Family dynamics across generations

Ruth Selby:

My name's Ruth Selby. Thanks for being with us today. I'm at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, and this is Charitable Conversations session three of our six-part series discussing family dynamics and involvement in philanthropy. We have already addressed in this series values, conversation starters, and effective philanthropic practice. Today, we're going to talk about legacy planning, how to engage children in the next generation in philanthropy, and more in the family dynamic space. I'm really thrilled to be here, and again, thanks for joining.

Here's our agenda: So we're starting with welcome and introductions. We'll go into why this topic is important, as I'm sure many of you are having these conversations with clients already and wanting to know how to navigate the conversations with different generations of family. We're going to talk about the dual purpose of family philanthropy, so the two aims of philanthropy when it's practiced in a family unit. Different roles that family members play, family dynamics, things to be aware of when advising a family in their philanthropy. And then we'll save time at the end for Q&A and close out.

So next, I'm going to pass the microphone to Kristie Mitchell, who's a senior manager with DAFgiving360™. Over to you, Kristie.

Kristie Mitchell:

Thank you, Ruth. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. I'm very excited to welcome you to our advisor webinar education series in partnership with Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. As Ruth mentioned, I'm Kristie Mitchell, a Senior Manager and Charitable Consultant with DAFgiving360.

And for those of you who may not know, last year we did rebrand to DAFgiving360. And our name increases awareness to our commitment to make DAF a strategic part of giving. So while our name has changed, our mission and our offer has remained the same.

Now, today's session will focus on family dynamics across generations and when it comes to charitable giving. At DAFgiving360, we recognize that philanthropy can be a very personal part of a person's charitable planning strategy, and we feel that philanthropy is a great way to connect generations.

So to complement that, I do want to highlight a few resources that are available on our public website, and these resources are there for advisors to use in helping their clients to achieve maximum charitable impact.

So our first resource, which is the key standout resource for us, and it's our most used resource, it's very easy to use and a very effective tool for advisors to use, and it's our DAFgiving360 Giving Guide. And it's basically just a comprehensive resource that you can use to walk your clients through the charitable planning journey no matter where they are in the journey. And it has 15 different topics that it covers, but the best place to probably start is with helping the client to understand their mission.

In addition to the DAFgiving360 Giving Guide, we also have the Advisor's Guide to the Guide, which provides helpful tips for you as the advisor to help with discussing charitable giving with your clients.

So again, both of these resources are free to you and available on our public website. And once clients go through the whole charitable planning journey and et cetera, from there, they can also explore organizations through excellent resources such as Candid and Charity Navigator. These are both excellent resources for evaluating nonprofits. And then the Giving Guide also includes guidance on topics such as international giving, as well as intergenerational engagement.

So today, we are joined by Vera Michalchik, Director of Philanthropy Research and Education at Stanford PACS, and Ruth Selby, who's the Program and Education Manager at Stanford PACS, who you've already met. So with that, I will turn it over to Vera.

Vera Michalchik:

As Kristie said, I'm the Director of Philanthropy Research and Education at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, which is an organization that has the goals you see here: improve philanthropy, strengthen civil society, and affect social change. And we also publish an absolutely wonderful magazine, if you haven't seen it yet, Stanford Social Innovation Review. I was a big fan of SSIR long before I joined this organization, and I think anybody interested in how to make the world a better place, including your clients, would find it a good read.

Our group, the one that Ruth and I are on, and you've met Ruth, you've met me, has a focus on doing research using tools and resources and holding educational events like this to help advance good giving for donors and donor supporters. So really what that means is that you are our target audience, you are the people we care about.

We use our interdisciplinarity, our knowledge of philanthropy, social science, design thinking to try to make giving for high-capacity donors better, easier, more effective, more aligned with the work that they really want to do in this world. And because of that, you as their advisors are, again, a particularly important audience to us.

So we thank you so much for being here today and for helping us think about really the keys to unlock resources, to solve problems, alleviate suffering, improve lives, create positive social change. Anything that your clients want to do with their resources is something that we hope we are supporting you to help them do better. Okay.

So enough about us, a little bit about you. As you go through the course today, the session today, you can wear the hat of you as someone who does give to the world in many ways, and also the hat of thinking through the eyes of your client as an advisor.

We've learned a lot about philanthropy and donor behavior in the 20 or so years we've been in existence. And we hope that the webinars like this that we do are helping bring some of those insights to you as advisors and to the clients you work with and other donors in this space.

There's this great wealth transfer that is upon us, and the many trillions of dollars are somewhat debated, but the highest number I've seen recently is $124 trillion being passed on to the next generation. And attrition between generations is estimated at between 38 and 60%, which puts assets under management at risk. Up to $70 trillion, if you do the math, is something that advisors could actually lose in their management in their portfolios as this generational transfer takes place.

The other thing to note, next slide, is that investible assets in U.S. households where there's 5 million or more available for investment, those folks, those families are three times more likely to have charitable giving as their most important financial goal. That's from a 2024 report.

And just think about that, your highest net worth clients, they're really going to be people who care a lot about giving. And as we know, there's a pretty big mismatch between how prepared financial advisors, wealth advisors feel they are to guide the giving conversations and how much their clients want those conversations. There are a lot of different statistics, but the truth is there is not as much advising in this space as there is desire to be advised. That's maybe the most succinct way I could put it.

Let's talk about what we've done specifically in building this toolkit that we've mentioned a couple times now. It has six units. They are really focused on helping advisors put philanthropy more centrally in the conversation with their clients. And the whole series is built around this toolkit, and you can download it. It is available in hard copy as well.

Next slide. Our toolkit is not the only resource we have. We also have a more in-depth guide that is written with a little more about the kind of strategy donors might want to use when they're thinking about how to plan their giving, plan it in the sense of what difference they want to make in the world.

And not long ago, with the help of our friends at DAFgiving360 and elsewhere, we have built a little interactive, self-paced online learning module built off the guide that really walks a donor, an advisor through some of the prior main considerations we think really need to be woven into the giving journey. And all of these are pretty complimentary, but we're, again, focused on the toolkit.

The unit we're focusing on this time is the one on involving family, as Ruth has mentioned. And I think, Ruth, if you could put the link to this unit up, that would maybe give people a quick access to it.

As Ruth suggested at the top of the hour, many or most of your clients really do care about this topic a great deal. It comes up a lot, we don't just hear that it comes up a lot from clients, but it's maybe top two. Sometimes the top question we get from advisors when advisors are talking about what they wish to learn more about is how to talk with and about family with their clients. And so today, we'll go through some frameworks and some exercises that we hope help you feel more confident when questions about family and giving get asked.

Next slide. Yes, family dynamics are going to be an important part of that. Thinking about family dynamics, we want to say that there are two really important considerations in family philanthropy. Of course, like all philanthropy, and we will put any tax considerations aside for the moment, like all philanthropy, there is a strong element of doing good in the world of a donor, understanding their values, understanding where they want to focus their giving, and then making a difference.

But family philanthropy also has the family dynamic issue also built in, ideally to build family closeness. But as we all know, dynamics around big decisions and families, even around small decisions, often find themselves in challenging situations, differences of opinion, even conflict. But there's a dual purpose in family philanthropy, and many families prioritize the second over the first, but we're not taking a stance on that. We're just saying they're both of these things happening at the same time.

Because of that, next slide, you might find your clients thinking about questions like how do they introduce their family to philanthropy? How do they clarify roles, responsibilities, expectations, and embrace shared family values and create a meaningful legacy? Again, these are questions directly addressed in our toolkit.

And I just want to put a little note here, yes, thank you, to say that family can be defined very broadly. It can be a biological family, it can be a bonus family, it can even be close friends or peers who might end up being co-funders and giving decisions. But we're going to think about mostly families of blood and marriage as we go through this. But any way you want to think about family or your clients want to think about family are certainly within the purview of how we hope to support you and your clients.

So we have a number of worksheets in the toolkit that help a client go through and think about what needs to be considered. So let's actually think through some of the considerations, and I encourage you to sort of do this yourself. Think about your own giving, think about your own planning, think about yourself and the position of a client, but really map your own personal life onto these questions and think when we think about what needs to be considered.

First of all, whom do you consider family? We just discussed that, and that can be broadly defined. Second, who do you want to involve in your giving? Children's spouses? Both my kids are marrying this year, and I found that to be a very interesting question: How much I would want their spouses, about whom I have my own mother-in-law opinions, how they can and should be involved.

Again, something that you may not have kids in the age where you have to think about that, but it's something that actually makes a pretty big difference as people get into their legacy-planning years.

Next question: Would involving your children in your philanthropy exert too much influence on their life paths? And this ends up being a big concern for a lot of donors: How much do they want to shape what their children decide to do? There's also the children's side of this: Would your children want to be involved?

So another question: How much control are you willing to give up so that family members can express their passions through what you as the wealth creator have created? And that adds... The next question is how much your children want to be involved, and what are the ways they want to give back into the world? These next-gen legacy questions become really thick. We've done a fair amount of research with families that are ultra-high net worth globally, and these are very dynamic questions that have a lot of negotiation between children, parents, even earlier generations.

Last question is about perpetuity and what a donor may want to communicate to future generations. So these are very big questions about life purpose, life goal, relationships between parents and children, children's life goals, mutual influence, and they are at the heart of family philanthropy. They're also discussed in our toolkit at greater length.

There's been a decline in the past years of younger generations having the same kind of involvement as they have in previous generations. So one thing you can think about is that there may be different roles that family members can have, that there's a dynamic to what roles they take.

So next slide, please. One role is as a co-philanthropist, being a partner in philanthropy so that the donor, your primary client, the primary wealth holder isn't lonely at the top and has others who really are thinking through the process with them. There are people who could potentially be a little less involved, but are a great sounding board. So a thought partner or advisor in the upper right quadrant is a great role for some family members.

Some family members might want to be implementers, that they really just want to get down, roll their sleeves up, and do the work. Implementation is a huge part of giving if it's not a simple matter of writing checks, but really paying attention to the outcomes of philanthropic giving. And then what's the succession plan? Always the question of what the succession plan is.

To get back to these dual goals of family philanthropy, some families only give grants by having everyone vote collectively, some families really try to do the good in the world all together as one, and that tends to be a little difficult. So what they end up doing is sort of dividing and giving people individual roles, which ends up being kind of sometimes confusing, and next gens tends to be a little bit complexifying in this, couples sometimes have challenges in this.

So next slide, please. We know from recent research that couples tend to give together only about 50% of the time. When couples aren't deciding together, men tend to make the decisions more than the women, but it's a complex landscape of how couples give. And the next generation is changing such that they prioritize issues around social justice often and environmental issues. They're more oriented towards approaches like donor-advised funds and maybe even some of the other newer vehicles. They tend to look more to impact investing than traditional philanthropic models. So more and more donors are thinking about how they can blend or integrate impact investing along with traditional grant making. And next gen are more likely to directly engage with the causes that they support and seek tangible results and transparency, working with non-profits and grantees, which is a model that we find very productive.

So it's a very interesting space to think about moving from sort of a check-writing creator foundation mode where the principles aren't as involved to really being deeply involved with the non-profits that are the recipients of grants.

So let's just take a second to give you a chance to reflect a little bit and think about, given all that we've said, what is happening in your own practice around conversations that may be a strategy to engage next gen? And then are these conversations bringing you new insights and deepening relationships in your work, if in fact you're using them?

Ruth Selby:

All right. Everyone should be seeing the poll on their screen. Great to see how many folks are already having these conversations as a strategy to engage the next generation. And it looks like most folks are around at three on the second question that these conversations are starting to bring new insights but not quite fully informing the picture.

Vera Michalchik:

And I want to say that it really is an art. The toolkit has some formula for conversations and ways to approach things, it has some templates, but it's always an art, and it always depends on the dance of the relationship with clients, but it is important to feel like there are techniques and tools one can use to get there and makes sense that nobody's really feeling like or very few of you are really feeling like you've really nailed the thing.

We've been doing this 20 years, and we have yes approaches, and there's a lot of traction in them. And when donors attend our programs, they tend to say that they're very helpful, but we know it's always just the beginning.

One thing that, if you were with us in session one, it was also mentioned in session two, is this focus statement, basically a mission statement for family giving. And the toolkit, as well as some elements on our website, really help you walk through a process, if you haven't done this already and don't do it already, where a family can use a statement of their own values, a statement of the issue areas that they're interested in and want to make a difference in to come up with something like the Veracity Foundation is committed to service, justice, and dignity, aiming to make educational experiences for youth in low-income communities, nurturing, empowering, and inspiring.

Now, coming up with a focus like that is a process, and not only is it a process, but it's a process that if it's redone, we'll always bring changes, always bring new ideas and new commitments. But a family doing this together is going to find out a lot about what each of the individual members care about, where they want to prioritize their giving based on their values. And we always say all giving starts with values.

So if you don't do anything else, it may be helpful to you to go back and look at this in the toolkit, again, which you can download for free. The toolkit itself offers cards that you can use for this exercise, and you also might want to use post-its, which we have exemplified here, what are people really interested in doing, and how do family members articulate their thoughts, their ideas, their values, so that they start to come together around what their giving journey might be as a family?

But of course, there are, as I mentioned earlier, going to be divisions, discrepancies, conflicts even. And we like to think about three major ways of managing differences of opinion. Of course, there's always democracy, the collective vote. One can always divide and conquer, give separately. And then there's the prospect of creating a grant policy for a family foundation or for a family-giving enterprise that would allow the family to make decisions in a principled way around how they handle controversial grants.

And again, next gens and the wealth-creating generations above them may really have different ideas about what priority issue areas are. And so creating a controversial grant policy, it can be very valuable to families. But again, there are going to be controversies, and just being prepared for that as a family going into conversations with next gen is always going to be important and helpful and valuable.

I like to think of a framework where if you think about the collective, so upper left-hand corner, you're going to stay together as a family collective, and if your focus is on giving, thinking about giving and relationships as the two mutual goals in family giving, if you're a collective focusing on giving, what you may want to do is come up together with an idea about a new important cause that you want to focus your family giving on.

And a lot of financial advisor, wealth advisors that I speak with who have a strong philanthropic advisory element to their organization really encourage the primary wealth holder to think about gaps in the giving space: What do they think is a place where they can really make a difference? Maybe not with all their philanthropic dollars, but with some set of them, and how can they work to fill those gaps, which sometimes are very, very niche, but nonetheless, a place where a donor can get excited and focus an initiative within their portfolio on making a very specific difference in the world. And their excitement can be contagious and bring the family along. So there could be, in this new important cause space, a real opportunity to create mutual enthusiasm and even bring additional philanthropic dollars into the process.

If the focus is on relationships, upper right-hand quadrant here, the family might decide that the issue area isn't as important as family traditions. That's really thinking about who they've been for generations. Perhaps an ethnic affiliation or identity or a national or a heritage would really make a difference to them. And they want to just really focus on who they are as a family given their traditions, given their heritage.

If the family wants to make more space for individuals to give but still support one another in that, they may, this bottom left-hand quadrant, really try to just be sure that individuals within the family have the opportunity to use some of the family wealth to make individual choices about what they want to do. So perhaps there's some collective giving, but perhaps there's also the designation of certain buckets of money or certain amounts of available resources so that individuals can do their own thing.

And then if relationships, bottom right-hand quadrant is really going to be important to them, but they also want to give a lot of individual space, they might think about how the individual giving may be aligned or complementary. Maybe they're all in the education space. Some want to work on early childhood, some want to work on early elementary literacy, some may want to focus on youth development starting in the middle school, and some may want to work on opportunities in higher education and bringing more first-generation college students into the space. And so that might feel like an interesting way of being complementary.

Just to linger here on this for a bit, it is one of the best tools to prepare heirs, next gen for inheriting the wealth they may want to inherit. I was talking to somebody who's a philanthropic advisor, and he says, "I don't believe in generational wealth." And I thought that was a pretty strong statement, pretty black and white. But the point he was trying to make was that we all want wealth to enhance lives of the next gen, not hurt them. And there are too many examples of wealth being distorting, inherited wealth being distorting to a person's life rather than enhancing.

And as children mature, family meetings, the creation of a family foundation, having a junior board, they're all gathering points to begin mentoring the next generation and then subsequent generations. It's so important to think about the ways philanthropy can be used to enhance the lives of subsequent generations by giving them perspective on their wealth, thinking about wealth as a responsibility, as a service, as a way to think about how those to whom much is given, much is expected, to paraphrase. That can be a very life enhancing way to have those conversations and for the principals that are your clients to think about bringing their children into a deeper understanding of what they may want to do as inheritors of family wealth.

Ruth Selby:

Oh, sorry, Vera, I'm sorry to interrupt.

Vera Michalchik:

No, please.

Ruth Selby:

But I wanted to air a question that's... And the question is, is there a range of assets for which it makes sense to shift towards intentional planning and purpose towards giving, or would you incorporate these elements in conversations for smaller clients as well? So it sounds like maybe a question of tranche or range, sort of what, maybe, asset class do you start thinking about this?

And Kristie, I would offer this question to you as well as maybe this is something that you've encountered or that DAFgiving360 may have a framework to approach. Thanks.

Vera Michalchik:

Yeah, I'd love to hear Kristie. I'll start just to say that I think there's no asset class that's too small to think about what it means to give back. And I think it's a conversation no matter where your clients sit that could actually deepen your relationship with them and create greater trust and greater fidelity, greater loyalty to you as an advisor. Kristie, to you.

Kristie Mitchell:

Yes, I would agree with you that there's not necessarily a range of assets. However, when you're dealing with more of the ultra-high net worth individual, the conversations may look differently, but there's certainly not a minimum threshold here.

I mean, I teach financial literacy to children, and I start as young as five years old with explaining how the philanthropy works and charitable planning, even with my own children. So there's not a minimum. It's a very good topic to go through and to help people start thinking of being just more philanthropic throughout life and just understanding that it's not just about the dollar amount, it's really about your heart and your desire to give. So yeah, I wouldn't focus on a certain asset level for sure.

Vera Michalchik:

So back to our consideration of next-gen wealth holders, what is up with next gen? There are a lot of things that are happening, shifting, and our next slide lists some of these things that are both areas of conflict, but also potential alignment, potential growth. Certainly, the various forms of what we could characterize as social upheaval effect alignment. There are different ways of viewing what's happening in the world as all of us know all too well, and differences of perspective, differences of values, differences of ideology even really affect the generational relationships.

Another thing that next gen seem to express is that they have less time for philanthropy in the traditional sense, but they, again, want to be more involved in the kinds of organizations that may make social change, which then kind of circles back or refers them back to philanthropic giving and what they might want to do with that.

Some of the areas of conflict that we see in families are certainly over just the existence of the wealth: Is the wealth deserved? Should it be passed on generationally? And if so, who's deserving? There are certainly differences in social, political, religious views and a lot of differences around what may be considered what's happened in the last five years around racial equity and some of the social justice issues.

As far as family legacy goes, we have done a study, a small study about the idea of preservationist versus inheritance being something that really allows the next gen to think of the wealth as theirs. Do they need to preserve, or can they build? And what are the ways in which they honor the prior generation? These are sort of deep identity issues, even deep moral issues for next gen that they really do tend to grapple with a great deal.

So just, again, to put the kind of more philosophical and deeply personal questions on your radar, because they absolutely can and should come up if you get to this level of conversation with your clients.

Advisors are generally considered not meeting the needs of the next gen in a lot of research nowadays, partly because the younger clients don't have philanthropy knowledge, and partly because the advisors don't quite know how to approach this. So what I would suggest is that this is an area that may be, just in and of itself, a good conversation with clients: How do your children, grandchildren think about philanthropy? And do they? Can we even just start the conversation there?

One of the areas, the ways that we suggest really working with the next gen is just... and there are four principles that we advise and that are, I think, well-explicated in the toolkit is first of all to start young. And both Kristie and I have mentioned the ways in which one can start young. It's financial literacy, and it's also philanthropy literacy. It's literacy around service.

And speaking of service, serving together is a really outstanding way to build shared family values and to understand what it feels like and what it means to serve.

And then to think about roles that people have: What do they like to do vis-a-vis their interests, their natural skills, or talents, and how might that move the family into differentiated but aligned and coordinated ways of working together in their philanthropic journey? And, of course, we advise the use of the tools, again, using that focus statement as a starting point for many of your clients.

For those of you who want to dive deeper and may, in fact, just want to recommend this to your client site, I recommend the framework used by the National Center on Family Philanthropy, which is a very well-established organization. Next slide, please. Should be the NCFP slide, yes, that has just an enormous number of tools, and really helps family think about the kinds of decision points that they may encounter as they go through their philanthropic journey as a unit, as a family.

It starts with philanthropic purpose, which we've mentioned many times, thinking about what kind of impact vehicles and structures, the broadest sense, are you impact investing or are you giving outright grants, gifts to nonprofits? And then if you are doing the latter, what kinds of giving vehicles do you want to use? Is it a DAF, is it a foundation, is it some of the other less often used? But even just writing checks is another way to go. What kind of governance, what kind of policies, what kinds of decisions about how you're going to work together do you want to make?

Some families I know, they have long-drawn-out family meetings, three or four weekends a year with different extended family, and they do site visits with all of the nonprofits they may give to.

How are you measuring your impact? What strategies and tools are you using? How are you assessing what you are seeing? And then learning from that. And then redoing the cycle of giving, thinking about what might be more effective in your giving. Operations and management can get very particular and very specific. And then there's the question of succession and legacy. And for each of these stages, the National Center for Family Philanthropy, which is a membership organization, they have enormous number of tools that they are willing to share and guide people on.

But I just want to call out some of the featured collections from the National Center on Family Philanthropy that can give you just a deeper dive if you're finding that conflicts are really a big deal or that the next gen really wants to do impact investing. You can look at the collection on family dynamics and impact investing. Very complimentary to what we have in the toolkit, which is simple and all in one place. But we partnered with the National Center on Family Philanthropy, and they're just a great group of people with wonderful resources.

Okay, we're coming to near the end of our 50 minutes together. We've talked about what effective philanthropy means, how one finds one's focus, and we're going to proceed in the area of structuring your giving around DAFs or other vehicles, and ultimately end with some of the practicalities around making and tracking gifts. And then we're going to have a bonus unit. Our sixth unit because consolidating a couple of them here is going to be on impact investing with a guest speaker. Kristy, please go ahead.

Kristie Mitchell:

All right. Thank you, Vera, and thank you all for joining us today. I hope this session gave you practical insights and tools that you can bring into your client conversations right away. So I just want to thank you again for joining us.

I'd also like to thank Stanford PACS for the great content. And as mentioned, we have several resources available to you, and you obviously have Stanford's Advisor Toolkit, as well as DAFgiving360's Giving Guide with an Advisor Guide.

If you have any follow-up questions specifically with DAFgiving360 resources, feel free to reach out to your local charitable consultant. And if you've never had the chance to interact with DAFgiving360, we do have a business development team that can be a best resource for you as well. And I will let Ruth and Vera close it out from here. And thank you guys again.

Ruth Selby:

There's a few other questions in the chat that I wanted to address, and one is, do you have resources that could help advisors engage with non-profits and their donors? The answer from Stanford PACS is yes, yes, we do have resources, and many of those are linked on our website.

Vera Michalchik:

May I add to that? When you talk about the things you're learning from the toolkit, from the guide, you can judge as to where they may want to go deeper, if they want to go deeper. And then we have, other people have whole courses, programs that they could sign up for if they're really interested in going deeper. But in the meantime, could get copies of the toolkit and give them that. That's another way to kind of stimulate the conversation.

Ruth Selby:

I also see another question, Vera and Kristie, that could be interesting. It's in the Q&A function. Is there an inflection point at which I would need to loop in a third-party philanthropic advisor versus trying to handle or facilitate these conversations myself?

Vera Michalchik:

That's such a great question. I'm going to let Kristie start with it and see if I possibly have anything to add.

Kristie Mitchell:

I would say when you start to feel a little uncomfortable with some of the questions that you're being asked, sometimes advisors just don't have the in-house resources to answer some of the questions around complex giving vehicles or the bandwidth, because it can take a lot of time to go through a charitable planning process with the client. So I would advise you to start maybe with your charitable consultant at DAFgiving360, and they can maybe share and go through some of the resources that we have, see how comfortable you are with the content, because I think it really just depends on how comfortable you are with the content and the bandwidth that you have to provide the service.

Vera Michalchik:

That's a fantastic answer. And I would add that depending on the nature of the question, depending on what the kind of inflection point is, we offer programs for donors that are a few days of their lives where they can come in and get a pretty thorough briefing in what we think are the most important issues in strategizing their giving.

Ruth Selby:

I also see a question: Can an advisor manage a DAF at DAFgiving360? Is there a minimum amount of capital for that? [inaudible 00:41:46].

Vera Michalchik:

Kristie, that's your question.

Kristie Mitchell:

That's my question. Yes, an advisor can manage the assets in a DAF here, DAFgiving360, and the minimum threshold for that is $100,000. I'll actually post the link in the chat that links to our account fees and minimums so you can see more details on that.

Ruth Selby:

Great. Another question that was asked: Do you find that families actively meet to discuss not just the choices for their gifts, but the impacts the gifts are making? So tracking the impact of the gift, and how that can be a follow-on conversation.

Vera Michalchik:

That is hard. And most families at family office, DAF, the small family foundation level, don't really have the resources and the tools to do that. It's typically only when you get to larger foundations that you can really do that at a level of depth that may be really satisfying to the family. But there are lots of kind of smaller-scale indicators of whether the money is making the difference, whether the resources are making the difference that the family wants to make. And we always encourage people to try to seek out what those might be.

A lot of nonprofits, obviously, are writing reports for their donors and may or may not speak to the reasons that the family is giving to that particular donor. So the best for a smaller family or a smaller organization is to kind of piggyback onto the reports being written for some of the larger donors.

I mean, I said it's hard to do because it's hard to get a nonprofit to do that independent of the rest of the work and the rest of their donors. It's very hard for a family to actually instigate that or fund that because those are kind of expensive things to do. But thinking collaboratively with thinking in the context of the collective of whom else that the nonprofit is reporting to may get the family the answers that they want.

August 27th, we're going to talk about actually finding organizations, vetting organizations that your clients may want to give to. And that was one of the questions that was just asked, is how do you really identify strong nonprofits? And that's August 27th. Mark your calendars, come join us, and then Ruth and I give you our contact info.

We very much appreciate you being here with us. This is our mission, and we are just so happy to share.

Ruth Selby:

Yeah, thanks very much for being with us today. All right. Bye, Kristie. Thanks so much.

Kristie Mitchell:

Bye. Thank you.

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