If you’ve already established a donor-advised fund at the Winona Community Foundation, you can understand why it’s become such a popular tool to organize your giving and serve as a springboard for so many other ways to make a difference in our region.
We talk with a lot of people who work with us in a variety of ways, such as supporting the Foundation’s operating endowment, making qualified charitable distributions from an IRA to a designated fund, or regularly contributing to one or more fiscally sponsored programs. Interestingly, we are discovering that some of these folks also have a donor-advised fund at a national financial institution and did not realize that they could have set up their donor-advised fund at the Winona Community Foundation.
It’s time to set the record straight!
For starters, the Winona Community Foundation offers donor-advised fund holders the same tax and administrative benefits as a national financial institution, including:
–Online access to their 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, the Winona Community Foundation offers high-level, customized services to its donor-advised fund holders, including:
–Staff who can work directly with you to structure estate gifts to charities and accept gifts of appreciated stock or complex assets such as real estate or closely-held stock
–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 Winona Community Foundation, itself a nonprofit, to help support operations, grow its mission, and help even more donors support the causes they care about
–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 the Winona Community Foundation. When you work with us, 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.
