Welcome! You're here because you're thinking about hiring a consultant, or you already have one and want the engagement to go well, or you are a consultant working with the nonprofit, social change, and community-impact sectors. Either way, you're in the right place.
This is a free, searchable library of field-tested guides, templates, and case studies for nonprofits and their consultants. Every piece was written by a practicing consultant with deep experience in the social change sector, and every template is designed to be grabbed, adapted, and used immediately.
How to use this site
This isn't a 90-page PDF you'll download and never open. It's built for the moment you're in right now. See the whole library laid out here, or browse by the stage of the consulting journey you're navigating:
Finding & Selecting Consultants — How to know when you need outside help, where to look, what to watch for, and how to run a hiring process that actually surfaces the right partner.
Budget & Pricing — What consultants charge and why, how to negotiate scope within your budget, and the hidden costs most organizations don't plan for.
Setting Up for Success — Scoping the work, writing a good contract, getting the right people involved, and establishing clear communication from day one.
Managing the Engagement — What your role looks like once the work is underway, how to stay aligned, what to do when things go off track, and how to wrap up well and set your team up to carry the work forward.
What Good Looks Like — Real stories from real engagements — ones that worked, and ones that didn't — so you can learn from both.
You can also browse by content type. Guides are the essays — the thinking and advice behind good practice. Templates are the grab-and-go tools: checklists, conversation scripts, planning worksheets. Case Studies are the stories that put it all in context.
Start anywhere. Come back when you need the next piece.
Who made this
We're a group of consultants with decades of collective experience in the nonprofit and social change sector. We've worked in-house and externally, in roles ranging from fundraisers and executive coaches to writers, designers, data specialists, and strategists. We built this because we've seen — from both sides — how much easier consulting engagements go when everyone has good tools and shared language from the start.
This project was developed collaboratively through the Chorus Consultant Community and is maintained as a living resource. If you find something useful, borrow it. If you'd improve something, tell us. If you'd like to contribute, write it up and send it our way! And if you want to work with any of the people behind these pages, visit our contributor profiles — we're available for questions and for hire.
The contributors
Emily Berens · Allison Ehrich Bernstein · Amy Chen · Jasmine Daly · Izzy Goodman · Susannah Hook-Rodgers · Michaela Howard · Sam Landenwitsch · Danielle Lemi · Michele Levy
A note on how we built this
Every essay, template, and case study in this library was written by a named author drawing on their own experience. We peer-reviewed each other's work, argued about scope and framing, and tried to write the resource we wished had existed when we were starting out. Nothing here was generated by AI, though some of us used AI tools in our drafting processes — and we wrote a whole section on navigating AI use in consulting engagements, because we think that transparency matters.
This is a living project. We plan to update, add to, and refine it over time. If you have a suggestion, a correction, or a story of your own, we'd love to hear from you.