It’s difficult buying holiday gifts for clients. Your hope is to align these gifts with your practice mission, but without insulting or boring your clients with a cheese board or cooler stamped with your firm’s logo on it. Going the extra distance can be thankless.

Brandon Opre knows that pressure. Opre, the founder of TrustTree Financial, a wealth management firm in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., said, “I got tired of sending branded gifts and asking clients to use something with my name on it. It felt awkward.” He recalls giving clients a Yeti cup with his firm’s name emblazoned across the front a few years back, without much fanfare.

Then, “I came across TisBest Charity Gift Cards, which gives me a unique solution to gift-giving,” Opre said.

TisBest’s cards work like any other gift card, except they allow recipients to experience the power of giving by donating 100% of the card’s value to charities of their choice.

TisBest, founded in 2007, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to encouraging others to give gifts of good, rather than gifts of stuff. TisBest’s cards work like conventional gift cards, with one meaningful exception: The recipient "spends" the card by choosing which charity to support with the funds.

The cards are customizable and come in any amount between $10 and $5,000. Purchasers can choose to send a biodegradable plastic card by mail, print a card at home, or send an e-card directly to their gift recipients. 

With the card, recipients can direct donations to one or more of the 1.8 million charities registered with the IRS (they are handily listed on TisBest’s website at www.tisbest.com).

And with these cards, brokers and registered reps will not be hamstrung by the $100 limit imposed by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority on most other gifts, since there is no intrinsic value in the gift card.

Clients get to give back, Opre said, adding, “I’m able to get a tax deduction for the charitable donation—whether the client uses the card or not—and make the world a better place in the process.”

TisBest offers feedback too, providing advisors with email reports listing the charities that clients and employees give to—important information that can help a firm and advisor personalize and focus future discussions.

“Feedback from clients is amazing,” said Kimberly Stone, director of marketing and client relations at Cannon Wealth Management in Winston-Salem, N.C.

“We’ve been using TisBest cards since 2014,” Stone said. “When clients go to the website and pick their charity, they also have the ability to send us a note. That allows me to know who the pet lovers are, who the veterans are. It helps me in my user-defined fields because I can focus on where they’re using the cards to get to know them better as clients.”

When Nicole Donnelly joined TisBest as marketing director several years back, she specifically pointed to advisors as some of the organization’s most desirable customers because “they have so much influence over what their own clients do with disposable wealth,” said Donnelly, who did a panel on tax-deductible giving for Financial Advisor’s recent Invest in Women conference.

Donnelly said the firm has “a lot of advisors who will give $250 cards to their clients and to their employees during the holidays, but more and more for occasions all year round.”

TisBest has given more than $42 million to charities since it was founded in 2007 and has seen its gift card giving double from 2019 to 2020. Donnelly said the firm expects the total to more than double again through 2021, Donnelly said.

“The thing we hear from advisors is that once they start using charitable gift cards, they never go back to giving other gifts. It establishes an emotional connection that [is] meaningful to advisors and their clients.”

Ray Dalio, founder, co-chairman, and co-CIO of Bridgewater Associates, partnered with TisBest last year to help the charity give away $2 million worth of the charity gift cards to 30,000 folks who signed up for the TisBest website. The successful campaign was repeated in 2021.

"For more than a decade at the holidays, I have been giving people blank chekcs, and now charity gift cards, to pick their favoritie charities...to donate money," Dalio said. "I've loved it--and the recipients have loved it--because it replaces wasteful giving with meaningful giving and gets money into the hands of people who need it most." 

TisBest also recently launched a partnership with The Ellen DeGeneres Show and premiered an original digital series on Ellen Digital’s “Smile,” hub, Donnelly said.

Next up is answering the call from supermarket gift card distributors who want to put TisBest cards at the checkout counter. “They really want us in the stores,” Donnelly added.