Social Impact Consulting (read time: 14 min)

Written By Second Day

So you want to work in Social Impact Consulting?

Social impact consulting includes any sort of work where you are advising or supporting nonprofits, government, philanthropy, or other organizations focused on doing good in the world. An upside of this industry is that you generally have very focused training and feedback from managers. These organizations are generally better resourced, which allows for a higher salary and generally more time to invest in your own professional development. The promotion pathways are clear, and there are a range of exit opportunities available. Hiring timelines, particularly for larger firms, can provide more certainty for you than most nonprofits.

A downside of social impact consulting is that this work can often feel quite distant from the “actual impact.” If you are hoping for greater exposure to the issues you are working on, consulting can feel very abstract and distanced. Many of these firms are highly competitive and require more interview prep than a typical interview. However, if you are eager to learn quickly and enjoy analytical work, social impact consulting is one of the best ways to launch a social impact career!

If this career path sounds exciting to you, this guide will take you through everything you need to know about working in social impact consulting. To inform our work, Second Day has spoken to experts in the field and gathered the best information out there for upcoming and recent graduates. First, the guide will take you through the different entry-level positions to look out for in this field. Then, we’ll provide tips on actually getting those jobs. We’ll finish with our next three steps: actionable items you can take to make progress towards finding your first job in Social Impact Consulting. Let’s get started!

This guide was written by Phil Dearing in partnership with the Second Day team.

Many thanks to experts in the field who supported this work:

  • Clara Cecil, Former Consultant, Censeo Consulting

  • Ronak Parikh, Consultant, Bridgespan

  • Garrett Ulosevich, Founder, Bell Creek Consulting

What types of jobs are out there?

Social impact consultancies range from a few employees to hundreds or thousands of them. Tasks for each organization and role range quite widely. The title for someone hired out of college is usually something like analyst, associate, or consultant. Here are some examples to demonstrate the range of things that you can do in an entry-level role:

  • You could help a nonprofit develop a strategy to expand to new states or restructure their team. Typical tasks include researching how other comparable organizations do things, finding potential funders, designing slide decks to present your findings, or creating a sample budget

  • You could help a foundation evaluate the demographics of its portfolio or identify potential new grantees focused on a specific issue

  • You could create a research report on trends in your specific sector (e.g., talent practices, funding trends)

  • You could help a federal agency develop its strategic plan, redesign its organizational structure and training offerings to better support its employees, or modernize business processes and IT systems to more efficiently match grant funding with communities in need

  • You could help nonprofits develop new fundraising strategies or operate as an outsourced fundraiser for a specific duration of time

  • You could help develop a new marketing or branding strategy, run communications as an outsourced provider, or help to bring in senior-level talent as a recruiter for any type of organization focused on social good

At its core, a “consulting” firm gets its name from the fact that it completes projects for another entity that pays for that work. Those entities “consult” your firm for its advice or work. Most consulting organizations operate in a pyramid structure, where executives or partners sell new projects to clients, while more junior-level folks execute on the work. Many times, your role will start in the background—doing research, drafting emails, and creating slides for the more senior folks at your firm to use with clients. Over time, you often gain more exposure to clients or partners, presenting materials that you weighed in on, giving advice, and building personal relationships. For some organizations, it can take several years to increase client interaction, while for others, it happens quite quickly.

Some firms are hyper-focused (e.g., only do outsourced fundraising for nonprofits in Cleveland), while others are much more general (e.g., do a range of tasks for a range of different types of organizations). It’s not always clear from the website what the work actually is, so it can be valuable to reach out to someone at the organization for an informational interview to learn more about what the organization actually does.

Categories of Social Impact Consulting Firms

While there are a lot of subtleties across the work, we’ve tried to create some tags and frameworks to help you wrap your arms around this industry. In the social impact consulting database, we use two key tags.

Type of client

These are general tags to give you a quick sense of what work firms do. In practice, these categories blur together and aren’t perfectly comprehensive.

  • Nonprofits - work supporting nonprofits to grow and improve their impact in the world.

  • Philanthropy - helping institutional philanthropy, individuals, or family foundations to improve their giving practices, source additional grantees, or grow their work

  • Private sector - assisting corporations to develop their philanthropic strategy, measure or mitigate their environmental impact, or support impact investments

  • Public sector - supporting the government to do their work more effectively or expansively. It includes both local and federal government work. For now, we are particularly focused on organizations that support government work around the safety net and human services, because that seems like the most clearly impact-focused government work. We may include more public sector firms in the future as we refine a framework for what work qualifies as impact-focused

  • Global - conducting work in offices globally or working with stakeholders based around the world. Because of our networks and knowledge, we are mostly focused on US-based roles for now, but want to flag firms working globally if that is of interest to you

Type of consulting advice

We tried to add tags for the type of work that these organizations do with their clients across the sectors listed above. The categories aren’t perfect, but should give you a good initial sense of their work.

  • Strategy consulting - developing strategic plans, clarifying goals, or helping with key organizational decisions

  • Implementation and operations - running outsourced programs, facilitating change-management within an organization, or helping with tactical program support

  • IT consulting - bringing in, developing, or integrating new technological systems to improve the effectiveness of organizations

  • HR consulting - supporting the people operations and strategy of organizations, including outsourced support

  • Fundraising consulting - helping organizations to improve their fundraising strategy and execution, including outsourced support

  • Communications consulting - helping organizations to improve their communications, marketing, brand, and social media work, including outsourced support and strategy

  • Research and analysis - conducting evaluations of programs, developing custom reports, and using other data-based approaches to support the work of organizations

  • General consulting - this category is used for firms that (1) provide a wide range of services for specific types of clients, (2) are vague publicly about the specifics of their work, or (3) do some type of work that wasn’t common enough to create a whole new category for yet

You can check out our directory of social impact consulting firms and sort them by type, along with several other criteria!

What are common pay and promotion timelines?

We generally categorize social impact consulting roles into five categories:

  • Internships. These can be for either undergrads or grad students and are typically paid. Pay ranges vary based on hours of work and experience, but likely fit between $2K-$10K for a summer or semester internship. These are very often a gateway into full-time work if there is mutual interest.

  • Entry-level roles. These are full-time roles for someone with 0-3 years of full-time work experience. Typical titles include associate, analyst, or consultant. These roles typically pay between $45,000 and $75,000, with the opportunity to advance into more responsibilities and a higher salary fairly quickly.

  • Mid-level roles. These are roles for someone between 2-8 years of experience. Typical titles include senior associate, consultant, and project manager. Generally, this work entails more client-facing work, but still a lot of individual research and development. It often includes coaching more junior staff and sometimes managing them. These roles may pay between $60,000 and $150,000 depending on the resources of the organization and your experience.

  • Senior-level roles. These are roles for someone with 8+ years of experience. Typical role titles include manager, principal, or partner. These are senior roles focused on managing teams and projects, along with client business development. Experience managing teams, existing relationships that might bring in work, and prior work in consulting are typical qualifications here. Salary will vary widely depending on the firm and how much business you bring in but may range from $120,000 to more than $300,000.

  • Contract work. These are time-delimited opportunities to help on a specific project. In general, firms bring on contractors when they need a specific skillset or surge capacity for a really busy period. The pay, experience, and timeframe vary quite widely. There is a whole industry of independent consultants that have their rates and many social impact firms will have a network of referrals to send on or contract with.

One huge upside of social impact consulting is that promotion pathways are generally more clear, accessible, and predictable than in other social impact spaces. Most firms are built on a pyramid model. That means that most cases have a partner that sells the work and manages the relationship with a client, a project manager that is in charge of driving forward the workplan and coordinating the team, and a group of analysts that do the core research, interviewing, and analysis that is needed.

If you start as an analyst or associate, you will get the chance to work with and learn from more senior team members. Because you will often shift from project to project, you might get the chance every few months to take on a new level of responsibility. Eventually, you can get promoted to a team leader or manager. In that role, you also get the chance to learn about building relationships with clients and selling work until you’ve built up enough of a track record to get promoted to a principal or partner role. The exact promotion timeline varies based on your rate of learning, norms within the organization, and whether they expect grad school as a prerequisite for promotion to certain positions. Increasingly, firms are not requiring graduate school and there are a number of instances of associates moving up to senior-level partners over time.

What about big consulting firms?

This guide covers firms that are primarily focused on social impact work. However, you may have heard of the huge corporate consulting firms like Deloitte or McKinsey that tout their social impact work. These corporations know that students are driven to make the world a better place, so they go out of their way to emphasize those mission-oriented opportunities. However, it is important to understand how and if you will actually have the chance to work on those projects. Second Day has talked to dozens of young professionals that felt misled by recruiters about the potential to do social impact work at big consulting firms. Many of these consultants found ways to volunteer outside of their normal corporate workload through programs like Inspire, or they got onto “real” pro bono/impact work after a few years at the organization. Because so many people want to make a positive influence on the world while also being paid well, placement on these projects is highly competitive. And at the same time, these teams rarely bring much revenue to the organization, so most firms limit how many impact-driven opportunities they take on per year. Finally, consultants that do get placed on impact-driven projects sometimes suffer lower pay and slower promotion timelines.

This doesn’t mean that going to work at a big consulting firm is always a bad option. Working at one of these firms for a few years can position you quite well to transition into a Social Impact Consulting firm or other types of impact work. Just make sure to go in with eyes wide open—knowing that (1) you likely won’t get to do much substantive impact work and (2) these firms do everything in their power to make it hard to leave. The big consulting firms have spent millions of dollars optimizing incentives so that path dependency kicks in—there is always a new promotion opportunity around the corner, an enticing salary, sponsored graduate school, or the fear of the unknown to keep you from leaving the firm. If you are committed to working for a big consulting firm and transitioning later, be sure to create a solid accountability plan and timeline before you get sucked into these incentives.

How to get a job in social impact consulting

Larger social impact consulting firms tend to have very structured application and interview processes. Usually, large firms have a defined timeline and application process, with multiple rounds of interviews. The specifics of this process should be explained on the firm’s website. If you see a job posting on their website or your career center portal, you can apply knowing that they will very likely consider your application fully and respond in a timely fashion. For some firms, there is no benefit to networking, but many firms use a recommendation system (where a current employee can email the recruiting team to recommend you). This means different things for different places—sometimes it helps to automatically advance you to the second round, while other times it is just one of many factors that the recruiting team considers. If you know someone at the organization you are applying to or feel like you charmed them during a conversation, you can ask if they have a recommendation system. This never hurts, and can really help!

On the other hand, smaller organizations don’t often post their job openings publicly. Because they are small, they are more likely to hire someone to start as soon as possible when they sell a new piece of work or someone leaves. For these organizations, it’s much more important to connect with people working there so that they know who you are and think of you when an opportunity arises. If their website doesn’t list any open positions or a clear hiring process, you can email them and ask if there is a typical hiring process or timeline for their organization. Sometimes, they do case interviews or work samples, but the application process varies significantly.

Some social impact consulting firms offer internships, although these opportunities are not as established as the internship programs at corporate consulting firms. The larger organizations will often have larger internship programs and the smaller organizations will often have more informal internships. It is rarely (if ever) required to have interned at an organization in order to get hired full-time after you graduate.

Application tips

The best practices for your resume, cover letter, and any short answer questions that your career center touches on certainly apply here. Use the STAR method, and articulate in your cover letter why you are interested in working at that particular organization. You don’t need to spend hours obsessively researching every project the firm has done, but you should be able to cite a specific example or two. If you are planning to apply to several social impact consulting organizations, we recommend creating a template of a resume and a cover letter for those jobs as early as possible. In those documents, try to highlight some of the qualities that these firms are looking for, including:

  • Comfort with quantitative analysis. If you’ve done any sort of quantitative research/analysis, classes, or have handled a budget for an organization, this can show you are comfortable with the financial implications of whatever you are working on.

  • Leadership and team-building skills. If you’ve been involved in leadership for student activities or groups, led a project at work, or otherwise demonstrated that you know how to work with others effectively, make sure to note that.

  • Experience with social impact work. It is great to highlight your personal experience and any work you’ve done to create a more just world. A demonstrated interest and knowledge of social change initiatives is a common screen as well.

Getting through the initial application screen is usually the hardest part. Some organizations have 100 or more people apply for each available opportunity. If you advance past the initial interview round, there are typically 2-3 rounds of interviews. The first round often includes a case interview (more details below) or other work sample so that they can understand how you work. The final round often involves traveling to the office for the interview to meet more individuals and determine fit (along with perhaps a more rigorous case interview or work sample). These case interviews might sound intimidating, but they are a specific process that you can learn and thrive at!

Interview tips

Many organizations do case interviews as part of their interview process. This is a very specific type of interview and ~5 hours of practice goes a long way. Case in Point is the classic book that many people use for for-profit case preparation. The introduction and process tips are fairly relevant to social impact consulting, but the specific frameworks and problem types are less applicable. Instead of figuring out how a company can make more money, you’ll be charged with figuring out how an organization can have a greater impact. The math tips from Case in Point still apply and the advice on clearly articulating your thinking still apply, but don’t bother with the for-profit frameworks. Instead, we’ve included the ‘FINCOR’ framework that is more useful in impact-related case interviews below. If you receive an interview offer or are really eager to practice, we recommend doing 3-5 social impact practice cases with a friend before your first interview until you feel comfortable. Here are some examples, and some organizations will also provide you with additional practice cases. If you have friends that went through the for-profit consulting interview process, they would likely be glad to help practice interviewing with some of those examples—just make sure they don’t pressure you to focus too much on profit and loss.

Social impact case interviews

Sample cases with answers

Other resources or ideas to practice

  • If you go to a website for a firm and see more about stories of their impact, you can create your own sort of case study. To do this, read the context at the beginning and try to think about some of the key questions that the client might be asking. Develop your approach and the key factors you would consider and then read about what the firm did. Here are some examples from Redstone and here are some examples from FSG.

  • If you are struggling with the math in particular, using for-profit cases is a great way to practice that aspect. You can disregard the rest of those cases if you want.

  • If you are looking for general case tips, check out this Victor Cheng series, these resources from Cornell, and the free resources on Management Consulted.

Where to find jobs + resources

There is no good, centralized hub of Social Impact Consulting organizations. Below, we’ve compiled a list of firms that we have heard of or encountered in our work, but there are hundreds of other small nonprofit consulting organizations focused on a particular region or a particular topic (e.g., fundraising, accounting, marketing, etc.)

Exit opportunities

Typical exit opportunities include switching to another social impact consulting firm or going to work directly for one of your clients (e.g., a foundation or nonprofit). It’s not unusual to go to graduate school or to pivot into a more corporate role, since “consulting” is generally valued as more of a transferable experience than other nonprofit roles.

Next three steps

  1. Create a list of 5-15 organizations that you are interested in, and add them to a spreadsheet. Look up when the application deadline is for each to make sure you don’t miss them (some are as early as September of your senior year). If you are interested in a smaller firm, do some internet searching for ‘nonprofit consulting firm + (location you want to work in)’ or ‘best (marketing/HR/whatever specialty) nonprofit consulting firms’

  2. Draft an updated resume and cover letter template for social impact consulting specifically. The resume should be one page, with the detail and focused mentioned in the ‘application tips’ section of this guide

  3. Reach out for questions or more information to people working at the organization if you are interested in learning more or if they have a less formalized hiring process.

Last updated: July 2021

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