Enjoy the holidays! By encouraging clients to make their donations, establish their donor-advised fund accounts, and make their grant recommendations from their DAF accounts earlier in the year, advisors will be able to decrease their work and stress level during December. When advisors look back at previous years and see that clients asked them to donate stock to many different charities in November and December, it may make sense to look for a simpler solution to save both them and their clients much time and aggravation. One annual tax-receipt letter from a DAF sponsor is much easier to keep track of than many different letters from numerous grantees. Clients love to be able to go online at anytime to their DAF sponsor’s website to quickly make grant recommendations to different charities, or ask their advisors to do this for them, rather than having to bother their advisors to tell them to make separate stock donations to the many charities. And of course it is easier for advisors to be able to donate all of the stock holdings to the one DAF sponsor than to the different 501(c)3 organizations.
The most important aspect is to begin the conversation now. Clients always welcome this conversation when they understand how it benefits them, the charities they support, and even how it benefits their advisors. The charitable discussion often is a key factor in bringing in new clients as well as retaining existing ones. One advisor recently told me that he always talks about charitable planning because, if he does not, another advisor will!
Ken Nopar is the senior philanthropic advisor for the American Endowment Foundation, the country’s leading independent donor-advised fund. AEF works with donors and their financial, legal and tax advisors in all 50 states.