How to: Encourage your donors to give stock through Overflow.

Educating your donors about the tax benefits of giving via stock, how easy is to donate stock online, and the security of the Overflow platform is critical to encourage your supporters to give in this way.

This article covers these three essential elements of donor education in detail. At the end of the article, you'll have a chance to download a donor-facing kit with PDFs you can send directly to supporters, as well as multiple demos of the Overflow platform.

Why Give Stock?

For givers who have never given stock before, tax benefits are key. They may have never considered the tax implications of giving stock. This education will focus on the two main tax benefits of giving via stock:

1. They can deduct 100% of the fair market value of the stock from their taxes, just like cash.

2. They can avoid capital gains taxes by donating the stock directly to your organization rather than liquidating the asset and giving cash.

We recommend keeping the tax education high level. Everyone’s tax situation is different, but if you can share these two main tenants, donors will realize that they can maximize their impact and give from their gains, not their grocery budget, with a stock donation.

Ease of Use

The second audience is those that have given stock before. For this audience, ease of use and security are paramount. Of course, both of these principles are important to share with all types of donors, but for those that have given stock before, the thing to highlight here is that you no longer have to fax a document to give! The old way involved finding your brokerage’s unique transfer request form, printing it, filling it out by hand, and faxing or mailing it in. Some people are used to giving in this way and that’s ok.

But for many others, they may have attempted to give stock in the past but gave up because it was so difficult - gifts you didn’t even know were never fulfilled. But with Overflow, it can take a donor less than 5 minutes to initiate a gift of stock and that’s really what we recommend emphasizing when talking to donors about this way of giving.

For donors that have had difficulty giving stock the old way, another thing to share with them is that Overflow has a Donor Operations team that can help facilitate their gift through to completion. This is important because donating stock is complicated. Some gifts are sent from brokerages with very strict transfer requirements, or the type of stock itself may be complex. Our team has transacted thousands of stock donations and knows how to facilitate even the most complicated donation through to completion. So if your donor has struggled before, they can rest assured knowing there is a team that will personally reach out and work with them to ensure their gift is fulfilled. This concierge support is a huge benefit.

Overflow also makes the stock donation experience easier by offering donors a giving account, what we call a Donor Profile, where they can see the status of their gifts, manage payment methods, update personal information, and even download their tax documents! Learn more about the Donor Profile here.

Sharing these factors that make the platform easy to use will be key in encouraging donors to give in this way.

Security

Even though giving is moving online across the board, that doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice security for ease of use. Overflow is SOC2 Type 1 compliant and takes our platform’s security, as well as those of our partners’, very seriously.

In the stock-giving experience, donors are prompted to log in to their brokerage account using Yodlee. Yodlee is extremely secure with bank-level security protocols in place and Overflow never sees nor stores donors’ brokerage account login information. But we understand that logging into a brokerage account on a different platform may be uncomfortable for some donors. With that in mind, we’ve created multiple pathways for someone to give so they feel as secure as possible. Those pathways include:

• Manual: A donor can go through the online experience but enter their stock holdings information manually
• Concierge: The donor is connected with our donor operations team to walk them through the donation entirely offline
• Financial Advisor Experience: For those that wish for their financial advisor to give on their behalf. 

Even once donors are bought in to giving stock, it is critical to walk them through how to do so online and build their trust in the platform. They’ll soon find that it is so much better than the old way. 

Don't worry - you don't have to do all of this education on your own! We've prepared a donor-facing kit with PDFs you can send directly to donors to educate them on all of these elements. Click here to download the kit. Also feel free to download the demos included in this article to plug into your next fundraising appeal.