This episode of Simple Civics: Greenville County is brought to you by Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, providing free books to children zero to five throughout Greenville County. To sign up, visit greenvillefirststeps.org/freebooks.
How can nonprofits break free from the cycle of fundraising and grant dependency? With traditional donations failing to keep pace with inflation, a new approach can help nonprofits grow to better fulfill their missions. This episode explores the future of nonprofit earned revenue, a powerful strategy that applies startup principles to organizations with a social mission. We dive deep into how nonprofits can develop their own mission-aligned profits, build financial resilience, and amplify their impact without relying solely on philanthropy. Discover how a cohort of Greenville nonprofits is learning to shift from a beneficiary-focus to a customer-first mindset, creating sustainable business models that serve their community.
In this episode, we spotlight the innovative RevUpGVL: Revenue for Good program, a five-month incubator designed by Greater Good Greenville to guide nonprofits toward nonprofit sustainability. Joined by Paola Bonilla from the national consultancy 20 Degrees and Catherine Puckett from Greater Good Greenville, we unpack the process of building effective business models for nonprofits. We explore the critical mindset shift required for leaders to see their organizations as a business for good—a true social enterprise. You'll hear firsthand from Taylor Culliver, founder of Brother Box, as he shares his journey through the program. He discusses the challenges of traditional fundraising and how the RevUpGVL cohort provided the space and tools to develop a new, scalable income stream to support his mission of inspiring Black boys. This conversation is a masterclass in how to generate reliable revenue for a nonprofit, moving beyond the limits of conventional funding. The discussion also highlights the other visionary organizations in the cohort, including CommunityWorks, Conestee Nature Preserve, Loaves and Fishes, and TreesUpstate, who are all pioneering new ways to fund their vital work through nonprofit earned revenue.
Episode Resources
Introduction
Katy Smith: How can we bring best practices from the private sector and the startup world to nonprofit organizations? And how can we help nonprofits with vital missions be less dependent on donations and grants and more self-reliant by generating their own mission-aligned profits? RevUpGVL: Revenue for Good aims to answer those questions. I'm Katy Smith with Greater Good Greenville, and on this episode of Simple Civics Greenville County, I am so proud to feature one of our own programs, RevUpGVL: Revenue for Good.
Five nonprofit organizations have just completed a five-month cohort in which they have developed business models to generate their own revenue streams, and they're ready to pitch those ideas to donors and investors for good. Today, you will hear from some of those team members. Catherine Puckett is Program Director with Greater Good Greenville, who oversaw the whole project. Paola Bonilla, who goes by Pao, is Senior Social Finance Manager with 20 Degrees. 20 Degrees is a national consultancy that helps organizations re-evaluate their systems and structures so they can move away from traditional philanthropic models and to find their own futures. And Taylor Culliver is founder and CEO of Brother Box, an amazing nonprofit that you'll hear much more about on this episode.
RevUpGVL: Revenue for Good was funded by the Helga Marston Foundation, and the Revenue Showcase is sponsored by the Gallivan Group of UCB Private Wealth Management, Pinnacle Financial Partners, Nelson Mullins, and Beth and Mike Andrews.
Katy Smith: We're here today to talk about a really exciting program that we have launched this year in hopes that you as listeners might want to connect. So I'm delighted to be joined by Catherine Puckett, Taylor Culliver, and Paola Bonilla. Thanks so much for being with me.
Taylor Culliver: Thanks for having us.
Catherine Puckett: Happy to be here.
Paola Bonilla: Thank you so much for having us.
Addressing the Decline in Traditional Nonprofit Funding
Katy Smith: Catherine, why don't you go ahead and get us started? Tell us why the RevUpGVL: Revenue for Good program felt important for us to launch this year.
Catherine Puckett: So we all know that nonprofits are always considering their funding streams. And last year, we actually conducted a philanthropic landscape study and found that 31 percent of the nonprofits in Greenville County saw that their revenues had declined in the last few years. And also 44 percent of those reported revenues that did not keep up with inflation. So this program will really help unleash new revenue streams for these nonprofits, build more resilient organizations, all while staying true to their missions.
What is Nonprofit Earned Revenue?
Katy Smith: So, Pao, this is the space you guys work in all the time. I suspect a lot of folks listening just think about nonprofit revenues as donations. Some might think of grants from foundations, but you really get deep into spreadsheets and look at the many ways that nonprofits can tap into new revenue. So can you talk about what that looks like when nonprofits add an earned revenue component and what that is?
Paola Bonilla: So here at 20 Degrees, as you've mentioned, Katy, we've helped hundreds of nonprofits across the country build earned revenue strategies as a way to stabilize their revenue or income, in particular, aligning with their mission and vision. So what I want to double down on here is that we are increasing the impact for an organization and the impact that they can make within their own community by introducing this earned revenue strategy within their revenue income or revenue mix.
Nonprofits, to Catherine's point, are often tasked to do the most with less. So contributed funding or philanthropy just isn't keeping pace with the needs of communities across the United States. You're scrambling if revenue goals aren't met. This is detrimental to their ability to create impact. So that's where we believe earned revenue comes in because it serves as this reliable, repeatable source of revenue, which leaders can predict easier. And again, to the point that I was making earlier, it helps generate more impact if a leader is able to predict their revenue stream or better plan for their future.
Here in Greenville, nonprofits went through what we call RevUpGVL: Revenue for Good, or think of revving up an engine, revving up their revenue, where several organizations moved through our process together. Our process is four-pronged. So nonprofits fall in love with the problem. They find their perfect customer. They build a roadmap to get there or that business model canvas. And finally, they test and iterate to ensure they got those first three steps right. So that's a bit about our process and the why. Happy to jump in on the how, if that's helpful.
Applying Startup Principles: The Beneficiary-to-Customer Shift
Katy Smith: I suspect that if someone is listening to this and is in the private sector, particularly if they are themselves an entrepreneur or they're someone who invests in startups, what you just said is super familiar terminology, but it's not something we hear enough in the nonprofit sector. We do know the problems that people are facing, but how to look at the problem that a potential customer might have is a little bit of a flip for many of us. Have you seen when you work with nonprofits who are very used to thinking about telling a story to potential donors to changing this and thinking about a problem in terms of who will be my customer, regardless of whether they love my mission or not? What do you see when you work with nonprofits on shifting their mindset?
Paola Bonilla: That's such a great question. We spend a lot of the beginning of our process really reshifting a nonprofit leader's brain space or mindset, if you will. It's really easy for nonprofit leaders to center their beneficiaries. It's way harder for them to think about someone who would be willing to pay or be within a transaction. So again, to your point around that customer, a really big effort that we make is to ensure that nonprofit leaders understand that they themselves are leading a business. It is a business that is for good, and that is not something that we want to shy away from, but it is a business ultimately.
And so really encouraging them to step into that mindset is a part of our first step within our process. And really, again, making sure that they are centering a problem rather than that initial customer, because our nonprofit leaders are so beautiful that they want to just create lasting impact. They want to center their mission. And so by starting with the problem, we find that it's a lot easier to bridge that beneficiary to customer mindset. And so that's where we start. But it is an ongoing push to keep our leaders centering their customer rather than the beneficiary.
A Case Study in Mission-Driven Work: Introducing Brother Box
Katy Smith: That's interesting. I would love to hear now from Taylor Culliver, who's the founder of Brother Box, which is an amazing non-profit, that I want everyone to know about that I'm suspecting a lot of you listeners don't. So first, Taylor, tell us about Brother Box.
Taylor Culliver: So Brother Box was founded seven years ago with the sole mission to inspire black boys to dream big and be their most authentic selves. We live in a world in which the deck is already stacked so high against black boys in terms of their outcomes and possibility, that it was really critical for me when I embarked on this journey to just want to create affirmative tools to be able to message the kinds of language that inspire Black boys, that teach them about values like courage and authenticity, to educate them about things like financial literacy and mental health and wellness, how to have healthy relationships.
And so we have worked really hard over the past seven years to try and figure out how best to do that. We have care packages that we started with. It was just a simple way of saying, I see you and I support you. And that ultimately evolved into a text message education program in which we're sending out daily messages to hundreds of black boys and rewarding them as they engage with those messages with the care packages sent directly to their door.
And it creates a really awesome feedback loop. We've heard some incredible feedback from the 1,700 or so kids who have been a part of that program, just in terms of what it's been able to do to boost their confidence, to give them space to explore who they are and what they want, and also to open up conversations with their parents that parents find challenging. So we're doing some incredible work. I love what I do in regards to this work. And we've also supported several students in the upstate with scholarships and support for college. And so, thank you for asking.
From Fundraising Challenges to a New Business Model: The Brother Box Experience
Katy Smith: Thank you for doing what you do. We love what you do, too. So now I would love to talk more about what you've learned in this program, because clearly you understand the problem, the social problem that black boys are facing and that you're focused on addressing and the opportunity there to make a difference in what your mission is. But you have just finished going through the RevUpGVL: Revenue for Good cohort and would love to hear what you learned and what might be next for you that you're getting ready to pitch.
Taylor Culliver: Yeah, good question. But coming into RevUp, I was super excited about the opportunity because this is something that I had been thinking about a lot over the past several years. How do I make this more sustainable? How do I de-risk the organization? How do I create more capacity to reach more kids and do the things that we actually want to do? And fundraising for some people like me is not a whole lot of fun.
It has its challenges. And so I've been thinking for the past several years about how do we create income streams that are attached to our mission, but that provide stable revenue to power and fuel the social impact that we want to create in the world? And so it was super timely when this came about. And I think RevUp has just been awesome at creating and carving out some time and space to really think about how to do this and think about the ideation behind what ideas actually make sense? What problems are we actually going to try and solve? Who might be the customer? And thinking about things like pricing and budget and value proposition and how to reach a different kind of base than is our typical beneficiary.
And so I found it so interesting, helpful and impactful just to have the guidance from the team that brought this. And the several, I was thinking yesterday about how fast it seems that we have gone through this, but we actually started in June. But within a few months, we have a idea baked and ready to put out into the world and looking forward to pitching that when that time comes.
The RevUpGVL Revenue Showcase: Pitching New Ideas for Good
Katy Smith: So Catherine, you've had the joy of watching Taylor and four other nonprofit organizations walk through this process with Pao and the team from 20 Degrees and see that mindset shift that they have gone through there. Can you talk a little bit about the other four nonprofits that have developed business plans for their organizations just like Taylor?
Catherine Puckett: Yeah, absolutely. It truly has been a joy. So in addition to Brother Box, we have CommunityWorks, Conestee Nature Preserve, Loaves and Fishes, and TreesUpstate. We're excited to hear what they have to pitch.
Katy Smith: All right, so if people are listening to this on the day this episode posts or the day after, they'll have the opportunity to come and hear about the pitch event, which is taking place on Wednesday afternoon, November 5th at 4:30 at the Rutherford, and we'll put a link in the show notes to how folks can register. What will that experience be like? What can people expect should they come and participate?
Catherine Puckett: We are super excited about this event. It's really going to be a time to watch these five nonprofits just shine. So if you are able to come at 4:30, come and network. And then from five to six will be the actual program. And then after that time will be a chance for all the attendees to just talk with each of the staff members of the five organizations and learn more about their pitches as well as their organizations themselves.
The Transformative Impact of Earned Revenue on the Nonprofit Sector
Katy Smith: Yeah, we had a pitch practice and got to watch a demo and I was blown away by the ideas. I was blown away, honestly, by the courage of each of these nonprofits. It's scary to get up and do something like this that you've never done before and get really direct feedback from people who say that didn't land well. I didn't understand this. Can you reorganize your slides? The nonprofit leaders took amazing notes and will have great stories to convey. So, Pao, you've seen this again and again in different communities that you've worked in. Can you talk about what kind of transformation you see in organizations and the kind of results they expect, not just from new donors and investors in their work, but in their overall, the way they come forward in their work in the community?
Paola Bonilla: The pitch event or the revenue showcase is my favorite part of RevUpGVL: Revenue for Good or our earned revenue studio. It's exciting. It can lead to funding, absolutely. But more importantly, it can open doors for many nonprofits. And to your point, Katy, there's so much bravery as they get onto stage. It is their first time sharing their new idea publicly. It's a great chance to get real feedback, make connections, and strengthen relationships with supporters and community partners.
In the nonprofit world, relationships are everything. The pitch helps folks collaborate around a shared vision. It's not just a presentation. It's an invitation to partner on change. At the sector level, earned revenue shifts the relationship between funder and non-profit. Instead of the traditional grant and grantee dynamic, it becomes more of a partnership. An earned revenue idea is a mission-based investment where both sides are working towards that shared outcome.
And when a non-profit becomes financially stable, there's a true ripple effect. It's all about impact. With more sustainability, nonprofits can serve more people, reach more neighborhoods, and strengthen their community as a whole. In a way, the pitch event isn't just about revenue. It's about reinvestment and reengagement, bringing the community into the innovation and resilience that is already existing within the sector and helping them see a new way to give back. And so it's a very exciting event. I'm very pumped to see our five nonprofits step on stage. And I can't wait to see what the community thinks.
A Preview of the Pitch: Supporting Parents of Black Boys
Katy Smith: It'll be great. And again, if you are listening and you are in that startup space, you'll say, I know what this is. You might not call it a revenue showcase, but that's what we call it. It's a spark tank for these great new ideas. Taylor, we don't want to scoop the event itself, but maybe you could give us a little bit of a preview of what they'll hear from you if they come to the revenue showcase.
Taylor Culliver: Yeah, I'm super pumped to pitch, actually. And our idea really takes the bread and butter of what we've done for Black boys and actually looks at how we can best support parents of Black boys who are trying to build trustworthy relationships and navigating the journey of parenthood, particularly of a Black male at a time when things are just really challenging right now, particularly for Black parents. And so our idea is really about how we support them and how we use the tools that we've already cultivated and built for our boys and shine a light for parents as well. And so I'm excited to share more details about that at the pitch.
Katy Smith: I can't wait for people to hear it. And what I want to say very precisely about it is you walk through the why this matters, but then you get into the who is the potential customer base for this? And it is a large base. And the amount of revenue that it can generate for your mission is really impressive. And that is what people who come will hear about all five of you nonprofits.
That sure, perhaps they love Conestee Nature Preserve, or they care about TreesUpstate, or they want to support the work of CommunityWorks, or they believe in important food rescue that Loaves and Fishes is doing. But there are also ways that each of you can just generate money because people want to buy what you're selling and that invests in the mission. And that's what people will be able to hear.
How to Get Involved and Learn More About RevUpGVL
Katy Smith: All right. Now, if you are a couple days later listener, as many of our listeners are, and you think, darn it, I missed November 5th. I would have loved to have come. There is still absolutely a way for you to learn more and get involved in these really interesting revenue generating models. Catherine, what might they do?
Catherine Puckett: All you need to do is visit our website. We will have information posted there. There's a special page dedicated to RevUpGVL: Revenue for Good, and there will be a link to all of the different five, nonprofits and their pitches. So please visit us and learn more.
The Power of Community: Learning and Growing Together
Taylor Culliver: I also want to say in regards to the program itself that we've been able to go through, just the power of doing that in community with other nonprofits has been really, really impactful. Often we always have our heads down. We're trying to figure things out ourselves and to be able to create the time to be in connection with other incredible nonprofits who are working through some of the same challenges and trying to figure out some of these similar ideas, the back and forth, the bouncing things off of one another, the pressure cooker, ice breakers and stuff that we've done in our workshops have all lent themselves to garnering really great feedback and then being able to implement that into our ideas. And so just want to shout out to the team that brought us together and the team that led us through our workshops, because it's just been fun to go through this with other people and to have more lenses on the work that we're doing and how we can best tell our story.
Paola Bonilla: Thanks so much for that, Taylor. We purposefully build our RevUpGVL: Revenue for Good in community with folks because we believe that first and foremost, you should not do hard things alone. Being a leader at a nonprofit is isolating within itself because of all of the things that you're juggling. And so there's that. And we found that peer support really sparks creativity and keeps folks motivated to testing ideas and so I love hearing this feedback in real time that it happened, that you create a community and felt that pressure cooker piece. So, happy that the process worked and we're just so thankful.
I'll also offer RevUpGVL: Revenue for Good just showcase for me how much Greenville leaders in particular are so in tune with this line of work. Frankly, it didn't take much for our five leaders to step into that business mindset, which is something that we struggle with a lot with our clients. And so I just want to shout out the Greenville community for the innovation that is already here because there is so much of it. And frankly, there are a lot of leaders within the space. So thankful to be a part of the community.
Katy Smith: I couldn't be more delighted and grateful to each of you and to the folks that aren't with us that have been a part of the program but aren't with us on this podcast today. Really amazing leaders and so much expertise. So I cannot wait for those of you listening to meet them, whether it is in person with us at the showcase on November 5th or if it's afterwards on our website when you get to learn about the projects and the organizations that are leading them.
I'll also say if you don't live in Greenville and you think, I'd like to bring a rev up to my community, we'll put links in the show notes to 20 Degrees' information because this is what they do. They really help look at the profit and nonprofit because we are businesses and we're doing really important work and we deserve the same tools at our disposal as all of our friends in the for-profit sector. So I appreciate each of you and can't wait for the rest of you to get to know them more too.
Credits
Simple Civics: Greenville County is Produced by Podcast Studio X.
A Greater Good Greenville project.
