Build the business behind your nonprofit expertise

Relatable Nonprofit helps nonprofit professionals turn their expertise into a consulting business with steady clients and income.

Explore the Mentorship

As featured in

Catalina Parker has been featured in Forbes, Business Insider, Fast Company, Devex, and Motherly

The five foundations of a nonprofit consulting business

Consulting comes with a second job: running the business. You already know how to help nonprofits. Getting clients and steady income comes down to five foundations:

Offers
What you sell, who it's for, and what you charge.
Marketing
How you talk about your value and how the right clients find you.
Sales
Knowing where your next clients are coming from, and turning conversations into signed proposals.
Client delivery
How you onboard clients and communicate with them, so expectations stay clear and the work stays in scope.
Operations
Your numbers and the back end: tracking what matters and knowing when to hire help.

All five can be learned, and you don't have to figure them out alone.

Results from the Mentorship

Erin PeshoffErin was consulting on the side when she lost her job a few months into the Mentorship. Working the outreach challenge, she built a $227,000 pipeline of proposals, and within about a month she had finalized three contracts.Read Erin's story Jamie McDonaldA former executive director, Jamie packaged and priced her expertise, launched about a month in, and signed her first retainer client five months in.Read Jamie's story John GattisJohn found his niche, started moving to value-based pricing, and landed new clients through his network and his outreach.Read John's story Shelby SchmidtShelby found her niche in fractional fundraising, and her first business payment nearly covered what she’d paid for the program.Read Shelby's story

I had the nonprofit expertise. I had to learn the business side.

Hi, I'm Cat. At 24, I became a program officer at a $500M foundation. It looked perfect on paper, but I was miserable, and my health and family were paying for it. So I left and started consulting.

My first year went well because my clients came from people I already knew. Then my network ran out, and I realized I didn't have a business. I had a few clients and no plan for getting the next ones. It took years of trial and error, and some expensive mistakes, to learn how to turn my nonprofit expertise into clear, profitable offers, find clients beyond referrals, and manage those clients without the work taking over my life.

Since 2021, my business has generated nearly $1 million in revenue. I still consult, but most of my work now is teaching other nonprofit consultants what I learned the hard way. So far, 100+ nonprofit professionals have joined the Mentorship, where I help them build businesses that pay the bills and let them do meaningful work on their own terms.

Read my story