Support for Charity Freelancers: How to Turn Your Expertise Into a Service Charities Actually Buy
There’s an idea in the notes app on your phone that’s older than some of your clients. I said this at a recent workshop for charity freelancers and the chat went: me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me.
If you’re a freelance fundraiser, a comms consultant, an evaluator or any of the brilliant charity consultants keeping the sector running, this one’s for you. It’s about taking the expertise you already have and turning it into something a charity can understand, value and buy.
The day rate trap for charity freelancers
Let’s do the maths. There are roughly 250 working days in a year, minus unpaid holiday, minus the week you were ill, minus the week the children were ill, and minus the other week the children were ill. Multiply what’s left by your day rate. That’s your income ceiling.
You can put your rate up, and you probably should and ir’s still a sum with a hard edge, where every extra pound costs another piece of your time.
I learned this the hard way. In 2021, after my third redundancy before I turned 30, I was working part-time in-house for a charity and doing fundraising consultancy on a day rate for the rest of the week. I was buying a house. I simply couldn’t earn enough. There were no more hours in my week to sell.
And as I got more experienced, I got quicker. Which meant that on a day rate, I was effectively giving myself a pay cut for being good at my job.
Charities don’t need to know how long a piece of work took you. If a client wants to monitor and manage you by the hour, they should be paying you a salary. One you probably wouldn’t want anyway. You do not have to live life on level hard.
What charities actually want from freelancers and consultants
Nobody working in a charity has ever woken up wanting to sign off on a service or bring in a freelancer in a cape to save the day.
They wake up needing:
the Christmas appeal at the mailing house yesterday
to raise more money by last week
to fix a process that’s been held together with goodwill since 2017
the funder report to stop being a crisis every March
to get their team through a restructure that’s already been announced
someone to tell the board the truth in a way they’ll actually hear
Your service sells when it speaks to the person in the middle of one of those mornings.
Which means most charity freelancers don’t need to invent something new. You need to rename and redesign something you already do, from your client’s side of the desk.
Step 1: Find the problem you’re already solving
Most new services start with a freelancer asking, “What could I offer?”
The services that sell start one step earlier: with something that’s already keeping someone awake before you’ve even spoken to them.
Look for evidence of real need…
Real need leaves evidence. Look for three things:
They’ve already had a go. Badly, or halfway. Someone who has tried and failed is much closer to paying you to do it properly.
There’s money attached. A budget line, or a good reason to find one.
There’s a deadline that has nothing to do with you. A funding round, a campaign, an inspection, an audit, a board meeting.
If your idea ticks none of these, it’s still an idea for now. Ideas can be shaped.
The gap between the request and the real problem…
Try this exercise. Write down three things people have asked you for, in their words. Straight from your inbox, a discovery call or your LinkedIn DMs.
Under each one, write what was actually going wrong once you opened the can of worms.
A charity might ask for a comms plan. What’s really going wrong is that everything goes out late, nothing gets engagement, and nobody can say who owns the comms strategy.
The first line is how they’ll find you. The second line is what you sell.
Your service lives in the gap between the two.
Step 2: Shape your service into something a charity can actually buy
This is where most experienced charity consultants get stuck. And it’s a strange kind of stuck, because it’s caused by knowing too much.
If you’ve worked across dozens of organisations for fifteen years, everything feels relevant. The offer grows. The description gets longer. Your CV stopped fitting on two sides of A4 a long time ago.
Meanwhile your client can only see what you put in front of them. Usually for about 45 seconds, between two other things.
Package the outcome, not the days
Take “I’ll work with you five days a month for three months” and turn it into something they can picture:
Pipeline development
A workshop to streamline the comms team’s processes
A monthly review with the Head of Fundraising
Mentoring for their new fundraising manager
Same expertise. Now they can see what they’re buying.
Get specific about who it’s for
“Small charities” isn’t specific enough. Around 96% of registered charities in the UK have an annual income under £1 million. That’s roughly 166,000 organisations.
Try something like: fundraising managers in charities with under £1m turnover who don’t have an in-house data manager.
One freelancer in my workshop wrote: charities with a turnover of £150k–£600k who have tried individual giving, events and CSR, are juggling too many things and haven’t had much success. Perfect.
Being specific feels scary when you’re a generalist. You can still bring every tool out of the box once you’re working with someone. You just need to be the person someone recommends in a room you’re not in.
Pricing your service: three numbers
Leave every money story you’ve ever told yourself at the door and write down three numbers:
The resentful number: what you’d feel resentful being paid for this service.
The over-the-moon number: what would genuinely change something in your life.
The middle ground: the number you can say out loud without flinching.
Notice there’s no counting hours or days. Keep an eye on overdelivery internally, but that stays in your business. It doesn’t need to go in the proposal.
Give them what they need to get sign-off
The person you’re talking to often isn’t the one signing off the budget. They have to take you to their CEO or board and make the case without you there.
Give them the words to do it. Simple language. A clear picture of life after the problem’s solved. A testimonial with a real face next to it.
What this looks like in practice
One of my Freelancers for Good members came in seeing herself as a bid writer. Through the programme, she realised the bigger value she was bringing was strategic: fundraising systems, processes, capacity.
She proposed a fractional fundraising function to a client she was already working with, and doubled her income from that one client.
She didn’t need more experience. She needed to package the experience she already had.
Step 3: Start the conversations
A service almost never arrives fully formed. It gets better when you say it out loud to someone who might buy it and watch their face. Most of us wait. The website needs updating. The wording needs perfecting. The timing needs to be right. Meanwhile there are at least six people who’d tell you the truth.
Write down three names
Actual names, not types of people:
Someone living with the problem right now
Someone who recommend you for this kind of work
Someone who’ll tell you the truth
Then send them this: “I’m putting together something for organisations dealing with X, and I’d really value 20-30 minutes of your thinking on it. It’s rough, and that’s deliberate.”
They might hire you. They might recommend you. They might give you insight that reshapes the whole thing. Any of those is worth twenty minutes.
Support for charity freelancers: you don’t have to do this alone
An idea with no client, no deadline and nobody asking about it will lose your attention to paid client work every single week, for as long as you’re on your own with it.
That’s why I created Freelancers for Good™, a six-month group coaching programme for charity freelancers and consultants. A small group of people who get it. A weekly call where your business is the client. A monthly 1:1 with me, where we look at your numbers and your calendar. And our Circle Community for the questions that bubble up on a Tuesday afternoon.
You left employment to be your own boss. Be the best one you’ve ever had.
FAQs for charity freelancers
How do charity freelancers move away from day rates?
Package your expertise around a specific problem and outcome, then price the outcome. Clients buy the result. The days it takes you are your business.
What should charity consultants charge?
Start with three numbers: the fee you’d resent, the fee that would thrill you, and the middle ground you can say confidently. Then check it against the value the charity gets.
Where can charity freelancers find support?
Look for communities and coaching built specifically for the charity sector and the challenges of running a business, where people understand funding cycles, board sign-off and the realities of working with charities, like Freelancers for Good™.
