Why Working Ourselves Out of a Job is the (Counter-Intuitive) Goal

Lois Dodd, The Painted Room (1982). Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME.

Last month marked a few important professional moments for me and reaffirmed that in every client engagement, there comes a time to part ways. The first milestone was the wrapping-up of a nearly three-year campaign engagement with the Farnsworth Art Museum. The second milestone came as I toured the new 14,000 square-foot facility going up as a result of a different long-term campaign project with the Center for Wildlife. While not all of Brightspot’s projects are long-term in nature, campaign-related work – as these were – often stretch over a few years. 

For those unfamiliar, a campaign effort is launched when an organization is working to raise a significant amount in philanthropy to support a new building, program, or priority. This work is undertaken on top of existing programming and staff demands. For that reason (and others), hiring a consultant to serve as campaign counsel or campaign director can create the additional capacity and expertise needed to guide organizations through this period of flux and growth. 

My primary role as a consultant during a campaign engagement is to strategize and create the plan for how to secure the needed resources (read: dollars). But one of my secondary goals is to help build greater internal capacity so that one day the work I’m doing can be taken on in-house.  I’m glad to say that both of the campaign projects I referenced above ended with the organizations being in a position to take on the planning, strategy, research, and project management work themselves. This transition, and how to make this happen, looks different for different groups – sometimes, over the course of a campaign an organization has increased their annual fundraising and are in a position to hire additional staff. For other groups, a campaign effort can create systems and establish processes that weren’t there before, thus enabling an existing staff member to pick up where a consultant leaves off. 

While the campaign world is the one I’m most familiar with, this philosophy of working ourselves out of a job (as counter-intuitive as it may seem) is shared across all of our engagements. Crafting a development plan and supporting its implementation? Yes. Building a major donor program and systems to support it? You betcha. Grant prospecting and managing a grant program? Sure thing. Even board training – one day, that too could be taken on in-house and managed by a governance committee. 

One sign of success for us is when we examine projects as they close-out and feel confident the work won’t stop or sit on the (digital) bookshelf looking pretty, but will be embraced by staff who were part of the process and who understand why the time is right for them to carry it forward.