You can get a copy of the webinar presentation Fidelity Charitable hosted for 160 non-profit development professionals on donor-advised giving.
I had the pleasure of being one of the speakers, along with Rachel Earl of St. Labre and Amy Pirozzolo of Fidelity Charitable. The session was recorded and will be rebroadcast.
Everyone needs to pick up the pace of your outreach to these donors and your efforts to inspire them to give regularly from these giving accounts.
In a short period of time the overall level of funds in these accounts will exceed $100 billion and this money is only granted fulfilling donors’ instructions (i.e. why they are called donor-advised funds).
So the key here is to inspire donors to instruct their giving account to distribute the money more often to YOU.
Some of the key points you’ll hear expressed on the recorded session include:
Fidelity Charitable has ~20% of the funds and ~50% of all the donor-advised donors in the U.S.
The average account distributes all of its funds over nine years
The majority of the FC donors have a balance of $25,000 or less; we’re talking about donors for the most part who will be giving gifts of $100-$2,000
The majority of the funds are in accounts significantly larger who will be making grants of $10,000 or more
These donors have planned and acted upon their desire to be able to continue their charitable giving, whether in their retirement years or to make current giving easier. These funds have been irrevocably set-aside for charitable purposes
YOUR role here is to cultivate, educate and inspire donors with these accounts; look through the names of the donors who have used a donor-advised fund giving account and tell their stories to other donors as testimonials for all. Write letters with the sole purpose of asking them to use their account today
Make it easy for the donors to find the DAF Direct widget on your website; this is available for free from dafdirect.org for 501 (c)(3) organizations
Take on the role as their trusted advisor on best donor practices – advise them how to add your organization as a successor or beneficiary of their account. Suggest they set up a monthly giving plan. They control this feature and can make changes or additions constantly without cost. Indicate this is a smarter way to plan their legacy giving than constantly revising their will
Rachel said that after a donor read about what anyone can do with a donor advised fund account, the donor called in and indicated she had just made St. Labre the beneficiary of her DAF account. Now St. Labre can tell her story and inspire others!
