The encyclopedia · Strategy & Leadership · Strategic decision · 1991
Fidelity let donors deduct now, decide later
Fidelity let donors deduct now, decide later by transferring ownership to a public charity.
Fidelity Charitable
the move
US tax law rewards charitable giving with a deduction, but only for the year the gift is actually made — someone holding appreciated stock who wanted the deduction this year, while taking years to decide which specific causes deserved the money, had no clean vehicle for that. A wealthy donor could set up their own private foundation to keep control over grant-making decisions, but the tax code forces private foundations to pay out roughly 5% of assets every year regardless of the donor's own timeline, with excise-tax penalties for falling short.
Community foundations had quietly offered a middle path since the 1970s: a donor could contribute to a fund the community foundation legally owned and controlled, then "advise" the foundation on which charities to support over time, without the private-foundation payout mandate attached. In 1991, Fidelity Investments' charitable affiliate took that community-foundation structure and built it into a nationally scaled, commercially run product.
why it works
- Tax deduction is earned by legal transfer of ownership, not by the money reaching a charity.
- Fidelity Charitable legally owns the assets, so the donor's deduction is valid immediately.
- Because the donor only advises, the fund isn't a private foundation and avoids the 5% payout rule.
- Donors can take years to decide which charities to support, with assets growing tax-free.
what transfers
When a rule couples a benefit to a decision, decouple them by transferring the trigger event to a third party while retaining advisory control.
what came after
Since 1991 Fidelity Charitable has distributed nearly $118B in grants to 461,000+ charities and became the largest US grantmaker by 2019. Fidelity Charitable's donor-advised fund model was quickly copied by rival commercial sponsors including Charles Schwab (1999) and Vanguard (1997), and donor-advised funds collectively became the single largest and fastest-growing vehicle in US charitable giving, prompting ongoing debate over how quickly money held in them should actually reach working charities.
references
spotted an error? The archive wants to know.