Giving Ventures Podcast: Episode 106 – The Importance of Donor Intent

This transcript has been AI-generated and lightly edited for clarity. Some inaccuracies may remain.

Peter Lipsett: At DonorsTrust, we talk a lot about donor intent. But what is donor intent? What do we mean when we use those words? Well, recently we hosted a webinar for clients and prospective clients focused on this idea of donor intent — what it is, how donors should think about it, and how it factors into one’s legacy planning more broadly. It was a great conversation. We had great attendance, and so I wanted to share it with you, with this broader audience, so that we could help more people around this really important concept.

You know, when we think about donor intent, we think about failures of donor intent. We’re also often thinking about the Pew Foundation, Carnegie, Ford — these great philanthropists who, if they saw their foundations today, would be shocked at what they are doing because it’s so different from some of the beliefs that we know they held when they were alive.

You don’t have to be a billionaire to have your donor intent go astray. That’s why it’s so important to really understand what it is and have it locked up tight. So in this webinar, you’re going to first hear the voice of Lawson Bader, DonorsTrust President and CEO, as he kicks things off and introduces us. And then I will take over the interviewing reins with Kim Dennis. Kim is DonorsTrust Co-Founder and still the board chair here, and is an expert in what it takes to really preserve the charitable legacy of a donor — drawing from decades in the philanthropic world and experience with numerous foundations in day-to-day operations and on boards.

We’re going to discuss how to be thoughtful about outlining donor intent, the challenges that can come from later generations trying to interpret donor intent, and how to make that donor intent as bulletproof as possible. There’s some real, real gold in this conversation. We also kept in the Q&A because some of the audience questions were really great — and maybe questions that you have yourself.

So buckle up and enjoy this. And by the way, we have two more webinars on this topic coming soon. On April 22nd, we have one on how to craft your donor intent statement — how to actually put the words on paper. And then coming on May 12th, one final webinar that’s going to look at how we at DonorsTrust take the Donor Intent Statement and the history of a donor to really steward that legacy once you are no longer here. I’d love to have you sign up for those, and information for that is going to be in our show notes page. All right, with that, let’s kick it over to Lawson.

Lawson Bader: I’m Lawson Bader, CEO and President of DonorsTrust. Thank you for joining us. We’ve got a large group to talk about something that is quite important to DonorsTrust. In fact, it’s part of the fabric of why we were created in the first place. And the fact that we have so many of you signed up shows that it’s important to you as well, so we’re very grateful for that.

I’m joined by Peter Lipsett, longtime Vice President of DonorsTrust, as well as Kim Dennis — a familiar face and name to many of you — who is not just the founder of DonorsTrust and organizations like the Philanthropy Roundtable, but also our board chair. So yes, I get to say she’s my boss. Also, most recently, along with Courtney Myers and Rich Tren, she has joined the team as a philanthropic advisor from the recently closed Searle Freedom Trust. So it’s been a nice addition to have her as an advisor, along with her colleagues, so we can provide a bit more service to our clients — going beyond just offering a DAF account and now being able to work more closely with folks on what it means to do donor intent, what it means to actually develop an ability to assess a grantee, for example. So we’re expanding our services, and to the extent that after this call you want to learn more about what that means, give us a call and we’ll talk more about that.

But onto the substance of this event and this conversation — let me turn this over to Peter, and you and Kim can go forth. Let’s talk about donor intent.

Peter Lipsett: Let’s do it. Thank you, Lawson. I’m thrilled to be here. It’s so wonderful to look at the list of folks who are here — the dozens and dozens of you, so many friends, so many great clients of DonorsTrust. And I’m excited to have this conversation. We have a two-part mission at DonorsTrust, as Lawson said. We care about donor intent. We care about growing the Liberty Movement. And by succeeding on the donor intent front, we do the latter.

So I’m so happy to talk to our board chair, to my friend, Kim Dennis. Kim, let’s start by just defining terms. When I say “donor intent” — a term that still doesn’t get the airtime it probably deserves — what does donor intent mean to you?

Kim Dennis: So I’m going to go back in time a bit and date myself here. I first started working in the philanthropic movement in 1980. Back then, donor intent really wasn’t talked about as a concept, because people just gave money to the causes they were interested in, and that was that.

What started happening in the 1980s is that there was pressure from the left, including the Council on Foundations, on foundations in particular to start opening their businesses, as it were, to the larger community. The thinking behind it was that because donors get the charitable deduction, that tax advantage basically gives the public a claim on those resources. So there was a lot of pressure on foundations back then — for example, to put members of their grant-making constituencies on their boards. It was the beginning of the whole DEI push where foundations were being pressured to diversify their boards. And if you have a family foundation, that’s hard. You can’t create diversity where it doesn’t exist.

So that pressure really resulted in some of the conservative foundations pushing back. And that really is where the whole concept of donor intent arose. Basically the argument was: no, the resources of donors are their private resources, and they can do what they want with them. It is not incumbent upon them to respond to the pressures from external organizations and groups.

So, donor intent to me is very simple. It’s donors’ right to give their charitable resources where they see fit. That’s it. Pretty simple.

Peter Lipsett: And it’s interesting that that dichotomy — whose money is it really — is still playing out decades later. It’s still a battle that we have to deal with. We know we’re on the right side of it because, you know, you’re the donor. It’s your money.

Kim Dennis: And it’s like it shouldn’t even have to be talked about — it should just be obvious, inherent. But the reason it’s important is because all the pressure is pushing back against the exercise of donor intent.

Peter Lipsett: So back in 1998–99, you were formulating the idea for DonorsTrust. You were working with our late co-founder Whitney Ball to get this off the ground. You put donor intent right at the heart of what DonorsTrust is all about. Were there any particular incidents — you don’t have to throw anybody under the bus, you don’t have to name names — but were there any precipitating incidents? You were coming out of the Philanthropy Roundtable, you were seeing a lot of different philanthropists do different things. Was there something that launched you to say, “We really have to have something for donor intent”?

Kim Dennis: Yeah, there was sort of a series of incidents. It actually started back in the early 1990s when Whitney and I were running the Philanthropy Roundtable. Back then, donor-advised funds — no one knew what they were. They hardly existed. There was a smattering of them, but even the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, I think, only launched in the early ’90s.

In those days, donor-advised funds weren’t common. But donors who were looking for that kind of vehicle to do their giving — for the ease of administration, being able to make a single contribution and give grants out from there — those donors tended to look to community foundations. But community foundations had two issues that we spotted. One was that most community foundations are basically oriented toward helping their local communities. So if a person doing their giving through the community foundation wanted to give to something outside that geographic area, there could be pushback.

The other thing — and this is what really precipitated the idea for DonorsTrust — is that we began hearing from more and more of the Roundtable’s members who were using community foundations, that the community foundations were refusing to honor their requests to give to organizations on the right side of the political spectrum. And it was like: we should have a community foundation for the Liberty Movement. So that’s really how it all started.

It took a while. That was the early ’90s, and as you know, it wasn’t until 1999 that we were actually founded — and funded. But that was really the precipitating event: the pushback that conservative donors were getting and their need for an alternative vehicle.

Peter Lipsett: So how has that changed over time? How has the idea of donor intent, that uptake and understanding of it — the process by which the donor community actually takes it on — how do you think it has evolved in the last 25 years?

Kim Dennis: Where DonorsTrust is concerned, it was founded on the principle of donor intent. That’s what we wanted to be able to honor. And it’s why we called it DonorsTrust — you should trust that we will execute your intent and protect your intent. Many of DonorsTrust’s clients choose DonorsTrust for that reason, because they have that confidence.

And as you know, we ask all our clients to sign a donor intent statement, so we know how to carry out their wishes if they’re no longer around. DonorsTrust is different from other DAFs in that way. The commercial DAFs, for instance — their interest is in managing the money. It’s not a geographic focus. Our interest is in protecting the intent of donors who are committed to liberty. We don’t want donors who are committed to expanding government — they can do their thing — but our interest is in people who want to preserve and protect liberty.

I do think that over time, donor intent has become more and more elevated as a principle that should guide the philanthropic sector. DonorsTrust and the Philanthropy Roundtable deserve a lot of credit for putting the concept of donor intent on the map. But one thing that’s happened is people have come to understand how they can’t take the honoring of their intent for granted anymore. They know there are pressures out there that will threaten their intent if it’s not protected. Much of the impulse for donor intent, and the importance of it, stems from the pressures that are trying to dishonor people’s intent and compromise it.

Peter Lipsett: And you mentioned the donor intent statement. That is something that we at DonorsTrust are putting a lot of emphasis on this year. It’s our goal to talk to every single client — so all of you who are joining here today, if we haven’t already, we’re going to be talking to you about that donor intent statement. Either you submitted one maybe a long time ago, or maybe you’ve updated it, but it needs to be current because your tastes change, things change. And even just getting fresh eyes on it is really important.

They can be lovely expressions. I had somebody on this call who actually sent me an update today and it was just lovely — really nice to see how they phrase what they care about, the passions they have. So running with that: you’ve been on different boards and had roles in philanthropy for a very long time. When you talk to people about how to formulate their donor intent, how to put pen to paper on it, what are some of the key pieces of advice that you offer them?

Kim Dennis: In terms of protecting your intent, there are three things I typically emphasize. The first is a very good statement of your intent — a mission statement, whatever you want to call it. I always used to say, “Put it in writing.” Now, it could be a video; times are changing. However you want to do it — formulate it in a way that anyone who might be called upon to execute your philanthropy when you’re not around will understand it. I think that’s actually more complicated than it sounds. Because when we think of our giving, things seem obvious to us. “I believe in free markets.” Well, you’ve got to put a lot more meat on that for someone to be able to execute upon that mission.

There are lots of things to emphasize: the principles that guide your giving, the kinds of things you like to invest in. Is it research? Is it outreach? Is it video content? Basically making it granular enough that someone can come in and interpret your intent — including what you don’t want to support. You can learn as much from what a donor isn’t interested in as what they are interested in.

One piece of advice I give people is to read your mission statement as if you are from the left — like you’re Elizabeth Warren, whoever you most don’t want executing your philanthropy — and see how that person could basically twist your meaning. How could they find a way to insinuate their objectives into your mission statement? I recommend asking other people to read it and poke holes in it. What do they not understand? How can you do it better? Essentially, you just want it as airtight as possible.

People will drive a Mack truck through a mission statement if they are determined to do so and if they can.

The second thing is the people you choose to help you with your philanthropy — that’s very important. One important point is to get them involved with your giving while you are doing it. If you just assign, say, DonorsTrust as successor advisors but they’re not engaged with your giving while you’re alive, it’ll be much harder for them to understand and follow what you would have wanted.

And it’s not enough to find people you trust — whether it’s family or outside advisors, an attorney, a long-time business associate, a close friend. You might find people who want to honor your intentions and who will do their best, but they also need to understand how to do that. Do they know the organizations you’re interested in supporting? Do they know the whole landscape? It’s really important to have people helping with your philanthropy who have a granular understanding of the issues and the organizations that you’re interested in supporting.

Third thing — and you’re going to hear this from me every time — sunsetting. No matter how good your mission statement is, no matter how good the people are who you entrust your giving to, sunsetting is the best protection you have against things going astray with your giving.

Peter Lipsett: That is terrific. Your answer right there was worth the price of admission — which admittedly was free — but it far outpaces that. I hope people get the recording of this and watch that section again.

I’ve heard you talk about sunsetting before, and I wholeheartedly believe it. I’ve heard you talk about the importance of people, and I wholeheartedly believe it. But I’ve never heard what you said about pretending you are reading the statement as if you were Elizabeth Warren — the person you least want executing your donor intent — because if it’s airtight, they’re kind of stuck. And the more airtight you can get it, the better. That was a really, really good point.

And it kind of goes to my next question. You’re on, for example, the board of the Roop Foundation, and Mr. Roop passed away several years ago. So now you are helping to guide the giving of a donor who’s no longer alive. For those of us on the call, we don’t want to think about it, but one day we will no longer be alive and somebody will be in that position of carrying it out. What are the challenges we should be mindful of now, in anticipation of somebody else carrying that out?

Kim Dennis: It’s really easy when the donor is sitting around the table with you. When that’s going on, you are learning from the donor — that’s your role, so that you understand what to do when they’re gone. The difficulty occurs when they’re gone.

And again, I would just repeat that having your advisors engaged while you are living, learning how you think and how you like to give, is really important. People can read a mission statement and think they understand it — but that is very different from having sat with a donor and watched and participated as they make decisions. I often say it should be like a séance afterward: “What would the donor have done?” Something might fit within a mission statement, but if you know the donor well enough, you know they just wouldn’t have wanted to do that. That’s really important.

The other thing that’s really, really hard is anticipating how things might change — and things are always going to change. The longer your foundation or your DAF or whatever it is remains in existence after you’re gone, the more likely that things will change. If your objective is to support orphanages, well, that changes over time. An educational institution might change its philosophical approach, or might go out of business.

So while you need to be really specific and granular, on the other hand you need to anticipate how things might change. That’s impossible to do perfectly, but I would say one thing we’re facing right now in our movement is that a lot of institutions — if you’re interested in the public policy sphere — there’s a lot of scrambling of the narrative. We’re all used to the old Reaganite approach to conservatism, and that is splintering. You have national conservatives, traditional conservatives, and it’s all over the map. The institutions that represent those values are changing. So you might have said, “I believe in this institution more than anything else,” but you’ve got to remember that institution can change. I think it’s really important for donors, in leaving an intent statement, to try to anticipate as best they can how things could change.

Peter Lipsett: Okay, I’m going to get personal for a second, because I know you love that. I’ve known you for a long time, but — what’s your donor intent?

Kim Dennis: Okay, you warned me you were going to ask this question. When I read it in your email, I thought, “What a strange question.” In part because the amount I give personally, compared to all the donors I’ve advised over the years, just seems inconsequential, really. I mean, to me it’s not, but it’s all relative.

When I thought about it more, I realized one reason it seemed odd to me is that as an advisor to donors, you are always trying to see life through their eyes. Whoever it is you’re advising, you’re not thinking about your intent — you’re trying to interpret the world through their lens and how they would see it and how they would want their philanthropy directed. Through the course of my career, my own intent has been irrelevant to what I have done. I’ve advised donors who are all for liberty, but within that, that spans a wide spectrum, and they’ve had very different approaches to how they tackle the objective of supporting liberty.

Having said that — that’s why I thought it was a strange question — let me now try to answer it. In my own giving, I’m like a lot of donors. I support the organizations I’m most closely involved with, the ones I’m on the boards of. They’re the ones that get their hooks in you, but they’re also the groups I most believe in.

One thing I would say is that I tend not to support what I might call “feel good” organizations or direct-service charity groups. The reason I don’t is not that I don’t think those groups are important — those civil society groups are the foundation of our society. My thinking is that a lot of other people are more likely to support those organizations. They’re the ones that pull at your heartstrings.

But fewer people are going to support policy organizations. It’s harder to understand, harder to get your mind around as a philanthropic objective. And the way I see it is that everything else we do — all those civil society organizations — depends on us maintaining our individual and economic freedom. If we don’t have that, all those other organizations lose their ability to thrive. They don’t have the money. They don’t have the freedom. So in my mind, the most important philanthropic objective is to support the institutions that will preserve our individual and economic freedom.

Peter Lipsett: Well, that was great, Kim. I really appreciate that. And you know what? You illustrated the point you shared earlier — that you know what you’re saying no to. And that’s actually really, really important because it allows you to invest more deeply in the things you’re actually passionate about. It’s not, as you say, that there are bad groups on the other side — it’s just not your cup of tea. It’s somebody else’s cup of tea. I happen to know it is the cup of tea of other people on this call, and that’s great. That is what we want.

I’ll also reframe one other thing: you said “such as it is” about your giving. I think there are a lot of people on this call and elsewhere that we work with — some who don’t have a lot to give, some who have a lot to give — who still think that what they’re doing is never enough. But as I like to say, you don’t have to be a billionaire to have your donor intent go astray. So it is really important to be thoughtful about this, whether you’re giving away $10 a year or $10 million a year. I appreciate the candor and you sharing that.

All right — don’t go anywhere, Kim. We’re going to go to Q&A in just a second. If you have a question, there are already a couple that have come in — use that Q&A box and put your question in there. We’re going to go through that in a second with Kim and also with Lawson. But first, Lawson, I want to ask you one question and then we’ll go to Q&A. You came to DonorsTrust 11 years ago after many years in the nonprofit space. You worked at the Buckeye Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. You had that nonprofit hat on. When you stepped into the role here, what was your perception of donor intent and how has that changed and evolved over the last 11 years?

Lawson Bader: Good question. When I was running those organizations, there was a narrower focus on the relationship between the donor and the respective institution. We dabbled a bit in legacy planning — essentially, what would happen to my organization when Donor X passed away — but that was the extent of it. As CEO, I was thinking about the next 12 months: What’s our strategy? What are our goals? What are our policy objectives? What is the upcoming fight? How will the political landscape provide opportunity or obstacles? We were only thinking about what the institution would do. We weren’t thinking about the idea of drift — which really can be at the heart and core of donor intent.

So the concept of donor intent was not part of my psyche. It was a very compartmentalized relationship between an individual set of donors and my group.

Then I came to DonorsTrust and realized it’s a lot bigger — a much bigger concept. I came to understand the larger problem of donor intent and donor intent drift and the real negative effect it has had on the larger conservative and libertarian philanthropic community. I realized that my role here — and frankly, your role and the rest of your team’s role, Peter — is to monitor our grantees, to look at how they spend their money, not in any micro-managing sense, but over the long run. How much do organizations spend on compensation? What is spent on fundraising? What is spent on sending clients a lot of swag? In other words, how is an organization behaving? Because that also goes to how we honor and fulfill the donor intent of our account holders.

Think tank CEOs are not thinking about that, but I as a former think tank CEO now do think about it. A lot of organizations don’t think seriously about the idea of preserving their mission. And I can tell you they don’t think about it at the board level, which is something they should.

Lastly, and Kim alluded to this earlier, I don’t think we take seriously enough the threats to the larger conservative and libertarian community brought about by the commercialized philanthropic sector. It’s kind of like the ocean — the waves come in, sometimes little waves, sometimes larger. And we sometimes get taken in when we’re in the trough between the waves, when it seems calm.

Just this last week, Peter, as you know, we became aware of two situations where a couple of clients and grantees had struggles with a couple of commercial DAFs about both making and receiving grants. Ultimately it was worked out, but I think it happened because they’re in that center-right space. The challenge of preserving and protecting donor intent is still very real, and 11 years later, we’re still dealing with it. It’s been a lesson learned, and here we are, and I’m glad we’re able to continue this conversation.

Peter Lipsett: Yeah, that’s great. And to be clear, it worked out because those donors moved their funds over to DonorsTrust, which was helpful too. All right, I’m going to invite Lawson and Kim onto the virtual stage together here, and we’re going to do some questions. Again, put those in the Q&A box. A couple came in. One person asked, Kim, if you could elaborate a little bit more about sunsetting. They weren’t quite sure what the sunsetting clause really meant. Talk about that.

Kim Dennis: Okay, so first of all, at DonorsTrust, we require all clients to sunset their accounts a certain number of years after they’re no longer around, if their account survives them. And I always forget exactly how many years that is.

Peter Lipsett: 25 years.

Lawson Bader: Five years after the death of the original advisor. We also allow — and the original advisor can appoint a successor advisor — but the successor advisor cannot appoint a third successor advisor. So the clock begins to tick with the death of the original advisor.

Kim Dennis: Exactly. And with a foundation, it’s typically a matter of putting yourself out of business. In most cases, although not always, there are foundation boards that decide to close a foundation — but typically it’s the donor who establishes the foundation and puts an end date on it. It might be some formula — how many years after the death of their youngest child, or their advisors — or it might be a specific date and time. But in any case, sunsetting a foundation refers to shutting it down after a certain period of time, with that time determined by either the donor or the board.

Peter Lipsett: And as we talk to people about updating their donor intent, we’re really asking them to update that whole set of things — the successor advisors, final beneficiaries, but also that sunset period. I would say the median fund at DonorsTrust probably has a sunset of about 10 to 15 years. Would you agree, Lawson?

Lawson Bader: I think that’s right. In many cases, the donor intent is very clear that there’s actually a specific timetable set up for when the proverbial bus comes along. I want this to sunset within — I think 10 years is probably the max in most cases. It really depends on the potential balance and trying to maximize what the gift is, but it’s pretty rare that it exceeds that.

Kim Dennis: Can I just add something there? I think it’s important to note that at DonorsTrust, we really want to execute your intent. If you pass away, it’s not like we say, “Great, we get to spend that money.” We don’t want to do that. We want to give it away the way you wanted to give it away. We can look at your pattern of giving — that helps us a lot. And your Donor Intent Statement helps us. But we really need that, and we want to honor it.

And I will say, if you appoint a successor advisor who tries to do something that would not have been within your intent, we’ll step in. It’s not common, but when we have to do that, we do.

Peter Lipsett: There was a question about the advisor role, particularly during a donor’s lifetime. What is the role of the fundraiser? We have several fundraisers on this call who are interested in this topic — advisors working with a donor to understand that donor intent over the long term. I think you touched on this, but any other color you want to add?

Lawson Bader: Working with a financial advisor, or…

Peter Lipsett: I think any kind of secondary person who is alongside the donor to better understand their intent. Are there steps they can take? Are there things they can do?

Lawson Bader: Beyond recording and writing and constant conversation — and as Kim said, patterns of giving — even things like, what are your favorite books? Alluding to what influences you is in itself helpful. Anything that gets to the core values is important. There’s nothing that should be taken off the table as a way to provide insight into what that means.

And as I alluded to, also the patterns of giving from the grantee space. I jokingly made the comment about swag, but sometimes intent is not just about an organization trying to achieve a mission — it’s also about the organization spending money the way we think an organization should spend money. That is also an interpretation that comes into donor intent. And that’s something DonorsTrust does in monitoring an organization to make sure it remains faithful to the reasons you gave to them in the first place.

Sometimes it’s a small point, Peter, but oftentimes an organization receives money because of who the CEO is. Well, what if the CEO changes jobs? Sometimes following intent means following the path of an individual or a researcher. There are lots of different reasons that go into why somebody supports a particular organization. So there are a lot of layers to what donor intent means beyond just, “I like this organization because they’re suing the government.”

Kim Dennis: I was going to say — I have a closet full of swag that I love. Sorry, Lawson.

Lawson Bader: Some love it.

Peter Lipsett: I was looking around my desk at the swag just within arm’s reach. So somebody asked: do we ever guide donors away from aspects of what they have put down as their donor intent, or from specific organizations — presumably as things change?

Kim Dennis: Yes, to the extent that as an advisor to a donor, your role is to help them most effectively carry out their objectives. And if they are thinking of giving to an organization or a category that you think isn’t consistent with that, I think it’s incumbent upon you to mention it. It’s not that you’re trying to tell the donor they can’t do it, but your role as an advisor is to share when you think they’re making a mistake. When they’re alive, it’s obviously up to them — but I think it’s important, without going around issuing your opinion on everything, that when that is your role, yes, you should share that knowledge.

Lawson Bader: Yeah, and you have to be careful — there’s a danger in gossip and in filtering your own opinion into things and deciding what information may or may not be relevant to the donor’s decision-making process. But ideally, you know what’s important to that donor. If you know that they give because of a particular person, and that person is having an issue or is leaving, you probably feel like you should let the donor know. Sometimes we’re privy to information that an organization looks like it’s really struggling financially. Well, that may be an opportunity for a donor to step in because they feel that’s relevant — or maybe that’s a warning sign and the donor may want to be conservative. I don’t want to make that judgment call, but it’s probably information they should be made aware of.

So there’s this balance. And ultimately — and this is a very important point, as Kim has made — DonorsTrust’s role is always to give priority to our account holder. Unless the account holder has made DonorsTrust the successor advisor to the account, in which case we are making those decisions, but still with the guardrails in place.

Peter Lipsett: And the one thing I’ll add to that is that sometimes an advisor’s role can be to nudge donors to remember the things they’ve left out, rather than cutting things out. So if a donor has this great donor intent statement, but you also know they happen to love one particular organization — they’re going to ride or die with that organization no matter what — but it doesn’t quite fit cleanly in the statement, you can point to it and say, “Don’t forget this, because future generations may forget that this was really, really important to you. And if it’s going to stay important to you, make sure you factor that in.”

Somebody — this is really more a comment than a question, but a good one — says they appreciate Kim’s point about how being an important method of defining donor intent, like how you give. So thank you, Kim. I don’t know if you have anything to add on that, but it is a really important thing to think about.

This is a good one: how does a good donor intent statement prepare for a favorite organization closing its doors or drifting from its principles after the donor’s death? Is there a way to make sure the statement itself addresses that, or is it really going back to the question of how?

Kim Dennis: So a favorite organization drifts after the donor is no longer around…

Peter Lipsett: Or closes its doors — like FreedomWorks.

Kim Dennis: Right, yes. One thing I’ve seen is a donor put in writing: if said organization — and again, you’re trusting your successor advisors to make that judgment — if an organization devolves away from what it was committed to, then it’s not uncommon to name other organizations that would receive the funds, or simply to leave instructions about finding an organization that does something similar. What I’ve seen mostly is identifying other organizations that would receive the funds if the named one isn’t fulfilling its purposes.

Lawson Bader: Yeah, Peter, we see this frequently. In fact, this just happened a month ago. In some cases, we have accounts we’d call bequest accounts — where there may be a small amount of money at a given time, and upon death that may be funded through various estate documents. DonorsTrust is given the responsibility for fulfilling those wishes. In some cases, there’s a list of organizations that were important to that advisor, and maybe that list was given 10 years previously. Perhaps two or three of those organizations are no longer around.

We can make a decision based on the dollar amount — because you also want the grant to have meaning to the organization — and we can say, “Well, this organization doesn’t exist anymore, but here’s another one that serves the exact same purpose and is ideologically in the same camp.” So we can substitute that. Or if there are, say, seven organizations on the list and only five are still around, we’ll take those dollars and disperse them among the five, because it’s going to make more of an impact. Sometimes we have to make a judgment call, but we still want to remain faithful to who and what that person was — which is why specificity matters to us.

There are organizations that come and go, and there are organizations that do change their mission and experience ideological drift. Sometimes we can look at where the groupings were when the individual gave us that list, and we can kind of see where they fit in that larger universe. There are clues and tweaks, and we’re going to follow those clues. But the point is that we take this extraordinarily seriously.

Kim Dennis: And of course, the best thing is just to give it away while you’re alive. Then you don’t have to worry about any of this. Just give it all away.

Peter Lipsett: All right, this is going to be the final question. I’m going to combine a couple here, both about sunsetting. One person asks what happens after the fund’s sunset. Another is about how you avoid essentially dumping a lot of money at the end if you’re sunsetting.

I’ll take a quick stab at this. One of the reasons it’s so important to have that sunset period established early is that — if you’re no longer with us, it’s a 20-year period, and there’s a million dollars in the fund — we have a sense of how much should be going out every year and what the investment strategy should be, so that you’re not dumping it all on one organization at once. In fact, that’s one of the benefits to using a donor-advised fund as part of your legacy strategy: so that you don’t overwhelm an organization with a lot of money all at once when maybe they can’t handle it, or when you know they need 10 years of runway for your giving.

Post-sunset, one of the questions we do ask is: who are those charitable beneficiaries? If there’s a little bit of money left that can’t be doled out evenly — say there’s $10,000 left — where would you like those last dollars to go? That’s an important question. It’s a confusing one on our form, frankly, but important nonetheless.

Lawson, you take this piece of it: what if someone changes their mind? You’re with us, you know you’re going to sunset, but then you start thinking perpetuity would really be great. What happens then?

Lawson Bader: Well, we should have that conversation while you’re alive. DonorsTrust’s policy is that we do sunset every account — that is our policy. If you are a current account holder and you desire the next generation to continue beyond that, then we should probably have a conversation about what that looks like.

We certainly care about the ideological component of a gift and the desire to sustain, especially, the conservative and libertarian movement. Oftentimes that may mean figuring out ways to do that within our existing framework. So if that’s something that matters to you, I would just say: let’s reach out and have a conversation and see how we can satisfy both parties.

Peter Lipsett: We’re going to wrap up the Q&A there. Lawson, I’m going to give you the last word in just a minute. First off, thank you so much, Kim, for sharing all your wisdom with us. Before I give it to Lawson, I just want to remind you this is actually part one of a three-part webinar series. This one covered what donor intent is in the first place. Coming up on April 22nd, we’re going to do another webinar on how to craft that statement — we’re going to go deeper into the great answer that Kim gave earlier. And then on May 12th, we’re going to pull back the curtain a little bit and show how we steward your legacy if it is with us and give you a little breakdown of that. With that, Lawson, why don’t you close this out?

Lawson Bader: Thank you, Peter. And thank you, Kim. Just in closing: it is easy for us as donors — and I put myself in that category — to neglect the details. But if I can just say one thing, it is important, if nothing else, to write down how and why giving matters to you. What are your motives for giving?

In a world of shifting alliances, nuance, and evolving ideological perspectives, it’s those motives that often provide the clarity when my colleagues and I are faced with making decisions about how to properly steward your account and preserve your intent when we lack certain details. And it is an old saying, but we very much mean it here at DonorsTrust: help us help you.

By doing that, we hopefully also continue to move in the direction of a more free and prosperous society. Think about the why, think about the what. Make sure that is clear, because that’s also an important legacy to pass on — and if nothing else, it gets you thinking about your own motives for why you give.

Peter Lipsett: Well, I hope you found that helpful. As I mentioned at the top, this was the first webinar in a three-part series — the next one on April 22nd, focusing on how to craft your donor intent statement, and then one more on May 12th looking at how we at DonorsTrust take those intent statements to help carry out people’s legacies. I would love to have you join if that is interesting to you.

If you are considering donor intent and how to apply it to your own giving, look at the show notes — you can register there. We’re not going to air those webinars here in the podcast feed, but we would love to have you as a part of them.

Of course, if you just have general questions, a webinar can’t answer every question about your own donor intent. So if there’s a question we can answer for you, if you want to talk it through, or explore how DonorsTrust can be helpful — whether you’re already working with us or maybe considering it — go to DonorsTrust.org and reach out to us that way. Email us at tellmemore@DonorsTrust.org, give the office a call, whatever you prefer. We would love to chat with you about how DonorsTrust can be helpful and how to think about donor intent. It’s really that important — such an important concept. We’re going to be back with a more traditional interview episode very soon. So until then, thank you for being a giver. We’ll talk more soon.