Let’s face it—if your nonprofit is still relying solely on grant applications and those annual galas where board members reluctantly bid on vacation packages they don’t want, you might as well be using a rotary phone to call potential donors. In today’s economic climate, diversification isn’t just smart—it’s survival.
Several nonprofit CEOs I’ve spoken with agree that today’s economic indicators are giving off troubling “2007 vibes.” I can count on both hands the number of once-great organizations from that era that no longer exist simply because they ran out of funding when traditional sources dried up during the Great Recession. With the COVID-19 recession of 2020 still fresh in our memory and President Trump’s elimination of USAID resources, the writing is on the wall. Economic uncertainties are a daily conversation and nonprofit organizations with multiple revenue channels demonstrate significantly greater financial resilience during economic downturns, than those who focus on grants and private donors.
Zig Ziglar wisely once said, “If you have enough push, you don’t have to worry about the pull.” And folks, we need a lot more pushing these days, as donor retention rates have dropped to a concerning 42% (Association of Fundraising Professionals, 2024). The data doesn’t lie—nonprofits with earned income covering just 25% of operating expenses were 35% more likely to maintain service levels during economic downturns (SSIR, 2024).
The Entrepreneurial Mindset Revolution
Remember when “nonprofit” and “entrepreneurial” in the same sentence would raise eyebrows faster than a surprise audit? Those days are gone. Today’s most sustainable organizations have embraced entrepreneurial thinking not as a compromise of their mission but as a strategic enhancement of it.
The limiting factor for most nonprofits isn’t external funding—it’s internal thinking. When staff and leadership remain trapped in a scarcity mindset, they miss abundance opportunities hiding in plain sight. Research has demonstrated that organizations with entrepreneurial cultures identified 3.4 times more funding opportunities than their traditional counterparts. (Independent Sector, 2024).
What would happen if your development director stopped asking “Who will fund our programs?” and started asking “How can our programs generate their own funding?” The entire conversation—and your financial outlook—would fundamentally change.
DC Central Kitchen: Culinary Training Meets Commercial Contracts
DC Central Kitchen has mastered the entrepreneurial approach through its Culinary Job Training program. They’ve secured contracts with schools, healthcare facilities, and corner stores to provide healthy meals while employing their program graduates. Their social enterprise initiatives now generate over 60% of their annual revenue, dramatically reducing their dependency on traditional fundraising (DC Central Kitchen, 2023).
Their CEO, Mike Curtin, often says their business contracts aren’t just about money—they’re about “creating a system where we solve tomorrow’s problems with today’s solutions.” That’s entrepreneurial thinking at its finest. By viewing their culinary training program as both a social service and a business opportunity, they’ve created a model of sustainable impact that can weather economic storms.
Three Essential Entrepreneurial Shifts
1. Your Mission Has Marketable Skills (Yes, Really)
Think about the expertise your team has developed over the years. It’s valuable far beyond your donor base. Consider the youth development organization in Chicago that transformed its conflict resolution curriculum into corporate training workshops, generating $75,000 in its first year alone. Their secret wasn’t complicated—they simply stopped thinking like a charity and started thinking like a solutions provider.
This new offer required a shift in perspective, not a change in purpose. As their executive director explained to me, “We’re not changing what we do—we’re changing who we do it for, and who pays for it.” The skills they teach youth in underserved communities are precisely the skills that corporate teams need to manage workplace conflict effectively.
Ask yourself: What expertise does your organization possess that might have value in the marketplace? What training materials, methodologies, or approaches have you developed that could be packaged and marketed to a paying audience? The answers might surprise you—and transform your financial sustainability.
2. Community Challenges = Market Opportunities
Social entrepreneurship isn’t just a buzzword—it’s a funding lifeline. When a housing nonprofit identified a gap in affordable home repair services in their community, they didn’t just lament the problem or write another grant proposal. Instead, they launched a social enterprise employing program participants as home repair technicians. Not only did they create jobs for the very people they served, but they also generated sustainable revenue while fulfilling their mission.
The beauty of this approach lies in its dual impact: addressing community needs while fostering financial sustainability. The organization now earns over 40% of its operating budget through this social enterprise, providing reliable income regardless of grant cycles or donor whims.
The irony? Many nonprofits are sitting on similar opportunities but are too busy writing grant applications to notice. It’s like complaining about being hungry while ignoring the fully stocked refrigerator in your kitchen. The needs your organization addresses might hold the key to sustainable revenue if viewed through an entrepreneurial lens.
3. Youth Programming: Girls Who Code: Corporate Training as Revenue Engine
The most innovative organizations are transforming youth programs from expense centers to revenue generators. Girls Who Code has brilliantly leveraged its expertise by offering fee-based training programs to corporations wanting to improve their tech initiatives. By packaging their knowledge for the corporate market, they’ve created a significant revenue stream while advancing their mission of gender equity in technology.
As founder Reshma Saujani puts it, we’re not just teaching girls to code—we’re “teaching the industry what it’s missing.” That mindset shift from charity to valued expertise opened us up entirely new funding avenues. Our organization now partners with major tech companies not just as donors but as paying clients for our expertise which they are using to build inclusive tech pipelines.
This approach has the added benefit of placing the organization’s mission at the center of industry conversations, increasing both impact and financial sustainability simultaneously.
Talk about a win-win that makes both accountants and program directors happy! When mission impact and financial sustainability align perfectly, everyone benefits. The organization becomes less dependent on external funding while delivering more impactful programs with more measurable outcomes.
From Mindset to Money: The Implementation Gap
If all this entrepreneurial talk sounds great but leaves you wondering how to actually implement it, you’re not alone. The gap between understanding these concepts and executing them is where most organizations falter. Transitioning from theoretical appreciation to practical application requires a structured approach, support, and specialized expertise.
This is precisely why we developed our Social Enterprise Accelerator program specifically for nonprofit professionals. Unlike generic business training, our curriculum addresses the unique challenges and opportunities within the nonprofit sector, including:
- Mission-Business Alignment: How to ensure earned income activities enhance rather than distract from your core purpose
- Internal Culture Shift: Techniques for moving from a scarcity to an abundance mindset across your organization
- Market Analysis: Tools for identifying viable market opportunities that leverage your existing assets
- Staff Considerations: Understanding what the human capital needs are to execute a social enterprise.
If you’re stressed about grant cycles or tired of scrambling for donations and interested in learning more, don’t miss our FREE webinar on June 5th at 6pm ET with Nonprofit Fundraising Expert, Anisha Robinson Keeys.
Attendees will learn how to:
✔️ Turn your programs into revenue-generating services
✔️ Build a revenue engine that doesn’t depend on donations
✔️ Make your nonprofit financially sustainable (and funder-attractive!)
This is the mindset shift your board has been waiting for.
Save your seat now: https://smallbizladyuniversity.net/revenueengine
Attendees will learn:
- Identify marketable assets within existing programs
- Develop earned income streams that advance (not distract from) the mission
- Transform organizational culture from dependency to self-sufficiency
- Identify skills within your team to pursue a social enterprise.
Organizations that develop new funding streams cover an average of 28% of their operating budgets within six months. One community health organization identified three distinct earned income opportunities in their existing programs and implemented the most promising one within 90 days, generating $40,000 in new revenue by the end of the year.
One nonprofit leader we’ve worked with at SmallBizLady Enterprises told us, “We came in thinking we needed more donors. We left realizing we needed more mirrors—to see our own value and how to package it.”
Economic Uncertainty Makes Action Urgent
The two most recent recessions—the Great Recession (December 2007-June 2009) and the COVID-19 Recession (March 2020-Sept 2021)—demonstrated how quickly traditional funding sources can evaporate during economic downturns. Foundation assets decrease with market declines, and individual giving contracts and government funding often face cuts.
Organizations with diversified revenue streams, particularly those with earned income components, weathered these storms far better than those dependent solely on traditional philanthropy. As we face continued economic uncertainty, the time to build these alternative funding streams is now—before you need them desperately.
Your Next Steps
If you’re tired of the fundraising hamster wheel and ready to build sustainable revenue streams that weather economic uncertainty, I invite you to join our Social Enterprise Accelerator course cohort. Class start June 17th.
This 3-week intensive program combines our proven business training to help you review your assets, identify staff and programs to develop new funding streams before economic headwinds intensify. The program includes:
- Comprehensive Organizational Assessment: Identify your marketable assets and most promising opportunities
- Interactive Training Sessions: Engaging experiences covering the essential elements of nonprofit entrepreneurship
- Group Coaching: Personalized guidance from experts with track records in nonprofit social enterprise
- Peer Learning Community: Collaboration with like-minded organizations facing similar challenges
- Implementation Toolkits: Templates, checklists, and frameworks to accelerate your progress
- Plan: A customized roadmap to implement your first earned income stream
Join our next cohort starting June 17th.
Or schedule an Assessment Call with Anisha Robinson Keeys. Get clarity on whether your organization could benefit from this. Click here to book a 30-min call.
In the nonprofit world, the most powerful words aren’t “grant approved”—they’re “earned income received.” The former comes with strings attached and eventual expiration; the latter provides flexibility and sustainability.
After all, as I like to tell my clients, traditional fundraising is like fishing—you might catch something today, but you’ll be hungry again tomorrow. Entrepreneurial funding is like building a fish farm—it takes more work upfront but feeds you reliably for years to come.
Which would you rather have in uncertain economic times?
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