How to Manage a Nonprofit Store + Gifts That Give Back

This week on the Nonprofit Jenni Show, we chat with Ana Guzman, the store manager for Ten Thousand Villages in Fort Collins, CO about how to manage a successful nonprofit store. We also highlight some of Ten Thousand Villages’ awesome Gifts That Give Back for the holiday season!

What is Nonprofit Jenni’s “Gifts That Give Back” podcast segment?

This and next month, I’m featuring one mission-driven store each week on the pod to help you learn about Gifts That Give Back. I hope these segments spark a few ideas for what you can buy to make people on your shopping list happy while also supporting great causes.

But we’re not stopping there! During Gifts That Give Back, I’m also interviewing these store owners to give you inspiration as a nonprofit professional about how you might be able to earn additional revenue for your organization by selling products and services.

How to Generate Revenue for Your Nonprofit With a Store

During our first week of Gives That Give Back, our guest is my sweet friend and colleague Ana Guzman, the manager of the Ten Thousand Villages store in Fort Collins, CO. If you’ve never been to a Ten Thousand Villages store, I highly recommend doing a quick Google search to see if there’s a store located near you. These stores are all so beautiful, and they do an awesome job of balancing the need to share their charitable mission with shoppers and remaining profitable so the organization can sustain itself. 

I highly recommend you listen to the full podcast episode to hear all of Ana’s tips and stories about how she manages her store, but here were some of my biggest takeaways from our interview:

1. Lead with your mission. The most successful nonprofit stores are those which do a great job both at educating shoppers on their mission and at making it easy for shoppers to support that mission. Make sure your store has plenty of signage talking about your impact, well-informed employees and volunteers who can speak intelligently about your mission to shoppers, and even accessible pricing that allows shoppers from all backgrounds to support you.

2. Consider shoppers’ in-store behavior. Ana talks about the importance of watching how shoppers walk through your store, especially when you want to encourage social distancing during the pandemic. If you notice too many people crowding one another in a certain section, consider changing up your layout.

3. Make each item feel special. Avoid visually overwhelming shoppers by creating clutter with too many items. Give each item enough space that shoppers feel they can look at each individual object, understand its story in alignment with your mission, and envision the object in their lives.

Listen to the Full Episode

Listen to my full conversation with Ana to hear her amazing story and advice for nonprofit store managers:

Jenni’s Favorite Resources This Week

Every week on my blog, I collect my top favorite resources for nonprofits to check out! Many of these relate to the topics covered on the podcast that week, but they’re great to check out any time: