Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Effective Consulting Partnerships To Philanthropy, Ellen Irie, Kim Ammann Howard, Ria Sengupta Bhatt, Naomi Orensten

The Foundation Review

This article explores the realm of partnerships among consultants who are supporting philanthropy, surfaces the forms those philanthropy-consulting partnerships take, and describes their benefits and inherent challenges. It also describes what foundations most need to know about initiating and supporting philanthropy-consulting partnerships.

Types of consulting partnerships are a function of the needs they address and the contexts in which they were initiated. A useful way of looking at consulting partnerships is according to their structure – whether the relationship with the client is primarily horizontal or vertical in nature. In a vertical structure, a client hires a consultant, who in …