GIVING BACK

Using Your Charitable Client Work to Increase Employee Engagement

By Christine T. DeMao

If you’re thinking about how you might leverage your charitable work with clients to drive employee engagement in your firm, remembering why clients give can be a helpful place to start. Clients’ philanthropic aspirations are usually as unique as the clients themselves. For some, they may have altruistic motivations—a desire to help others, connect with a community, or meet moral or religious obligations. Others may have more pragmatic goals in mind; they may be motivated by tax benefits or want to support their personal values and interests. For many clients, charitable activity is deeply meaningful to them, an opportunity to create a legacy for their family or to add purpose to their life. These conversations with clients can be intimate and personal exercises since there often is an emotional connection to giving. As advisors, we’re fortunate to wade into these deep waters with them.

How Advisors Help

I suspect most NAPFA Advisor readers are already familiar with the broad range of financial planning strategies that can help clients realize their philanthropic aspirations: gifting appreciated securities, using donor advised funds, charitable bunching, or fulfilling required minimum distributions from retirement accounts as qualified charitable distributions, to name a few. No doubt, many of you have also helped your clients establish advanced giving vehicles like charitable remainder trusts, charitable lead trusts, or private foundations.

Studies show client demand for philanthropic advice is growing, and RIAs who provide these services have more assets under management, grow faster, and see increased client loyalty when compared to those who don’t. A 2021 report¹ from Fidelity measured the impact of charitable planning services on 1,200 RIAs and family offices. It showed firms that provided charitable advice amassed six times the median AUM and experienced three times the organic growth rate of firms that didn’t offer philanthropic advice. Clients who receive this guidance also tend to recommend their advisor more often. Those facts alone make a compelling case for offering this kind of advice!

The Organizational Opportunity

One opportunity firms may miss is using their charitable client work as a tool to positively impact employee engagement and corporate culture. Catchphrases like the “mattering movement” and “corporate social responsibility” tend to come in and out of fashion. But the human need to find meaning and purpose in work existed long before we started scrolling through HR buzzwords. A 2019 study² at Swarthmore College highlighted the critical link between organizational health, employee success, and employees’ sense of the difference they are making in the world. Swarthmore’s research demonstrated that employees who feel their work makes a difference reported increased job satisfaction, a higher likelihood of taking on leadership roles, and better retention at their organization. Yes, please! The Swarthmore researchers went so far as to develop an Organizational Mattering Scale³ to measure mattering in organizations. I am not suggesting RIAs need to go quite that far. I am suggesting we should formalize forums and methods for talking about charitable work internally if we want to harness the positive potential it holds. For most of us, we’re already doing this meaningful work for our clients—we just need to find ways to amplify and share the stories with our teams.

Making Meaning of Client Giving—Without Writing a Check

From an operational perspective, doing charitable work for clients requires a lot of manpower. We must understand each client’s unique philanthropic objectives, set up accounts, gather and track cost basis details, collaborate with tax professionals, confirm contact information for charities, prepare custodial cashiering forms, process gift and grant recommendations, prepare and send gifting confirmation letters to the charities, reconcile transactions, and double-check tax forms—the list goes on and on—often under looming tax deadlines. We are busy, so it can be difficult to carve out time for reflecting and summarizing this work internally.

However, talking about this work with your team is an easy opportunity to inspire, engage, and align your staff and deepen their connection to your clients. This activity is particularly important in firms with siloed advisory teams where their work may not be visible to others across the organization. At our firm we do not silo advisory teams, and all clients are clients of the firm. Still, each advisor has their own “book” of primary client responsibilities, so to keep the staff informed of what is happening in our clients’ lives, we have a firm-wide lunch every Thursday, and each advisor shares an update about the clients they’ve met or spoken with in the preceding week—including updates about the client’s family, health, career, hobbies, and charitable aspirations. It’s casual, conversational, and powerful. Plus, it creates organic redundancy by broadening the information loop, and it reminds everyone that our client work is a team activity.

The end of each year is a perfect time to reflect on the charitable work the firm executed for clients in the prior 12 months. In the frenzy of day-to-day activity, it can be easy to miss the cumulative impact your clients’ charitable giving makes. Most of us have access to portfolio management software and custodial platforms that can easily generate summaries of the numerous types of client gifts to charities. Every December, I look back in appreciation and a little bit of awe at the generosity of our clients and the vast and varied flavors of their philanthropy. Being able to quantify and report the number of charitable transactions, total dollars donated, and list of charities that benefited each year is a moving and motivating reminder for our team of the good their work is making possible in the world.

Other Small Opportunities With Big Impact

If you’ve had to hire lately, you may already know younger workers tend to prioritize working for organizations with charitable missions. Studies⁴ show approximately two-thirds of Gen Z and millennial workers are more likely to want to work for a company that donates to a charity. As a result, a rise in corporate charitable activities has mirrored increased client-directed philanthropy. How can RIA firms find creative ways to do good or give back to their communities? Below are just a few additional examples to consider.

A few years ago, we added an annual sponsorship stipend to our employee benefits package. The firm donates up to $500 per calendar year to each employee to support community charities, sports teams, and non-political organizations that matter to them. At our annual year-end staff meeting, we include a list of all the organizations we’ve supported in our summary of the year. Like our clients, our staff’s charitable interests are varied, and reviewing the diverse recipients of our employees’ generosity provides a moment to pause and consider the dog rescues, high school sports teams, daycare carnivals, dance marathons, and music ensembles in our community represented.

This year, we also incorporated a charitable activity, The Birthday Cake Project, into our Take Your Kids to Work program. We purchased the supplies needed to create birthday cake kits for a local food bank: foil cake pans with lids, boxed cake mixes, tubs of frosting, sprinkles, candles, and a can of Sprite the families could use in place of eggs. Our little guests spent the morning assembling the kits and creating a personalized happy birthday card for each one. It was a moving experience to see the care they took in making something special for birthday parties for young strangers.

Many custodians, like Fidelity Investments, require advisors to designate a charity on their trade error account to receive any profits generated by those errors. Thankfully, we have few trade errors and thus little to contribute in this area (and hope that trend continues!). Still, this is an opportunity to demonstrate our commitment to doing good. So earlier this year, we updated our designated charity from a national financial literacy group to a local charity, Pittsburgh Tomorrow, to deepen our connection to our region.

These suggestions are small ones with minimal financial commitment required—they are just the tip of the charitable iceberg. Many firms have incorporated volunteer days into their paid time off (PTO) benefits for their employees. Some have encouraged pro bono advisory work—teaching financial literacy programs in local schools, offering college savings counseling to underprivileged families, and helping displaced workers and veterans learn foundational financial skills, just to name a few.

For NAPFA members who want to do more, the NAPFA Foundation website provides an excellent outline of its current pro bono programs.⁵ And this year, the Foundation for Financial Planning created a free pro bono curriculum for early-career financial planners to better equip them with the skills needed to implement impactful programs.⁶

¹ https://www.fidelitycharitable.org/content/dam/fc-public/docs/insights/on-the-leading-edge-report.pdf)

² https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-psychology/1132/

³https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17439760.2019.1689416#:~:text=Appendixes-,ABSTRACT,employee%20thriving

⁴ https://www.fidelitycharitable.org/content/dam/fc-public/docs/insights/giving-in-the-workplace.pdf

⁵ https://www.napfa.org/napfa-foundation-pro-bono-opportunities

⁶ https://ffpprobono.org/release-2025-10-7/

Christine T. DeMao is the Chief Operating Officer and a Managing Partner at Gibson Capital, LLC. She has spent nearly three decades working with and for registered investment advisors. You can connect with her on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/christinetaylordemao.

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