Invisible Architects: Rethinking Consultancy in Philanthropy's Ecosystem

Consultancy Work • By Nora Marketos • Published on January 13

On a typical Tuesday morning, a consultant adjusts her laptop camera, the familiar grid of a Teams call filling her screen. Between muted microphones and shared slides, she offers a nuanced perspective that transcends the digital interface — insights distilled from years of work across multiple foundations. While massive consulting firms populate the meeting with polished presentations and pitches, her quiet expertise speaks volumes — a perspective often overlooked, yet potentially transformative for the philanthropic landscape.

In today's newsletter edition I want to share some reflections about my experience stemming from two years of consulting work, both as an individual freelancer and as part of a smaller boutique consultancy firm. I complement this with my decade of experience as a staff of a major philanthropic foundation having engaged several consulting firms and individual consultants to advance its programs and strategies. It's an interesting world often overlooked when analyzing funder and grantee relationships. While my experience stems mostly from the philanthropic foundation world, I see parallels for the broader institutional donor context.

The Consultancy Constellation: Beyond the Obvious

The world of philanthropic consulting is not a monolithic structure but a complex ecosystem with distinct players, each bringing unique value to the table:

The Corporate Giants

Firms like Dalberg , IDinsight, RTI International , Mathematica and Results for Development represent the heavyweight champions of consulting. With staff numbering 100 or up to several 1000s, they offer:

  • Comprehensive, sophisticated infrastructure
  • Ability to handle large-scale, complex projects
  • Extensive research and presentation capabilities, as well as global networks

However, their scale comes with inherent limitations:

  • Often more bureaucratic and slower to adapt
  • Higher operational costs translate to expensive services
  • Risk of standardized approaches that might miss nuanced contextual insights


Boutique Firms: The Specialized Craftsmen

These smaller teams (2-30 staff) are the sector's precision instruments, specialized in areas like:

Their strength lies in focused expertise and agility, though they might struggle with resource-intensive proposals and broader implementation. They usually work with a lean core team who have acquired and an extended pool of associated consultants.


The Individual Consultant: An Underappreciated Resource

Here lies the most intriguing and in my view often undervalued segment of the consulting world. I've come across many impressive individual consultants that are not just service providers; they are adaptive, insights-rich professionals who can fundamentally reframe how philanthropic foundations approach challenges.

Hidden Advantages of Individual Consultants

1. Organizational Adaptability: Unlike larger structures, individual consultants can seamlessly integrate into existing team dynamics, quickly understanding and respecting internal cultures, leverage points and barriers.

2. Specialized fractional expertise at affordable cost: small to medium-sized foundations requiring very specific expertise often don't have the means of hiring a full-time staff and thus resort to a one-off consultancy. However, very often the reports and recommendations of those consultancies are left somewhere in the archives getting dusty while the foreseen change might not realize. A fractional, part-time individual consultant, on the other hand, is highly specialized and can become part of the team to ensure effective alignment with work culture and sustained impact over time.

2. Cross-Pollination of Insights: By working with multiple clients simultaneously, these professionals develop a unique ability to identify hidden synergies among different foundations and innovative solutions that might escape more siloed philanthropic approaches with large consultancy firms.

3. Informal Collaboration Catalyst: Their network-weaving capabilities can subtly lay groundwork for potential funder collaborations, creating awareness of joint areas of strategic interests and priorities without the need for foundations to go through time-intensive formal platforms or processes.

4. Bureaucratic Flexibility: With minimal administrative overhead, individual consultants offer streamlined, cost-effective engagement models.


Systemic Challenges

Yet, the path of individual consultants to fully take advantage of these potential strengths is not without significant hurdles:

  • Limited visibility and capacity in succeeding at public proposal processes: individual freelance consultants don't have the bandwidth to compete with medium or larger firms who have dedicated proposal writing departments who just do that. It is hard to keep up and stand out in those application processes if you are not having a direct connection to the hiring institution.
  • Lack of awareness of fractional work option among foundations and funders: compared to the communication, IT and design sector, I have hardly seen or heard of fractional leaders working with foundations or other institutional donors. Which I find surprising, given the usually very specific mission areas or approaches which require deep expertise which not all foundations might be able to fully pay for.
  • Competitive environments that discourage knowledge sharing: while there is some communication among individual consultants about current proposals and bidding processes, given it's a small and also very often a closed world there is only limited information shared around the proposals, the approaches and the learnings themselves.
  • Difficulty in creating sustainable collaborative networks: linked to the previous point I miss a more targeted approach for finding suitable collaborators among individual and consultancy firms depending on the call for proposals, or for exchanging on key learnings and approaches in a given sub-sector. While funders and grantees usually do organize themselves in networks, I find it much more limited in the consultancy world where there is much more richness of knowledge given the simultaneous insights into various funders/programs/initiatives that these individuals have.


Reimagining the Ecosystem: A Call to Collaboration and Learning

We've seen that the philanthropic sector stands at a critical juncture. New approaches and strategic priorities such as trust-based and flexible funding, funder collaboratives and systems change require foundations also to rethink the way they harness the required expertise within the sector at an affordable cost and in a sustainable manner. In my view, the cumulative potential of individual and boutique consultancies as ecosystem pillars are underused and not truly harnessed. That's why I dare to pose these "what if" questions to invite you to re-imagine the current consultancy ecosystem:

  • What if foundations rethink the current way of hiring and embrace fractional experts working on a part-time basis with several foundations simultaneously?
  • What if we set up collaborative platforms for knowledge exchange and regular collaborations on consultancy mandates among individual consultants and boutique consultancy firms?
  • What if we review the formal public call for proposal process altogether and think about match-making options that value diverse expertise?
  • What if we try to find mechanisms to capture and disseminate individual consultant insights?
  • How can we best recognize the unique value individual professionals bring?


The Way Forward

Foundations, funders, and consultants can all win if we co-create more inclusive, dynamic engagement models that break down existing structural barriers.

The future of philanthropic consulting isn't about size—it's about depth of insight, adaptability, and genuine commitment to driving meaningful change. Jointly.