As 2025 gets underway, my mind starts to wander towards the end of the Rob Jackson Consulting Ltd financial year on 31 March. How have things gone this year? Do I have enough to live on for the coming year? Is freelancing still a viable option?
I don’t mind saying that the current financial year has been a tough one.
When the first COVID-19 lockdown ended, many organisations seemed to realise that they had been neglecting investment in volunteering. As a result, work came flooding in for me as long-overdue spending was directed towards volunteering. I probably did more consulting projects in two years than I had in the previous five.
Those days are largely gone now.
As the cost-of-living crisis hit, many organisations cut spending to get through the lean period ahead. That’s understandable, we all did something similar, either at work or at home, or both.
Sadly, history teaches us that often the first thing to go when nonprofits cut their spending is any investment being made in volunteering. Sure enough, despite all the post-lockdown positive volunteering vibes, the nonprofit sector (in England at least) reverted to type alarmingly quickly, with many organisations cutting funding for volunteering and laying off Volunteer Managers. As usual, we’ve been left with warm words for volunteers but, in some cases, little else.
When any industry makes financial cuts it hits their supply chain and nonprofits are no exception. This last year has been one of the toughest financial years I’ve had in what will soon be fourteen years of running Rob Jackson Consulting Ltd. And I know other freelancers have had a similar experience too.
I started my business during a significant period of economic struggle following the global finical crisis and the onset of austerity. I navigated the challenging environment of the economic impacts on our sector of Brexit and the associated uncertainty. So the current financial challenges are not my first rodeo — this too will pass.
Meanwhile, those of us in this freelance space have to take steps to bolster our incomes. Despite what some may think, being a consultant in the nonprofit sector is not a shortcut to untold riches. Even less so when your specialism is strategic volunteer engagement. To steal a phrase from Tesco, every little helps, especially when times are tough.
That’s why I am today launching a Rob Jackson Consulting Ltd page on Buy Me A Coffee.
Buy Me A Coffee is an online platform that connects creators with their followers and allows the latter to support the former. I’m using it in two ways.
First, Buy Me A Coffee provides a simple way for anyone who values my work to support it financially with a donation. These start from £5 and go to whatever someone wants to give. These can be a one off or a monthly payment.
This is never going to replace the income I earn from client work but will help support the work I do that I don’t get paid for. That’s mostly my thought-leadership stuff and the free resources I create, such as this blog, my podcast, my newsletter etc.
Second, Buy Me A Coffee has an online shop. So you can buy a copy of my book, “From The Top Down — UK Edition” for the same price as on Amazon (you can pay more if you like!) but with the key difference that all the money comes to me, not Jeff Bezos. I’m also testing a mini-consulting call option, a forty-five-minute session to discuss your challenges, questions, issues, or needs.
Let me be clear. I’m not going to stop producing free resources like this blog, my newsletter, or my podcast. And I’m not going to introduce a mandatory charge for them. Buy Me A Coffee is simply there for those that want to support this work financially to do so, in however modest or extravagant a way they wish.
If you have five minutes, I’d love it if you’d go and have a look at my Buy Me A Coffee page and let me have any feedback on it. What do you think of it? Are there things you think I should add to the store? Are there changes you’d suggest? You can send any feedback to me here.