If you’ve already established a donor-advised fund at the FM Area Foundation, you can understand why it’s become such a popular tool for organizing your family’s giving and serving as a springboard for so many other ways to make a difference in our region.
Recently, we’ve talked with a lot of donors who work with the FM Area Foundation in a variety of ways, such as regularly contributing to a favorite organization’s endowment fund, supporting the FM Area Foundation’s operating endowment, making distributions from an IRA to a designated fund, or attending the FM Area Foundation events to rally around important community priorities. Interestingly, we are discovering that some of these donors also have established a donor-advised fund at a national financial institution and, in many cases, did not realize that they could have set up their donor-advised fund at the FM Area Foundation.
It’s time to set the record straight!
For starters, the FM Area Foundation offers donor-advised fund holders the same tax and administrative benefits as a national financial institution, including:
- Online access to the donor-advised fund to view balances, contributions, and grants
- Simple process for requesting grants to favorite charities
- Streamlined tax reporting, often represented by just one letter to provide to an accountant at tax time, even when the donor-advised fund is used to support dozens of individual charities throughout the year
- All back-office administration, tax receipts, recordkeeping, and other requirements for the donor-advised fund’s 501(c)(3) status
- Favorable tax-deductibility of contributions to the fund
Unlike standard national financial institutions’ donor-advised funds, though, the FM Area Foundation offers high-level, customized services to its donor-advised fund holders, including:
- Concierge-level service by knowledgeable staff to structure estate gifts to charities and accept gifts of appreciated stock or complex assets such as real estate or closely held stock
- In-house experts who have a finger on the pulse of community needs, the strengths of specific nonprofits, and how to structure grant-making for the highest possible community benefit
- Opportunities to collaborate with other donors who care about similar issues and forums to tap into local and national subject matter experts
- Opportunities to go deep into specific issue areas, both through education and hands-on involvement
- Assistance with structuring and measuring the impact of grants
- Family philanthropy and corporate giving services to foster a well-rounded, holistic approach to philanthropy
- Administrative fees are reinvested into the FM Area Foundation, itself a nonprofit, to help support operations, grow its mission, and help even more donors support the causes they care about
- Hands-on assistance from local experts who understand both local and distant needs and welcome the opportunity to research and identify causes aligned with donors’ goals and priorities
- Staff members who live in the community they serve and often personally know the leaders and staff of grantee organizations and regularly hear about their needs first-hand
If you’ve established a donor-advised fund at a national financial institution, we’d love to chat about moving it over to the FM Area Foundation. At the FM Area Foundation, your hard-earned assets receive the attention they deserve as you and your family strive to make a difference in the causes you care about the most.
