Raise Your Voice Blog | Nicole Clark Consulting

13 Nov, 2019

Ask Nicole: My #1 Rule for Marketing Yourself on Social Media

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T20:45:46-04:00November 13th, 2019|Categories: Consulting|Tags: Ask Nicole, consulting|0 Comments

Have a question you’d like featured? Let me know.

I’ve never had a client tell me that my social media presence influenced them to work with me.

In fact, there are really 3 ways clients find out about me (based on what they shared when filling out my prospective client questionnaire:

Word of mouth: They asked their networks for someone who has my skill sets and expertise
Internet search: The keywords they entered landed them on a page or blog post on my website
I was off somewhere being useful: From email listservs, in-person meetings and events, or online forums, they noticed me sharing resources and information or offering advice

But like most people, I use social media. I started off using it as a way to connect with the people I know in real life and to make connections with new folks.

Once I started growing my blog, I needed someplace to promote outside of friends and family.

It’s interesting to see the impact that social media has played in our professional and personal lives. However, like most of us, I got caught up in the vanity of it.

Likes, comments, retweets, shares, clicks, and comments. They all play a role in how people view you. But as we see with social media as a whole, they don’t tell the full story.

I call these “vanity metrics“. While they are important to see how your content resonates with your audience, you don’t really know why they’re engaging with you.

When we get caught up in these vanity metrics, we develop this inflated sense of importance. Outside of comments, vanity metrics don’t really tell you why someone engages with you. Nor do follower counts tell you if the person following you actually supports you, likes your work, or agrees with your viewpoint. It’s weird to think that people will follow someone or comment on something they don’t like, but it happens.

With all this talk of shadow bans, algorithms, paying to have your content seen by the people who chose to follow you, and removing likes, we need to ask ourselves some tough questions about what we’re really doing on social media and why. And if you use it to promote yourself or your organization, we need to ask ourselves is social media the best way to marketing ourselves.

My answer is no. Especially since social media platforms can disappear at any time.

While I do believe that social media is a great way to connect with and network with others, my #1 rule for marketing yourself on social media is to not have social media be the #1 way to market yourself.

Instead of having social media drive your marketing, consider the following ways to market yourself while using social media as a supplemental avenue:

(more…)

16 Oct, 2019

Try This: The Cookie Exercise

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T20:44:55-04:00October 16th, 2019|Categories: Research & Evaluation|Tags: program evaluation, Try This|0 Comments

*You don’t have to eat the cookie, but it might be tempting.*

Evaluative thinking involves identifying assumptions, posing thoughtful questions, pursuing deeper understanding through reflection and perspective-taking and making informed decisions in program planning, implementation, and evaluation.

It’s a key component to building evaluation capacity within an organization, company, or other entity. While I still conduct evaluations for clients, I’m finding myself more drawn to helping organizations build up this capacity so they can do it all themselves.

The primary reasons organizations conduct evaluations is to find out if 1) the program is meeting the needs of its intended audience(s), 2) if it’s financially feasible to maintain the program or service as is or if it needs to be scaled up or down, or 3) if it should be scrapped altogether.

It’s not enough for your staff to know the ins and outs of doing an evaluation. They need to harness the ability to think evaluatively about the programs they’re developing.

And what better way to try this out than with cookies?

Grab 3 different brands of cookies and let’s get started.

This activity is ideal for:

Anyone responsible for developing, running and evaluating programs and services
Students interested in evaluative thinking

Here’s what you need:

If you’re the baking type: Bake three different types of the same cookie (using different chips or filling, different ingredients, etc.)
If you’re the store-bought type: Buy 3 different brands of the same cookie type. In order for this to work, the brands cannot have any recognizable marks in the design that will give clues on who makes them. In other words, you can have 3 brands of cookies that look like Oreos, as long as each brand doesn’t have “Oreo” labeled on them (we’re trying to avoid biases here)
Sheets of paper
Writing utensils (pens, pencils, markers)

As a heads-up: You don’t have to eat the cookies. But you might, for testing purposes.

(more…)

2 Oct, 2019

Ask Nicole: Why Am I Doing This?

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T20:44:21-04:00October 2nd, 2019|Categories: Consulting|Tags: Ask Nicole, consulting|0 Comments

Have a question you’d like to be featured? Let me know.

I was speaking with a friend recently, who decided to go back to the corporate world after consulting for over 5 years. Of all his reasons, the main reason was that he no longer cared about what he did and who he did it for.

I know this feeling well, because closer to the end of my time with my old organization, I felt it. I have a specific memory of having a new client sitting across from me, detailing her concerns with her housing and benefits. When I first started working there, I would go above and beyond to do what I could for a client. But listening to her (and taking stock of my place within the organization), I realized that I didn’t care.

I’ve always told myself that when I get to the point where I no longer cared about what I do and who I do it for, I would call it quits. So, I did.

But one day in early 2018, I was preparing to write a blog post, create an email newsletter to send out to my subscribers, and do some work for my consulting clients.

It was a snowy, cloudy day. As I waited for my laptop to boot up, I looked out the window and asked myself, “Why am I doing this?”

(more…)

4 Sep, 2019

Ask Nicole: Reasons for Turning Down a Prospective Client

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T20:43:51-04:00September 4th, 2019|Categories: Consulting|Tags: Ask Nicole, consulting|0 Comments

Here’s a question from Ashleigh, a social worker based in California interested in taking on part-time consulting work:

Hi Nicole!

I’m interested in learning more about your process of taking on client or partnership work. Specifically, do you have any criteria or lessons learned in determining when to take on a new client or project and when to turn someone down? I’m interested in doing consulting on the side to supplement my income, and while I’m cognizant of my capacity, I’m curious to know if there are other reasons I should consider when turning down an opportunity.

Thanks in advance!

Great question!

I’ve already talked about how I’ve gone about getting client work and my process for reflecting on a project, as well as some of my pet peeves, including the RFP process and clients who “ghost”. So, we’ll focus on turning down opportunities.

My reasons for turning down a client or partnership opportunity varies, so what may be a deal breaker in one situation may not be the case for another. Also, my reasons are personal to me and I don’t have to tell a prospective client or partner why I’m choosing not to work with them unless asked, other than to let them know I’m not the best fit.

Nevertheless, here are some reasons why I may turn down a prospective client or partnership opportunity:

I’m not interested in the project

The main reason I transitioned into working for myself was the ability to choose who I want to work with, what I want to work on, and why I want to be involved. Some reasons why I may not be interested in a project can include:

The focus of the project or collaboration doesn’t align with my current interests or learning needs
Taking on this project will result in an imbalance of services provided (taking on more evaluation projects when I want to do more research or organizational sustainability projects, for example)
Project length (I may be interested in short-term projects while the client is looking for someone for longer, or vice versa)
Reputation of the client/partner (questionable leadership, people I know who have had a bad experience with them, etc.)
Budget (what the client is willing to pay doesn’t match up with the amount of work they’re requesting)
The client or partnership’s work doesn’t align with my business’ mission and values (see last reason)

Clients or partners with questionable communication patterns

If we’ve explored the possibility of working together…and you disappear…come back…and disappear again…only to come back and disappear yet again, I’m also going to assume you were either not serious, not ready, or there’s something going on with your organization’s stability.

Also, sometimes projects may not go forward due to factors not under the client or partner’s control, but when you don’t inform me if this, it makes me questions if dropping communication is something that happens often in your organization. If it’s my responsibility to follow-up with you within a given timeframe, I’ll make every effort to do that; but if it’s yours and you don’t, I’ll take it as a sign that you’re not ready to move forward, you’ve decided to work with someone else, or some other factor.

I like to spread out my projects and travel

I like to bring on projects and partnerships that vary in length and responsibilities. For instance, while I may be onboarding two long-term clients, I might have two projects that I’m halfway through, and two additional projects that I’m wrapping up and doing final reporting on. I also like to spread out my client travel as I try my best not to do too much traveling for one given client in case I need to be in person with another client.

Clients or partners who debate me on my process

How I interact with prospective clients and partners is driven by whether they’ve contacted me or if I’m responding to a solicitation. Along with this, it gives me and the client/partner the opportunity to feel each other out and for me to share how I’ve worked on similar projects with similar clients in the past.

Every agency, business, or organization has policies and procedures. As part of my policies and procedures, I ask prospective clients and partners complete my client/partner questionnaire. In the past year, I’ve buckled down on making sure everyone–prospective or previous clients–complete this questionnaire because I’ve observed that I’d been lax about it with people I knew personally. So now, everyone does it.

Also, depending on if the client has hired me for evaluation services, I have them complete an evaluation capacity measure assessment so I can assess what’s doing on within their organization related to evaluative thinking, leadership support for evaluation, and staff capacity, etc. I’ve had 2 prospective clients push back on this, even though they hired me to help them build evaluation capacity.

Similar to what I observed while working in a more direct service/case management setting, what I’ve learned is that, even when a client presents with one request, what really needs to be worked on and addressed doesn’t appear until after I’ve done a thorough analysis, so when a client is against this part of my process, I decline.

(more…)

7 Aug, 2019

Ask Nicole: Dealing with the Death of a Client

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T20:43:26-04:00August 7th, 2019|Categories: Public Health & Social Work|Tags: Ask Nicole, Social Work|0 Comments

Have a question you’d like answered? Let me know.

During the first year of my social work graduate program, I interned at a comprehensive care clinic at a New York City-area hospital. The primary population at the time was adults living with HIV and AIDS. The social work team was small- only four social workers on the team- and I shared a caseload with my field placement supervisor. The social workers would see clients at the clinic but also rotate to the inpatient floor of the hospital, so whenever it was my supervisor’s time to go to inpatient, I’d tag along.

One day, she asked for me to do a quick intake assessment for one of her clients who had been admitted on the inpatient floor. He was a middle-aged man with the initials “PM”, who was very pleasant and invited me to have a seat in one of the chairs in his room. One of the questions was confirming his AIDS status. He confirmed it, but quickly told me that no one else knew of his diagnosis, including his family.

I saw PM a few months later back in inpatient. This time, he looked completely different. He’d lost a lot of weight and his face was sunken. He was very weak, and couldn’t speak. In his room, I was met by his brother who seemed agitated because he wasn’t informed why his brother had been admitted. Before seeing PM, I looked at his clinic chart to discover that he’d been diagnosed with Epidemic (AIDS-associated) Kaposi sarcoma, an aggressive form of cancer. While asking questions from the intake assessment (after his brother stepped out of the room), PM answered with paper and pen. Before leaving, I asked PM if there’s anything he wanted me to tell my supervisor. He asked about the likelihood of him being discharged to go home.

A week later, I received a notification in the staff’s client appointment system that PM had died. I looked in his chart again to see an updated medical note from his clinic medical provider. The provider had recommended to PM’s brother and mother that PM should be discharged for hospice care. When asked why, the provider had to disclose PM’s AIDS status to his family.

Soon after PM’s death, my supervisor and I went back to inpatient, this time as witnesses for a young woman signing legal documentation to assign custody of her young sons to a relative. She died soon after. My supervisor asked if I wanted to debrief with her about PM’s and the young woman’s deaths, and I remember telling her that I was fine but would speak to her about it if I needed to.

I went from experiencing these deaths as a student to experiencing the deaths of several clients while working at my old agency after graduating. One client died by suicide, one was found dead in her apartment under suspicious circumstances but was later determined to be health related, one died via a drug overdose, and there are others who died but so much time as passed that I can’t remember their causes of death. On top of this, my staff would get routine emails informing us of clients who have died in other departments, along with the deaths of some staff members.

But the death that impacted me most was “LB”. He was middle-aged man whom I’d met around 2 years after joining my agency. When my supervisor introduced me to him in his office, LB was sitting across from my supervisor’s desk, crying as he wanted to sign up for services plus being spooked that he’d had 3 heart attacks in that month alone.

LB quickly became one of my favorite clients, where I’d do frequent home visits with him and I managed to get him a receptionist job at the agency location. The last time I saw LB was in April 2015 when he stopped by to see me for an update on a medical visit he’d just left. After that, all of my calls and letters either went unanswered or returned to sender. I managed to get in contact with LB’s mother that August, where she disclosed that LB died earlier in May from a heart attack. I told my supervisor and gave her his case closure documentation, and went about the rest of my day. When I got home, I sat on my bed and cried.

At the time, I thought I cried specifically for LB. In hindsight, I cried not only LB, but all the clients that died before him. I never fully gave myself the space to process each death (particularly the deaths that occurred when I was a student) and I think in some ways I’d become desensitized to hearing about the deaths as I transitioned from student to professional.

(more…)

Ask Nicole: My #1 Rule for Marketing Yourself on Social Media

Try This: The Cookie Exercise

Ask Nicole: Why Am I Doing This?

Ask Nicole: Reasons for Turning Down a Prospective Client

Ask Nicole: Dealing with the Death of a Client

This Is A Custom Widget