In 2016, Cari Newton organized a food drive for her church, and used one word to describe the process: chaotic. Newton was sorting hundreds of food items, all coming from different donors and getting dropped off at different places.
“There’s got to be an easier way to do this,” she said.
And from there, the idea of Benevolist was born. 
Newton describes her company (of which she is Founder and President) as a wedding registry for nonprofits: it’s a website on which nonprofits can organize collection drives, enabling donors to purchase items online. Nonprofits create lists of specific items they would like to collect from Benevolist’s partner merchants: Amazon, Walmart, Home Depot and Target. Donors buy the items directly from the merchants and send them to whatever addresses the nonprofits provide.
Benevolist, which is based in Raleigh, is a part of CED’s GRO Incubator, a 12-week program for early-stage startups. Newton said she and the other entrepreneurs in her cohort have been able to help each other make new connections.
“It’s fun to be able to help somebody else’s company grow,” she said.
As a nonprofit-adjacent company, Benevolist’s revenue comes from its merchant partners. Every sale on a partner’s site gives Benevolist a cut of the profit, and the platform is free for nonprofits and donors to use. So far, all funding has come from bootstrapping.
While the idea for Benevolist began in 2016, the website didn’t officially launch until the spring of 2023. Those years in between were difficult, Newton said, and at certain points, a “total disaster.”
At the beginning, when Newton was still working full time in marketing, she pulled together a team to develop her idea and website. But she said the team was not dedicated to the project, and she felt that what they had produced was “practically unusable.” Then, in 2018, Newton faced a serious medical diagnosis that sidetracked her professional aspirations. And in 2020, the pandemic hit.
“I was about to give up on this, I really was,” she said. “Multiple times I was about to throw in the towel.”
But, her friends and mentors convinced her to stick with it, and Newton decided that the next step was to find merchant partners to monetize her company. That proved to be difficult as well—Newton was denied by Walmart multiple times before being accepted—but she eventually got in touch with Target and Home Depot through an affiliate company.
“I could [not have been] more excited to have three of the best brands in the United States to launch with on our website,” Newton said. (Amazon would come aboard later.)
Through Benevolist, donors use a link from the nonprofit that takes them to the “needs list,” which Newton differentiates from a “wish list.” When a donor finds an item they’d like to purchase, the link takes them to the merchant’s website; the donor can also have a pop-up of the delivery address follow them to ensure an easy checkout. Meanwhile, Benevolist tracks when certain items are bought to minimize overlap between donations.
Benevolist provides several additional features to assist nonprofits with their collection drives. If those nonprofits don’t want to create a needs list from scratch, for instance, they can edit and sort collection items from Benevolist’s pre-built lists.
Another feature Benevolist is adding soon is a media kit, which has customizable emails and social media posts the nonprofits can use to promote their drives on their websites.
Newton said Benevolist’s greatest “proof of concept” drive was conducted by the Maui Food Bank after the Lahaina wildfire in August 2023. Target and Home Depot were on the north side of the island, untouched by the fire, and she said the food bank set up a needs list and received an overwhelming number of donations.
“I wanted to take my marketing skills and talents and do something where I can help lots and lots and lots of people in need,” Newton said. “It finally took until this stage in my life to realize what it is – and it’s Benevolist.”
