For nonprofits
Your donors have more to give than they are giving you.
Not because they are holding back. Because the ask does not match how they actually hold their charitable money.
For nonprofits
Not because they are holding back. Because the ask does not match how they actually hold their charitable money.
The premise
They are holding appreciated securities. Some of them have a donor advised fund with a balance already sitting in it, money that is committed to charity and waiting for a recipient. A few hold crypto.
A donation page with one field for a credit card number quietly tells every one of them that you cannot accept what they actually have. The gift does not get smaller. It goes somewhere else.
Most charities spend enormous energy asking donors for money and almost none teaching donors how to give.
What usually goes wrong
No mention of DAF giving anywhere on the donation page, so the donor with a funded account has to work out how to reach you on their own.
The brokerage details a donor needs in order to give shares are nowhere on the site, and nobody on staff knows where to find them.
The appeal goes out weeks after the donor already decided what they were giving and to whom.
A grant arrives from a sponsoring organization, gets receipted as an institutional gift, and a real donor relationship quietly goes unacknowledged.
A major donor offers something other than a check and the conversation stalls while somebody figures out whether you can even take it.
Almost none of this requires new software or new staff. It requires the people asking to understand how the people giving actually operate.
What a session covers
How financially sophisticated donors hold and move charitable capital. How to accept and properly acknowledge a donor advised fund grant. Stock and crypto transfer mechanics explained for staff rather than for accountants. The questions that surface an asset gift in a major donor conversation. And why the calendar matters more than the appeal.
I have been the board member who had to hit the number and the donor using these tools to give. That combination is less common than it sounds, and it is the reason this is a working session rather than a lecture.
Formats
If you would rather I speak to your donors directly instead of your staff, that is the Faith, Finance and Giving program.
Sessions are educational and drawn from personal experience. They are not financial, tax, or legal advice, and no donor advised fund provider is endorsed.
Next step
Organization, board size, and what last year’s campaign did or did not do. That is enough for me to tell you whether a session is worth your time.