The Finer Details of Donor-Advised Funds...

If you’ve already established a donor-advised fund at 3 Rivers Community Foundation, you can understand why it has become such a popular tool to organize your family’s giving and serve as a springboard for so many other ways to make a difference in Benton and Franklin counties.?

Recently, we’ve talked with a lot of donors who work with 3RCF in a variety of ways, such as regularly contributing to a favorite organization’s endowment fund, supporting 3RCF's annual grant fund, or making distributions from an IRA to a designated fund. Interestingly, we are discovering that some of these donors also have established a donor-advised fund at a national financial institution and in many cases did not realize that they could have set up their donor-advised fund at 3RCF.?

It’s time to set the record straight!?

For starters, 3 Rivers Community Foundation offers donor-advised fund holders the same tax and administrative benefits as a national financial institution, including:

• Online access to the donor-advised fund to view balances, contributions, and grants
• Simple process for requesting grants to favorite charities
• Streamlined tax reporting, often represented by just one letter to provide to an accountant at tax time, even when the donor-advised fund is used to support dozens of individual charities throughout the year
• All back-office administration, tax receipts, recordkeeping, and other requirements for the donor-advised fund’s 501(c)(3) status
• Favorable tax-deductibility of contributions to the fund

Unlike standard national financial institutions’ donor-advised funds, though, 3RCF offers high-level, customized services to its donor-advised fund holders, including:

• Concierge-level service by knowledgeable staff to structure estate gifts to charities and accept gifts of appreciated stock or other assets
• In-house experts who have a finger on the pulse of community needs, the strengths of specific nonprofits, and how to structure grant making for the highest possible community benefit
• Assistance with structuring and measuring the impact of grants?
• Family philanthropy and corporate giving services to foster a well-rounded, holistic approach to philanthropy?
• Administrative fees that are reinvested into the community foundation, itself a nonprofit, to help support operations, grow its mission, and help even more donors support the causes they care about
• Hands-on assistance from local experts who understand both local and distant needs, and welcome the opportunity to research and identify causes aligned with donors’ goals and priorities?
• Staff members who live in the community they serve and often personally know the leaders and staff of grantee organizations and regularly hear about their needs first-hand

If you’ve established a donor-advised fund at a national financial institution, we’d love to chat about moving it over to 3 Rivers Community Foundation. At 3RCF, your hard-earned assets receive the attention they deserve as you and your family strive to make a difference in the causes you care about the most.?