FAQ
Q. What is Micro-Consulting?
A. Micro-Consulting is extremely small scale consulting on short term projects for an organization in need.
Q. What does MCforNC do?
A. Please see our services.
Q. How much do these services cost?
A. MCforNC charges a nominal fee for its services to sustain our operations. The fee for our services is highly discounted as our entire mission is to use the skillsets of motivated student volunteers to help nonprofits with knowledge-specific or technical projects.
Q. What is the competition of MCforNC?
A. There are a variety of other consulting organizations. Some of these are large, multinational corporations (BCG, McKinsey), and some are much smaller nonprofits themselves (NYPowerNY). Both of these organizations offer solutions to non profits, either for a fee or on a pro-bono basis. However, the services are often geared towards larger-scale nonprofits with higher-level needs. These “macro” level solutions include:
- Board development
- Strategic planning
- Complex IT infrastructure assistance
- Marketing and Research
- Fund Development
When these “macro” consulting firms do charge a fee, it is typically in the range of several hundred to thousands of dollars. Smaller, startup nonprofits frequently do not need these services or cannot afford them. Therefore, these “macro” consulting firms are actually targeting a different segment of the market.
Q. What about skills-based volunteering/volunteer matching services?
A. There are several national skills-based or volunteer matching services, including volunteermatch.org,urbantastic.com, 1-800-volunteer.org, smartvolunteer.org, and grassroots.org. Most of these websites list long term volunteer opportunities, some of which are skilled positions. Grassroots.org builds websites for nonprofits. In general, very few of the opportunities on the websites are for short term, skilled positions.
There are also many local skills-based volunteer organizations, including DurhamCARES, Executive Service Corps, and Triangle Impact. These organizations either match community volunteers with long term positions (including leadership roles), or recruit community members for short term unskilled positions.
Q. How is MCforNC different?
A. MCforNC is different in that we connect students to nonprofits to solve small, skills-specific technical problems on a short-term basis. One way to understand this difference is to categorize volunteer positions in a “volunteer opportunity” matrix.
Also, MCforNC gives students the opportunity to build on their classroom knowledge and make a difference in their local community.
Q. How does MCforNC get the money to fund its consulting efforts?
A. We raise funds through private donations and matching grant programs of corporations.