Is there a donor-advised fund that we can contribute to, that is generally willing to send donations to the IFTech Foundation? I have stock that I would consider donating, but the IFTech Foundation doesn’t accept stock donations directly.
I know that once I donate to a donor-advised fund, where it goes from there is out of my hands, so if I donated a single share and the proceeds were sent six months later to, say, the Noninteractive Factual Philosophy … Roof instead, then that would be a relatively inexpensive lesson and I wouldn’t donate to that donor-advised fund again. But if it reliably sent donations on to the IFTech Foundation, I’d feel reasonably confident in donating in the future.
I got the link to this forum from the IFTech Foundation page, but I strongly suspect this isn’t the correct forum for this. I couldn’t find anything on the web about this, though, so sorry if this isn’t the right place to post this.
I think this is probably the best forum to ask this since it is run by IFTF and at least one board member is a frequent visitor (hopefully @zarf will forgive being tagged in). With that said, the most recent annual report is here, and it doesn’t look like there are significant foundation or DAF revenues, so doubt there’s an easy pre-existing path for what you’re looking to do, unfortunately. Might require some further conversations, then.
Asking those questions here is fine. (I am the IFTF treasurer.)
IFTF occasionally receives donations from some giant fund that I’ve never heard of, which turns out to be an employer matching deal. That is, someone donated $N by way of their employer who threw in another $N. That gets listed in the annual report as “individual donation” – breaking it down into “individual” and “institutional” seems more confusing than not.
I don’t know a lot about donor-advised funds. However, I can say that we’ve gotten donations this way from:
Benevity Giving Platform
PayPal Giving Fund
Network For Good
YourCause
Of these, Benevity is the one that shows up most often in my spreadsheet.
My understanding is that these funds allow you to target anything listed in the big catalog of US nonprofits – which we are. (See https://www.guidestar.org/profile/81-1920375 , for example.) So it should work, and there’s no reason to think that the money will go astray.
But then, I only see money when it arrives, so it’s possible that there are problems I never find out about.
I know just enough about donor-advised funds to get myself in trouble, but not sure these platforms would work, since it looks like these platforms require employers to set them up and do cash donations, but from Krishna’s initial post I think he’s looking to give a gift of appreciated stock on his own (donating the stock in-kind, rather than selling it first and then donating the cash, has tax benefits so your money goes farther).
I don’t know how much stock y’all are talking about, and therefore how many hoops are worth jumping through, but from a quick Google I did find this platform that appears to allow individual stock donation (looks like the donation goes to a middleman charity, then gets liquidated and the money passed on to the destination charity, minus what they say is a 2-3% fee). Certainly count vouch for them, but I think something like this might be more what you’re after than a DAF, which would probably require conversations with them to get IFTF on their radar and even then no guarantee, or platforms that may not specialize in stock donations.
Hope some of this is helpful, and of course I would definitely consult with a financial advisor on this kind of thing rather than relying on randos on the internet.
Anyhow, please let us know what you find out. If you try a service and run into a wall saying “Your charity has not registered on this site!”, drop me a note and I can see about registering.
I am an internet rando who has more than a tiny bit of DAF experience, so here’s what I think, in some sort of order:
If donors are interested in giving securities to IFTF, it might be a sign to IFTF that it’s time to look into how to accept them in a way that’s seamless to the donors. (It probably involves using a service like the one mentioned next…)
This service does look like a good option for what @krishna is actually trying to do. A ~3% fee hit seems reasonable for this kind of convenience/peace of mind.
Fidelity Charitable doesn’t have any minimum balance and a very low ($50) grant floor, but it does have a $100 minimum annual fee which acts as an effective brake on “I’ve got $200 in stock and want to give it to a small charity not set up to accept securities.”
Without sitting here and counting your money, Krishna, I suggest that if your single share was an earnest example, hopefully it’s of something with a high price like QQQ (or, y’know, Berkshire Hathaway Class A) to make it worthwhile for all involved. The paperwork and authentication involved in a transfer-of-ownership of securities is usually more fiddly than just writing a check. (and if it is one share of BRK.A then IFTF should open a brokerage account yesterday and accept it with open arms.)
It’s unlikely that an institutional DAF would go along with what you’re hoping. A DAF advised by a friend (or friendly Internet rando) is a better bet (although as you note, you can’t enforce any arrangement you made with the advisor). However, you expressed interest in doing this maneuver more than once and that might get a little tedious for the advisor.
So, yeah. Cocatalyst unless you’ve got a massive allergy to the charity taking the ~3% hit on the incoming funds, and in that case make nice with individual DAF-holders until one takes you up on the idea of doing this favor every X months.
Even then, you’ll have to make sure that your intended grant is higher than the DAF’s minimum. Fidelity’s $50 minimum is by far the lowest I’ve seen, values between $250-$500 are more the norm. So if it really is a single share donation of a stock with a typical double-digit price, the road leads back to Cocatalyst once more.
At our current scale, opening a brokerage account is just not happening. I do treasurer stuff in my spare time. Services like Cocatalyst exist exactly to serve organizations like IFTF; we will happily take advantage of that and let them take their fee.
That’s hundreds of thousands of dollars, to be clear. That’s the point where IFTF hires a professional accountant to handle the situation.
Right. There could always be an eccentric multi-millionaire out there who really loved Lists and Lists. You never know.
Sure. Making it easier for people in-the-moment to click through to “here’s our preferred partner for your securities donation” would be a good idea, though.
Similarly, “taking weirdocurrency from eccentric cryptomillionaires.” It’s only anecdotal, but I have the informed impression that there are a nonzero number of these people who enjoy throwing fractional weirdocurrencies at causes they favor, when those causes make it easy and obvious for them to do so. The ad hits for “cryptocurrency donation middleman” all seemed plausible enough.
(side note: ugh, is there a similar org to Cocatalyst which does not do the twee-and-shady thing of calling their serious executives things like “Andrea G.”? C’mon.)
Right, if you don’t want the hassle of a 20th century brokerage account I wouldn’t think you’d want to be juggling crypto wallets. The Giving Block appears to offer the option to give charities the cash equivalent, which is what you’d want.