As pioneers of the independent donor advised fund experience, we offer a donor experience not typically found in today’s marketplace for donor advised funds including:
- Sponsor Focus – different from Community Foundations, whose main focus is on the needs of the local community or National Commercial Sponsors, who focus on financial products and services for-profit motive, we focus on the donor’s philanthropic interests.
- Independence – with no pools, no products or services to sell and no philanthropic agenda, our focus is entirely on the philanthropic interests of the donor.
- The Donor Experience – we do not operate a call center. You have ready access to our principals and staff with some of the longest experience in the donor advised fund industry.
- Affordability – we have some of the lowest administrative fees in the industry with savings of 25% to 50% or more compared to other national sponsors. For example, our administrative fee schedule starts at just 0.45% (45 bps) on the first $500,000 of the fund balance. Other sponsors start at 0.60% (60 bps), or more.
- Investment choice – we do not manage the investment. Donors recommend their financial advisor, as broker or in a managed account relationship, to manage their fund’s investments in open architecture, at all fund size levels, on your familiar platform. Assets types can be held in kind. This allows the donor to keep their relationship with their trusted advisor.
- Fund options – unlike commercial sponsors, we are organized as a national community foundation. In addition to DAFs, we offer other donor fund options which can be tailored to the donor’s unique needs including: designated funds, field-of-interest funds, scholarship funds, charity endowment funds, etc. Note: These latter funds are not considered donor advised funds, and as such are eligible to receive Qualified Charitable Distributions (QCD) at age 70½ and count toward the donor’s RMDs at age 72.
- Systems – we have a great back office system and donor portal which allows us to provide a level of systems support equal to or better than some of the national commercial sponsors.