Stock Donations

Your project can receive stock donations via Social Good Fund’s brokerage account with Wells Fargo. The instructions and account information are found here on the Members Portal.

Please make sure to ask your donors to notify you if they are going to make a stock donation, because the way transactions appear in our brokerage account does not provide us with enough information to identify the donation. Often, we are not able to see the donor name with the transaction, and there is not usually space for the donor to make any notes with their donation. If a donor notifies you that they will be donating stock, please request the following:

• The name of the stock (company name and/or stock ticker symbol)

• The number of shares

• The date they will be donating

It is important that you email the information to [e-mail] and [e-mail]. Once we have that information, we will keep an eye out for the stock to arrive in our account. At that time, we will initiate the sale of the stock, which can take a day or two to clear. The amount your project will see in your account in Sage will be the amount that we were able to sell the stock for, known as the “proceeds” (less the applicable SGF fiscal sponsorship percentage).

Please note that stock donations typically take much longer to post to your Sage account than other types of donations because our process is to post the stock donations after we receive the brokerage account statement for the month in which the stock was sold by SGF. We normally receive the statement about 5 days after the end of each month, and then post the transactions within 5 business days of receipt. If a stock donation is received towards the end of a month, it may not be sold until the following month, which means an even longer lag time. (ie., a stock donation received on December 31 may not be sold until January 3 and would be on the January statement, which we receive in the beginning of February and post in Sage by mid February.) You can reach out to [e-mail] if you have questions about whether a stock donation has been received and if the stock has been sold.

For donated shares, your project can and should send a written acknowledgement of the donation to your donor. However, the acknowledgement should not include a value of the stock. It should only include the name and number of the shares received. This is similar to the guidance for in kind donations. The reason is that stock donations are treated differently by the IRS because the value of the stock fluctuates throughout the day and from day to day. Therefore, the amount we are able to sell it for is likely different from the value at the time it was donated. It is up to the donor to determine the value of their donation at the time they donated it. The donor should be able to get the information they need from their broker or brokerage statement.