July 18, 2023 • Written By Matt Reamy
Part I: Designed for equity: A new service that connects social sector organizations to expert skill building, training, and advice—and independent contractors to fractional work opportunities
TL;DR: We’re launching an Expert Advisory service that matches social sector professionals to experienced mentors to build skills and knowledge. And we’re putting our money where our mouth is—while other companies who aggregate, assign, and support fractional work take 50-60% of the money in profit, we’re starting at 35% for both our Fractional Capacity and Expert Advisory services work services with the goal of minimizing as we scale.
One of my first jobs was working at Teach For America (TFA), recruiting program applicants at Ivy League schools. I felt out of my depth.
Having grown up in Oklahoma in a big family where almost nobody went to college, I constantly felt that I was speaking and moving in a way that clashed with my environment. It seemed that the acceptable way of managing stress was to hide it, and I didn’t know how to hide mine. I also didn’t know how to present ideas succinctly—a challenge that I’ve worked on throughout my career. It was also my first time managing another colleague, Gina. We were regularly working over 90 hours a week, and I struggled to manage another person with empathy while managing my own anxiety. In turn, Gina struggled to express her needs to me. Three months into our jobs, we were both burned out.
Luckily, our team lead Katie had substantial management experience and taught us to find professional balance and communicate with each other. Over the three years that we worked together, Gina and I consistently performed in the top 5% of TFA recruiters. Perhaps more importantly, we went on to build a productive—and lasting—working relationship centered on respect, balance, and kindness; in fact, fifteen years down the road, we are working together again, with Gina managing infrastructure at RCG!
In their 2021 Nonprofit Talent Retention Practices Survey, Nonprofit HR found that a top reason that people leave nonprofits is a lack of growth opportunity. Katie’s early investment in my growth meant that I would continue to work at TFA for a decade.
But in retrospect, I realize how lucky and unique it was to have a supervisor with the capacity to develop my skills. Beyond Katie’s own expertise, TFA was an organization of more than 2,000 people, which afforded countless examples of colleague-to-colleague coaching. In contrast, 84% of nonprofits in the U.S employ less than 50 staff and, recently, ongoing layoffs have meant that social sector workers often find themselves as the only person or one of a few people in their roles, without colleagues who can coach, support, and guide them. In fact, RCG clients continuously raise two recurring capacity challenges in supporting growth:
An employee lacks some of the knowledge or skills they need to do their job, but their manager lacks the bandwidth or expertise to support them.
A leader who is navigating a strategic decision doesn’t have anybody they can turn to for advice.
This summer, I’m proud to officially launch RCG’s Expert Advisory service to address these challenges. We’ve built an ever-growing network of vetted advisors with social sector expertise ranging from fundraising and development to people management and board governance.
It’s a straightforward process. An organization comes to us with a challenge. We recommend a few vetted advisors from our network who can provide them with the coaching and consultation they need to thrive. The org meets with the recommended advisors, they make a match, and voila! Growth starts to happen.
Mitigating the inequity of social capital in the social sector
The Expert Advisory service is a natural outgrowth of the fractional work services we’ve been offering mission-driven organizations for years, matching them with the extra hands they needed to build functional capacity (e.g. communications directors or development operations contractors).
If you’re unfamiliar with the term “fractional work,” it’s exactly what it sounds like: an employment model in which someone sells fractions of their work time to multiple employers. Freelancers and independent consultants, for example, belong to the fractional workforce.
Fractional work has been a buzzword in the for-profit vernacular for some time. People love writing about it in relation to other corporate buzzy topics—e.g. remote work, gig economies, looming recessions, startups, and of course AI. These articles are all pretty laudatory of fractional work. They note that, in addition to benefiting from outside advice and support, organizations who employ fractional capacity avoid the time and expense of hiring staff. On the flipside, fractional workers get the benefits of independence and flexibility.
What none of these articles address is the equity issues of fractional work—specifically, what does fractional work cost and who has the opportunity to access it?
Let’s start with cost. Other services that match fractional workers to (usually for-profit) organizations’ needs are exorbitantly priced, taking anywhere from 50-65 cents on the dollar to aggregate, assign, and support fractional work. Especially given that RCG serves a social sector powered by social dollars, this kind of transaction didn’t sit well with us. As with all our services, we wanted to design an Expert Advisory service that lives our commitment to: pay people fairly, honor social sector resource limitations, and ensure our own stability as an organization without over-dialing on profit.
So, after months of wrangling numbers and forecasts, we’re putting this commitment in ink: we will start by taking 35 cents on the dollar to cover the costs of aggregating, matching, and supporting fractional work—in both our Fractional Capacity and Expert Advisory services. Our explicit goal will be to reduce this percentage over time as we reach economies of scale.
Next, who has the opportunity to engage in fractional work? Technically, anybody. But social capital holds a lot of weight in the fractional employment landscape, where independent consultants rely on their networks even more than their credentials to score contracts.
Case in point: one of my first fractional work experiences was consulting a large charter school network on their talent acquisition strategy and execution. Even though I didn’t have any prior consulting experience, they were confident in working with me because of my TFA connections; in fact, I’d heard about the opportunity in the first place through a former TFA colleague.
It’s natural for people to refer people they know to other people they know, or for them to vouch for people they know. It’s the easiest way to vet. But the preponderance of social capital means that a lot of smart and skilled people—especially those whose social networks do not overlap with predominant social networks—are denied access to fractional work, and organizations lose out on great talent and diverse perspectives.
We see our Expert Advisory service as a way to aggregate, connect, and support fractional work in a way that alleviates individual need for social capital, evens the playing field, and expands the talent pool to which mission-driven organizations have access. In fact, if you’re reading this and are interested in contributing your skills and knowledge to a diverse range of clients, apply to our Expert Advisory network!
In the next issue, we will offer a guide for organizations to successfully employ fractional work, using the lens of RCG’s own successes and failures over the past few years. Until then!
Ghostwritten by April Bo Wang, founder of Little Tiger Strategic Storytelling, who has been advising RCG on our storytelling and communications strategy in a fractional capacity. If your organization needs this type of support, you should totally hire her.