American Endowment Foundation receives inquiries from donors or their advisors every week, seeking guidance on transferring donor-advised fund accounts from other donor-advised fund sponsors to AEF. These inquiries come from individuals who may already have AEF donor-advised fund accounts and have a second donor-advised fund elsewhere, while others simply want to transfer their only donor-advised fund account to AEF.

The process for transferring donor-advised funds to AEF is straightforward, and nearly all other donor-advised fund sponsors allow these transfers. However, it’s important to note that AEF requires donors to have financial advisors who can open and manage the assets in the donor-advised fund accounts. As a result, AEF is unable to accommodate donors who do not have a financial advisor.

Donors often choose to transfer their donor-advised fund accounts to AEF for a number of reasons including:

  1. Donors prefer that their financial advisors manage the donor-advised fund assets since they trust them to provide better returns than the standard investment options offered by other donor-advised fund sponsors. Their financial advisors often have greater flexibility in selecting the investments for their AEF donor-advised fund account. Donors feel this enables them to grant more over time.
  2. Donors’ advisors are only able to manage the assets with some other donor-advised fund sponsors, or are only able to at very high minimum amounts.
  3. Some donors independently opened donor-advised funds, especially in the year-end rush or upon the advice of their tax or legal advisor, without realizing they could have opened one through their financial advisor.
  4. Donors established donor-advised funds at their previous bank or wealth management firm before engaging their current advisor or firm, and were unaware they could transfer the accounts to AEF. Also, donors’ advisors may have changed firms or custodians and could no longer use the previous donor-advised fund sponsor, thus necessitating a transfer to AEF.
  5. Donors opted to consolidate multiple donor-advised fund accounts into their one at AEF for efficiency and simplicity.
  6. Granting policies were more restrictive at other donor-advised fund sponsors so some prior and new grant recommendations were not approved.
  7. Donors were unable to name a successor advisor to the donor-advised fund account, the donor was limited in how much they could grant ever year, the donor was required to make grants every year, or fees were higher at other donor-advised fund sponsors.
  8. Donor-advised fund sponsors would not forward to the donors thank you letters they received from charities for the donors’ anonymous grants.
  9. Donors encountered service and execution issues, including slow grant processing, impersonal service, accounting errors, or limited technology
  10. AEF’s ability to accept many types of assets including real estate, closely-held business interests, or other illiquid assets, while other donor-advised fund sponsors could only accept gifts of cash or publicly traded stock

The number of donor-advised funds transferred to AEF is expected to continue growing due to these and other reasons. The process of transferring donor-advised funds to American Endowment Foundation is summarized in these three simple steps. Please reach out to American Endowment Foundation with any questions.