December 4, 2019
By Jack Doyle, Amergent President & CEO
Thought you’d like to have these to share with the right colleagues:
1. I get a LOT of questions from people worried that their thank you letters might not be right. We created this table as a reminder of whom to thank and how to thank them. The money granted to you from a donor advised fund (DAF) giving account was the charitable sponsor’s money, not your donor’s money anymore. The DAF donor should be thanked and should be told how much money you received, when you received it, and where it came from (use the popular name of the charitable sponsor like Fidelity Charitable). If you do all of that, you earn an A+.
2. DAF donors are not all alike. You should consider the following information, as it indicates how much they needed to donate to open a giving account with the charitable sponsor they chose; and it indicates what represents the minimum size grant they are allowed to recommend.
- Someone at Vanguard giving you a $500 grant is fulfilling their minimum requirement; someone from Schwab or Fidelity giving you a $500 grant is making a gift 10 times the grant minimum. Tells you something about their affinity to your cause.
- You get so many grants from Schwab and Fidelity DAF donors because the barrier to entry is low, much lower than all the other national sponsors. And they introduced this form of giving more effectively to the general giving public.
- Fidelity is now expanding into workplace giving, with an employee being able to set aside part of a paycheck into their retirement fund and other dollars into a DAF account (look for Fidelity Workplace Giving or Giving Marketplace).
- A DAF donor with a giving account at one of the top four national charitable sponsors should be given a higher major donor gift score, even if you can’t find other information; disregard if they gave you a $250 or $500 DAF grant, as their capacity for giving is dependent on their account balance.
- Consider an Ask Array that begins with two times the grant minimum by national sponsor or is based on a larger previous grant amount:
- A Fidelity Charitable Ask Array can be $100, $200, $300 and $500
- A UJFA Ask Array can be $200, $300, $500 and $1,000
- A Vanguard Ask Array can be $1,000, $2,000, $3,000 and $5,000
