Advisors and Clients in the Brave New World of Philanthropy
The Journal of Financial Planning, June 2007
How can you tell if your clients are charitably inclined? Is it your business to ask them? If they are charitably inclined, how do you help them?
Like it or not, more and more donors are looking to their financial planners rather than to their favorite charities for advice on making serious gifts. According to a study of donors by the National Committee on Planned Giving (Journal of Gift Planning Vol. 5, No. 1, 2001), “When donors were asked to identify the origin of the idea for their planned gift, we found that financial and legal advisors provided the impetus in 29 percent of the cases for charitable bequests and 68 percent for charitable remainder trusts, both up roughly five times the comparable 1992 results.”
The groundswell of giving in this country has fueled the demand for such advice. And the increasingly high-profile nature of philanthropy (from Warren Buffett and Bill Gates to Angelina Jolie and Oprah Winfrey) may be increasing the supply of donors through a kind of trickle-down generosity. Both the mega-wealthy and merely wealthy compete for inclusion on lists like the Slate 60 of America’s most generous donors (see www.slate.com). According to an October 2006 report of 900 affluent Americans by PhilanthropyNow and the Luxury Institute, a new cadre of donors wishes to “brand their family name as a living icon of generosity” (www.philanthropynow.com).