Vanessa Lindsay explains how nonprofits can use Small Business Saturday to earn money beyond donations. She suggests selling courses, branded merchandise, discounted services, and partnering with other organizations to reach new audiences.
Good, good, good. It's a good— it's a good, cool, crisp morning. So speaking of mornings and the days, so today we are talking about Small Business Saturday. You know, you have your Giving Tuesday, you have your Black Friday, you have all these other days, but not too many people mention Small Business Saturdays, right? Right.
Small Business Saturday is, um, a great opportunity for a small business like your nonprofit to um, open up, um, shop and sell a course, or if you have merchandise, or as the young people say, merch, you know, it's a good time to just make sure you advertise it. Yeah, but, um, yeah, it's a nice lead up to Giving Tuesday.
And then what's so good about it is, as you talk about now, the nonprofits having something to sell, and, you know, a lot of us think about when we're talking about nonprofits that we shouldn't, we don't, we don't sell things. But it's really important that we do have an opportunity to sell things because we are business just like anyone else, you know. Yeah. And so it's important that when we think about our nonprofit, we're always thinking about, you know, we always talk about give me, give me, give me, you know, we always want someone to give us a donation, give us a grant, give us funding, but we also have to have some things that we need to monetize. So how can you monetize your nonprofit while still staying in that arena of a nonprofit? I have the sun coming in on my face. See that real quick? Let me take the sun off my face.
I just, um, I just went off camera for a second to take the sun off of my face.
Like, even though it's cold, it's like the sun is shining.
So we do—
yeah, it really is. So we really have to monetize our nonprofit because we can't depend on— if we want to do this business, it's a business. We can't just depend on people always being there to give us donations, getting a grant. And so there's things that we need to monetize.
Yeah. And one of the things that you can consider monetizing is look at the services that you offer in the community in general and pick something and make it a course and then offer that as a, um, as a for-fee service. Um, and, and it doesn't— that one you can do to, you know, like you could offer to teach other nonprofits who might want to, um, do something similar. You could offer to teach them, or you could offer to another nonprofit to their, their group. Um, so you could just be creative and come up with so many ways. Also, it's another way to help get you in front of other communities and other, um, neighborhoods that you might not necessarily get in front of.
Like, for example, if you can see my shirt, right? This Jampro, right, Vanessa? And so nonprofits can have franchises. When we talked about that before, so this is a franchise. Or if you have another janitorial service or another service that you offer, you can also give a discount during that Saturday, right? So if you sign up for us to provide this service for you, and we have our clients are the ones that we're doing this for our business, then we'll give you a discount this Saturday that you sign up, right? And take it to the first month cleaning, or the first month babysitting, or their first month dog walking, or whatever it is that you offer as a service. So those are good things to do. So think about what it is that your nonprofit does, or it can do in the future. Even though a lot of people that we talk to, and we, we focus on, is people that are just starting their nonprofit. So we want to make sure that you get off on the right foot, right? And so don't always think about the charity, also about what it is that you can do so you can bring another stream of revenue into your organization.
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, I have nothing else to add to that. That was a great— that's great to leave off with, you know, like just think about other streams of revenue for your business.
Yeah, yes, yes, there's so many different ones. Another one I like to think about, I was talking with someone the other day, and, and when I was first starting mine, I used to get these big— I used to sell these big coloring books. They were huge, right? They're huge African-American coloring books, and I used to sell that and calendars and things along that line. And those are some of the things that you can really think about doing. So monetize and think of other streams of income for your nonprofit.
Yeah, awesome.
So, so if you guys don't know what Small Business Saturday is, look it up on the internet. It'll tell you everything about all Small Business Saturday. If you're not ready to participate in it, please go out and support our small businesses because they are important. Or support another nonprofit that's doing something in small business and learn a little bit more about it. All right.
Yeah.
Okay. So great. So if you have any questions, if you haven't had an opportunity, um, yet, we, um, go to our YouTube channel. If you haven't got to our YouTube channel, it's Vanessa Lindsay, and we have a lot of great videos on there. It's going to teach you about starting and growing your nonprofit organization and fundraising and Giving Tuesday and all things nonprofit. So we hope to see you soon.
Bye-bye.
