing a simple graphic that demonstrates your expertise.
  • Although cover pages are by no means necessary, please do include the following in your document: the project name, the client name (assuming it’s not hidden) and your name.
  • If you plan to include lots of acronyms, a list upfront is always appreciated.
  • For page length, use the guidance in the RFP. In general, shorter, simpler projects (<$10,000) should rarely require proposals of more than a page or two. More complex projects may require proposals of about 5-10 pages (although at Catalyst:Ed, we rarely recommend proposals of longer than 5 pages). For multi-million dollar projects at the state or federal level, the 50-page limit is often the norm.

Investments, and not expenditures
One reason why consultants don’t like proposals is because time spent on crafting one can often feel like it’s “wasted”. It’s not billable, and there’s no guarantee that you’ll get selected.

But there’s another way of thinking about it. A veteran consultant in our network thinks of proposals as investments and not as expenditures. “I’m building my own infrastructure and creating equity,” she says. “Each time I draft a proposal, I’m creating content that can be re-purposed for other similar proposals. I’m also investing in my brand and building networks. For new-to-me organizations and people, in particular, it becomes an invitation to a conversation and the start of a relationship that will hopefully continue, regardless of whether or not I am engaged on this particular project.”

To get you started, we’ve put together a very simple proposal format that you can play around with and tailor to meet the needs of your project. To access it, sign up below to download the proposal template.

We hope you found this post useful! We’d love to have you join the conversation:

  • Respond: What tips do you have for crafting killer proposals? What do you like/dislike about the process? Share your thoughts in the comments below or tweet us @_catalyst_ed. #edchat
  • Share: Here’s a pre-populated tweet to help you share our post: New post from @_catalyst_ed: The 3 Elements of a Compelling Project Proposal #edchat #consultants #therightexpertise bit.ly/2c22GgM
  • Connect: Join us in our mission to make education consulting more impactful. We’ll be sharing lessons from our journey on this blog. To subscribe, sign up here.

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About us: Catalyst:Ed connects education organizations with vetted experts for short-term, mission-critical needs. More than a directory of experts, we set up projects for success by investing time and resources into scoping out projects (at no cost to organizations!) and matching projects with experts who are the right fit. To learn more about how Catalyst:Ed can help you gain quick, reliable and affordable access to expertise for your most pressing requirements, please visit our website. Ready to get help? Schedule a needs assessment call. Want to join our network of experts? Apply to join here.

Why leaders need to ask for help – and how

by General

Here’s a simple trick for resource-constrained education organizations that want to get more done more effectively:

Get help. From the right person. At the right time.

Get help.
Every school, nonprofit and foundation has its own set of pressing needs. Perhaps there’s a mission-critical problem that needs to be addressed. Or a tremendous opportunity for impact that needs to be leveraged. Yet, when faced with these needs, education leaders often resist seeking help. Instead, they default to internal resources.

At first glance, the D-I-Y approach seems less expensive. After all, staff time is already paid for. Unfortunately, leaders often underestimate the complexity of a task and the time and expertise needed to complete it. A senior leader at a successful charter management organization recently admitted over coffee that when faced with a problem he often has to negotiate with his already overworked team members to put in “B-grade work to fix the latest problem in exchange for doing C-grade work on some other project”. The hidden costs of doing it all in-house – including time taken away from other projects, the cost of fixing missteps and the risk of staff frustration and burnout – can quickly add up.

Research shows that individual and organizational performance improves when we seek help. And when done right, it also builds internal knowledge and skills that boost performance over the long run. So, yes, it helps to get help.

From the right person.
But not just any kind of help. The same research also revealed that asking for help only pays off when the person providing help has relevant expertise. Now this might seem obvious to those of us who have stood by in anticipation-turned-to-helplessness-turned-to-horror as a friend enlisted to fix a plumbing issue futilely tinkers away with tools and pipes while the kitchen slowly floods. Yet, it turns out that in practice people often prioritize familiarity and comfort over actual expertise. Asking for help makes us feel vulnerable. We worry that by putting our organization’s problems out there, we might undermine our work and look incompetent. As a result, we often rely on friends we know and trust (and who speak in the same acronyms!) even when their know-how is barely better than ours.

But while this approach feels less threatening, it can rob us of the opportunity to learn and grow. The right expertise can also help us get to solutions quicker and more efficiently: by dint of their experience, experts often know what questions to ask and can recognize patterns and leverage existing knowledge and tools. Perhaps most importantly, an external expert – who is less likely to have imbibed the organizational Kool-Aid – might be more willing to bring up the elephant in the room and share fresh and divergent perspectives.

I suspect another reason why organization leaders stick with people they know is because they believe their problems and organizational contexts are unique. While this might be true at the margin, most of the challenges faced by organizations are depressingly similar. The good news is that this means (a) we don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time and can leverage the knowledge and expertise that already exists and (b) we can judge someone’s expertise by looking at their success in solving similar problems in the past.

At the right time.
I’m no longer surprised when an Executive Director admits during a project scoping conversation that the project they’ve listed with us has been on their organizational to-do list for years.

The danger with this approach is that stalling can result in lost opportunities and let minor challenges grow into full-blown crises. A crisis in turn requires more organizational resources to resolve. Worse, while it’s brewing, it eats away at precious organizational energy and momentum. 

So when is the right time? Obviously if the house is on fire, you call 9-1-1 right away. But what about those problems that simmer away in the background? Here’s one thumb-rule that works for a friend: The third time something comes up in a team/board meeting, he gets help.

Bonus: And in the right way.
Is there a “right way” to get expert help? Based on our experience at Catalyst:Ed helping schools, nonprofits and foundations connect with experts quickly, reliably and affordably, we definitely think so:

  • Be specific about your challenge and the help you need: Organizations are often vague about what they’re looking for. “We need a fundraising person” could mean anything. A rigorous process for scoping out projects provides organizations clarity about the problem that they are trying to solve and arrive at a definition of success. The scope also helps experts gauge their interest and “fit” for a project.
  • Reach out to folks who bring the right expertise: Don’t settle for good intentions. Don’t settle for vague expertise. Instead seek out professionals who bring a track record of success in the exact problem you need solved.
  • Get multiple bids: Even if you have a fallback option, do yourself a favor and get at least 3 bids. One of the other bids might surprise you. At the very least, you will have enough information and can consider trade-offs before taking a decision.
  • Connect before you decide: Assuming you’ve done your due diligence by going through the steps listed above, it is absolutely appropriate for you to connect with the expert options who meet your bar to gauge alignment and “fit”. The beauty of this process is that you don’t have to choose between process and intuition. You can leverage the best of both!

So there you have it. Get help. From the right person. At the right time. And ideally in the right way.

You’re welcome!

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Calling all education organizations and consultants. Join us in our mission to make education consulting more impactful. We’ll be sharing lessons from our journey on this blog. To subscribe, sign up here.

Catalyst:Ed connects education organizations with vetted experts for short-term, mission-critical needs. More than a directory of experts, we set up projects for success by investing time and resources into scoping out projects (at no cost to organizations!) and matching projects with experts who are the right fit. To learn more about how the Expert Hub can help you gain quick, reliable and affordable access to expertise for your most pressing requirements, please visit our website. Ready to get help? Schedule a needs assessment call.

How to not work with a “lemon”

by General

A few months ago, we were in the market to buy a house. A newly constructed home in our preferred neighborhood was beyond our budget, so we focused on the older houses. Built about a century ago, these came loaded with charm. Unfortunately, as our realtor often reminded us, they could also come loaded with issues. More than outdated layouts and rusty fixtures, we needed to be concerned about potential disasters hiding behind walls, under floors and above ceilings – think flood damage, old plumbing and wiring, termites, mold. As potential buyers, our real concern was not what we knew, but what we didn’t know.

The “lemon” problem

Economist George Akerlof called this problem “the lemon problem” in his seminal paper of the 1970s (he went on to win a Nobel for his work in this area), illustrating it with the example of the used car market. In his telling, there exists a fundamental information asymmetry between sellers and buyers of used cars – the seller knows more about the real value of the car they are selling than the buyers. Mixed in with the high-quality used cars available on the market are duds or “lemons”. Buyers are aware of this, but are unable to differentiate between the two. As a result, they end up paying the same price for used cars – in effect, paying a premium if they end up getting the dud, but by the same token, getting a high-quality used car at a steal.

The result of this information gap can be costly for the market as a whole: Sellers of high quality used cars lack the incentives to participate in the market. Buyers, faced with uncertainty, are similarly reluctant to join in.

We see this dynamic play out to some extent in the market for short-term talent [1]. While there are many consultants and self-anointed experts in education, there is wide variation in the quality of their work product and practically no reliable information to help organizations evaluate expertise before hiring someone for a project. Moreover, in the absence of a systematic and unbiased mechanism to validate and showcase expertise, individuals who bring specialist skills in an area often find it challenging to signal their superior grasp of the subject.

Why it matters

For an organization, working with a “lemon” can result in time and money being invested in an initiative without commensurate results. At a systemic level, one implication is that over a period of time, market participation by experts as well as organizations in need of expertise is less than what it could be. Another implication is that in the absence of directly relevant information about expertise, buyers and sellers end up relying on proxies to help them separate the wheat from the chaff. References from people we know, the pedigree of the education institutions that the expert attended, the salience of the organizations that she has worked with, the number of Twitter followers she has – all these and more become thumb rules that we use to gauge whether someone has the chops to deliver on a project requirement [2].

These proxies may be useful. But they are incomplete. As Rick Hess points out in his thought provoking essay in EdWeek, they can “lead to our investing great authority in this or that expert for a season” or extrapolating from expertise in one area, investing an individual with “presumed expertise across a broad range of issues”. The result is often an underwhelming work product, followed closely by skepticism about the benefit of expertise in general.

Another challenge presented by the proxies is that they often play into and reinforce biases and create barriers for those who through quirks of fate or their own idiosyncratic decisions are not “in the network”. A preference for working with someone who went to a certain college or has TFA or KIPP on her resume isn’t wrong per se. However, it can prevent an organization from working with an expert who might be a better fit for the task at hand, but whose resume may lack the words it’s scanning for. It can also – unfairly – require her to vault over a higher bar to get access to the same professional opportunities.

The value of unbiased information

So what’s the solution? An organization seeking expert talent should ideally put in the legwork vetting the expertise of a consultant before signing them on. They should ideally look beyond the “old boys network” when sourcing talent. And, equally importantly, the hiring manager should ideally check for her own biases since just the act of being aware of our subconscious preferences makes it more likely that we will fairly evaluate the options in front of us. 

I say “ideally” because doing some of this requires time and effort, which is always a constraint in the sector. We therefore also need to look at systemic solutions. Regulation helps, but it’s a clunky and heavy-handed answer. Better information gathering and sharing, facilitated by technology, is a far more elegant option, since it balances out the information asymmetry between buyers and sellers. At Catalyst:ED, we are incredibly excited at the power of the data we are collecting on the expertise of individuals through our upfront vetting process as well as mid-project feedback and post-project evaluations. These “reputational tools” can help create more transparent and effective markets by providing talent with a credible way to communicate their expertise and buyers with more information to enable them to work with someone who is the right fit for their needs [3].

The information we gather doesn’t just allow us to differentiate between levels of skill, but also between types of skill. Our reference check process, for instance, gives us great insight into the skill-sets of experts, often adding nuances that the experts themselves may not be aware of. For instance, a couple of months ago, we had two expert development professionals apply to our network on the same day. Both had been recommended to our network by people whose judgment we trusted. They also both brought solid and directly relevant experiences and spoke knowledgeably and passionately about their expertise during the interviews. The reference check process revealed interesting differences though: while one’s references extolled his ability to work really well independently and turn out very high quality grant proposals almost single-handedly within superhuman timelines, the other’s references spoke glowingly about her ability to orchestrate a team effort to produce outstanding work products. Two different skill-sets that are best set up for success in two completely different situations.

How do we see this panning out? Here’s what I believe will happen if we do this well: More organizations will look for experts who are vetted and who bring a specific skill-set and mind-set as opposed to a “general purpose” expert. More projects in the sector will go off well, thanks to more informed and better matches. Pricing will show greater dispersion and will be a better reflection of the level of expertise that someone brings. And more organizations and talent will participate in the market for expertise.

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Notes:

[1] While this may also be a problem for the talent market as a whole, it is especially so for short-term talent, since the consultant doesn’t have a lot of time before he or she has to start delivering results and the option to “develop and train” the person doesn’t usually exist. 

[2] Not surprisingly, we find through our data on consultant pricing that hourly rates tend to cluster based on seniority rather than expertise.

[3] A working paper by the Mercatus Center makes this point a lot more eruditely than I do.   




Painkillers and Vitamins: Rethinking the Scope of Education Consulting Projects

by General

Start-ups are often encouraged to reflect on whether their products are painkillers or vitamins. A painkiller makes a specific problem go away. Vitamins compensate for deficiencies and are good for growth and long-term health.

This analogy can apply to project-based work as well. When education organizations reach out to us at Catalyst:ED and ask to be connected to an expert consultant, they are usually looking for a painkiller. Perhaps a dysfunctional Board needs to be re-aligned and re-energized. Or a grant proposal needs to be written urgently to meet a deadline. Or a bloated transportation budget needs to be brought under control. In each of these cases, there is a clearly identified pain-point and a clear vision for what success looks like. Less often, organizations will ask for a vitamin – someone who can build organizational strength and capacity. Examples include coaching for senior leadership or setting up a mentoring program for novice teachers. Like vitamins, these are good for an organization’s health, but can also seem like a “nice-to-have” rather than a “must-have” for a cash-strapped school or nonprofit.  

What if all consultants were coaches? 

A recent conversation I had with Jimmy Henderson, CEO at EdFuel, brought up an interesting perspective. Jimmy suggested that short-term engagements in the social sector should not just be about doing the work, but also about building organizational capacity by exposing it to new ideas and helping develop staff expertise to carry the work forward. In terms of our analogy, social sector consulting engagements need to be set up so that they are not just painkillers, but also vitamins.

That’s an argument that’s hard to refute for those of us who have signed up to do purposeful and high-impact work. Indeed, some of the most successful consultants in our network see themselves as coaches, not just telling organizations what to do, but also teaching them how to do it. Yet, despite our stated commitment in the sector to teaching people to fish rather than just giving them fish, we don’t necessarily think in the same way when it comes to organizations. As a result, most projects are not explicitly set up with the understanding that organizations will learn alongside the consultant.

Teaching an organization to fish

Why don’t most projects include the vitamins in addition to the painkillers?

For starters, organizations are typically focused on solving the problem at hand, and it doesn’t occur to most of them – especially the ones that are less experienced at using short-term talent – to leverage their consultant talent in this way. Additionally, organization leaders often turn to consultants because their team doesn’t have the time and capacity to do the work – understandably, dedicating staff time to learning with the client can seem like a luxury they cannot afford [1]. A third issue revolves around money: Who should bear the cost for the added time invested by the consultant in training the staff? Given organizations’ limited budgets, anything that seems more oriented to long-term benefits rather than addressing the immediate challenge at hand is often the first to be left out of the project scope. A final concern is around consultant capacity. Not all consultants have the mindsets and skillsets required to be a trainer and coach. 

What might be some solutions to these challenges? Taking a cue from behavioral economics, we are nudging organizations by including a coaching component as a default option in every project that we scope out (although the decision on whether to keep it in there or remove it will continue to rest with the organization). Additionally, influential stakeholders (e.g., board members, funders, nonprofit incubators, etc.) can stress to organizations the importance of investing time and resources into learning from consultants and not just outsourcing to them. While organizations should ideally be willing to invest in building their capacities, funders might also want to take a more active role by showing a willingness to underwrite some of the costs.

There are also creative ways in which organizations can ensure that learning happens despite time constraints. A junior member of the team could be asked to work closely with the consultant, learning the ropes along the way. Weekly calls could be used as an opportunity to not just check in on the project’s progress, but also ask questions about how an analysis was conducted. Organizational leadership could ask to review notes from interviews and focus group discussions, so they can learn about what their constituents think more broadly rather than just relying on the sound bites that make it to the presentation deck.

Consultants also need to see themselves as coaches and build their coaching muscles. After all, people take painkillers only when there is pain, but they take their vitamins on an ongoing basis. More broadly, as consultants, we have the privilege of learning from every project that we work on – even when we are the experts. From that perspective, ensuring that organizations similarly learn from us is not just the smart thing to do, but also the right thing to do.

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Notes:

[1] If organizations had the time to dedicate to learning then couldn’t they just do the work themselves? Perhaps, but it would undoubtedly take them a lot longer to learn it without expert help. The benefit of working with an expert is that they can show you the right path quicker and get you to the desired destination more efficiently and with fewer false turns down the road.

 

The case for short-term talent in education

by General

Like all great conversations, this one left me with plenty to think about. A good friend and I had just spent an hour brainstorming ideas for building authorizer capacity. As we looked at our list, however, we realized that we had a problem. Much of the work needed expert short-term talent, and identifying, recruiting, vetting and matching talent to the work was a daunting task. Wasn’t it ironic, we mused, that education had a large, growing pool of experienced and expert professionals – yet schools and nonprofits that need expertise for short-term, mission-critical work find it difficult to access the right talent quickly, reliably and affordably? Wouldn’t it be great if there were a network of “catalysts” that organizations could call upon when the right opportunities for leveraging their expertise emerged?

Short-term talent as a solution to the “talent gap”: Education leaders identify a scarcity of expert talent as one of the biggest challenges facing their organizations. To meet this challenge, the sector has invested millions of dollars into developing its human capital resources and attracting high caliber new talent into the sector. Yet, although these efforts have been individually successful, they have barely made a dent at a systemic level as the demand for talent has outstripped its supply. Factors such as an increased focus on outcomes, more decentralized decision-making, emerging opportunities (e.g., technology in classrooms) and new challenges (e.g., more English language learners) have resulted in more schools and nonprofits looking for more expert help.

But what if we could extend the reach of the talent already present in the sector to deliver greater impact to more organizations? One way to do this would be for organizations to hire talent for high-leverage, short-term work structured to deliver results. An expert in early primary literacy would thus be able to work with more schools around the country, training more teachers and helping more children.

Short-term work doesn’t just enable us to amplify the impact of the best talent in the sector – it also enables innovation. A nonprofit recently asked us to help them find an expert on partnership development for a pilot initiative. Working with short-term talent rather than hiring a full time person allowed them to make a small investment on a new and unproven approach without compromising on quality. Short-term work also allows smaller organizations to afford expertise that would otherwise be out of their reach – some of our earliest clients were charter school applicants seeking coaches who could guide them through the process of applying for a charter and starting a new school.

“Like trying to find a needle in a haystack”: Recognizing the power of short-term talent, savvy school and nonprofit leaders have started to incorporate short-term hiring within their overall talent management strategy. Finding the right person for a mission-critical need is, however, easier said than done, and my conversations with education leaders prior to launching Catalyst:ED illustrated just how challenging the process could be. A school leader shared that it took her four months – almost half the school year – to find someone who could train her teachers on working with English language learner students. A nonprofit leader admitted that they hadn’t found an expert to develop their earned revenue plan – even though they had identified it as a strategic priority three years ago.

The expertise is out there. Here is a quick thought exercise: in a minute, how many folks can you name who are consulting, either full-time or on the side?. The challenge, though, is that the pool of short-term talent is highly fragmented and dispersed, making it difficult for organizations to find the right talent as and when they need it. There’s also very little reliable information to help organizations decide which of the available options might be the best fit.

A fragmented and dispersed market plus very little information is not a new problem. Consider the travel industry. Back in the day, if you were planning a vacation, you would ask friends and relatives and hope for recommendations, call 20 different hotels before finding one with available room, and then keep your fingers crossed till you got to the hotel and verified that it was indeed what you were hoping for. Today, we rely on platforms like Tripadvisor and AirBnB to show us our options and provide us with data and reviews, leading to better decisions in less time and with less worry.

Leveraging short-term expertise for long-term impact: Might we apply lessons from these models to address the challenges of accessing short-term talent in education without losing the personal touch? I think so. At Catalyst:ED (www.catalyst-ed.org), we are helping schools, school districts, and nonprofits connect with vetted, experienced and expert short-term talent for mission-critical needs. Mixed in with newer concepts like networks, algorithms and technology, is good old-fashioned matchmaking between organizations and talented individuals that we have invested time in getting to know. Here’s how it works: Organizations schedule a needs assessment call or use one of our starter scope templates to tell us what they’re looking for. We build out a custom project scope tailored to their needs and budget and then source talent that is the best “fit” from our network and through our referral partners. Organizations review profiles and bids from interested experts and decide whom they want to interview and work with. We check in during the project to ensure things are on track and, crucially, conduct a post-project evaluation on both sides to capture valuable lessons.

The results of our work so far indicate that we may be on to something: Compared to baseline data captured from our pre-launch surveys/interviews, the projects listed on our site were matched in less time (in two weeks on average, compared to 8-12 weeks), with more options (4 talent options on average per project, compared to 2) and with quality (every completed project has received a five-star rating from clients and consultants). Our clients say our services are “much needed”, “tremendously beneficial” and “a lifesaver”.

We have also laid the foundations for future growth. Our network of vetted experts is 200+ strong and consists of exceptional talent, ranging from independent consultants to boutique consulting firms to “diversifiers” – folks who have full-time jobs, but are open to side gigs that allow them to expand their impact. Schools, school districts, nonprofits, foundations and government agencies around the country are seeing us as a talent partner. And we are building out technology that will enable us to our work efficiently and effectively at scale.

To have an impact on the sector, we need to do much more. Next year, we will make 250 matches around the country and grow our network of experts to 1000+, so more organizations can access the expertise they need, when they need it. At that conversation over a coffee many months ago, we had wondered what education might look like if access to expertise was no longer a constraint. Would there be more innovation? Better results? More efficiencies? We can’t wait to find out.

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This is the first post in our blog “Talent Library”. We will be exploring some of themes of this blog post with greater depth in subsequent posts. Thoughts, ideas or feedback? Please use the “comments” section or email us at info@catalyst-ed.org. We would love to hear from you!