Abstract
When considering the impact consultants have on nonprofit organizations, it is often assumed that consultants reshape organizations by encouraging business-oriented strategies and processes. In How Consultants Shape Nonprofits: Shared Values, Unintended Consequences, Leah Margareta Gazzo Reisman offers a richly detailed ethnographic account that moves beyond this view of consultants as transmitters of strategy. Drawing on 14 months of immersive fieldwork with four consulting firms, where the author participated in strategic planning meetings, internal firm operations, and conducted 180 interviews, the book makes a compelling argument that consulting in the nonprofit sector is neither a direct transfer of corporate practices nor a neutral facilitation process. Instead, it is relational, emotional, deeply interpretive, and riddled with power dynamics that structure organizational decision making. Central to this account is the concept of empathetic customization, which captures how consultants tailor frameworks, data practices, and facilitation styles to fit a client’s context while simultaneously reproducing sector norms and reinforcing power dynamics.
In the opening chapter of Part 1, readers are introduced to the rhythms and tensions of consulting work through an illustrative vignette of a strategic planning meeting at a science museum. This entry point exemplifies Reisman’s methodological strength in her ability to capture how consultants translate abstract concepts into lived organizational moments. Through outlining a brief history of consulting, a core tension is brough to light in the dual view of consultants as generators of legitimacy in managerial decisions and organizational change contrasting the view that consultants are con artists selling substance-less solutions (Reisman, p. 9). Reisman frames this tension as a central paradox: consultants meaningfully support nonprofits in navigating strategic uncertainty while also inadvertently reinforcing industry norms, stakeholder hierarchies, and funder-oriented priorities.
A major contribution of this book is in the careful mapping of the nonprofit consulting field. Reisman emphasizes the heterogeneity of consulting firms operating in a sector guided heavily by funder investments and lacking clear professional standards. Through comparative analysis, Reisman distinguishes between corporate consulting firms, large nonprofit-focused firms, small generalist firms, and small subfield specialist firms. She finds that corporate and large firms tend to implement standardized business frameworks and quantitative assessments, while small and specialized firms leverage qualitative methods, co-creation, and hire professionals with sector-specific expertise. Rather than presenting these approaches as competing models, Reisman demonstrates how consulting practices are shaped by firm size, specialization, and client context.
Part 2 explores the central analytic contribution, empathetic customization, which emerged through close observation of how consultants at small firms adapt strategic tools for various nonprofit clients. Reisman critically unpacks this theme by reviewing shared frameworks such as Drucker’s Theory of Business and explaining how theoretical frameworks are not treated as fixed strategies, but as flexible and customizable tools. This analysis demonstrates another methodological strength of the book, where Raisman reviews and interprets artifacts including games, conversation guides, and evaluation tools to show how the context, content, and structure of consulting tools are adjusted. The artifacts reveal that while time intensive and inefficient from a technical standpoint, empathetic customization is essential for building trust and facilitating productive dialogue. Reisman acknowledges how empathetic customization originated from shared frameworks and disseminates common business language to the non-profit sector. The process by which consultants made these customizations demonstrates the emotional labor of facilitation, the interpretive work of strategic planning, and interpersonal negotiations that shape organizational decision making.
Customization also shapes consultants’ research and data sharing strategies and differs substantially from social science practices. Rather than using data to access objective realities, consultants use data to intervene in organizational relationships, prompt discussion, and catalyze sensemaking among stakeholders. Consultants prioritize directional accuracy and stakeholder validation over methodological precision, relying on participant recognition to determine whether findings “fit” organizational experience. These practices further distinguish consulting work from professionalized social sciences research and underscore the relational nature of nonprofit consulting work.
Part 3 explores the unintended consequences of consulting. Reisman argues that the practices consultants use during strategic planning encourage nonprofits to replicate common existing practices because they are viewed as fundable and feasible to implement. In this dynamic, common practices are best practices, and consultants rarely advise clients to use innovative new approaches. In addition, the way consultants learn about their clients’ histories, contexts, and potential strategic directions are shaped by the consultants’ own subjective judgments and professional networks. This subjectivity is evident in choices such as which peer institutions are selected for benchmarking and which stakeholders are prioritized for input. When consultants focus disproportionately on funders, senior leaders, and high-status partners, the perspectives of frontline staff, service recipients, and community members are often minimized or excluded. As a result, the strategic plans consultants produce tend to reinforce prevailing industry norms and prioritize the interests of organizational elites and funders.
Reisman’s work is commendable for its empirical rigor and conceptual clarity. The analysis deepens institutional theory by revealing how consultants’ micro-level practices such as benchmarking, framework customization, and stakeholder prioritization embed and reproduce broader norms related to funder influence, managerialism, and conceptions of “best practices”. At the same time, the book raises important questions about governance, stakeholder voice, peer comparison, and power, offering insights that resonate across public administration, philanthropy, and organizational studies. The findings are relevant to nonprofit leaders, funders, scholars, and researchers interested in the complexities of intermediary actors and the dynamics of organizational decision-making, making it a valuable resource for both academic and practitioner audiences.
Although the book offers substantial practical relevance, its primary limitation is generalizability. Reisman’s focus on small and mid-sized consulting firms, an appropriate choice given their prevalence and accessibility for ethnographic research, means that the study does not fully account for the practices of large firms. These larger firms, which are acknowledged as influential in shaping standardized approaches and disseminating business models across the sector, were not examined due to limited access to their internal processes. In addition, the narrow focus on strategic planning raises the question of whether the theoretical concept of empathetic customization would be seen in other consulting domains such as fundraising and marketing. The nature of strategic planning may be inherently customized due to the work directly involving an organization’s unique mission, vision, and context.
Overall, How Consultants Shape Nonprofits is thought-provoking and timely work. In a sector increasingly supported by external advisors for strategy planning and capacity building, the book invites readers to look more deeply at the impact these external actors have on nonprofit organizations.
