How Do I Receipt Stock Gifts?

Accepting Stock donations opens doors for donors to contribute with potentially bigger impact than other types of giving. When a donor gives a Stock Gift, your organization needs to ensure the gift is entered appropriately and the donor is sent a Gift Receipt with specific language related to their contribution. Sending customized Gift Receipts in a timely manner after a Gift is made is part of being a Responsive Fundraiser. Whether you’re sending paper or email receipts, the Receipting Tool can streamline the preparation and sending of all kinds of Receipts, including Stock Gift Receipts.

Gift Entry

When entering the Stock Gift, you’ll find a few additional fields to populate in the Import Tool after you select Stock Gift Type including:

• Ticker Symbol: an abbreviation used to uniquely identify publicly traded shares of a particular stock on a particular stock market.
• Number of Shares: how many total shares have been gifted
• Stock Sold for Cash: If the Stock has been sold for cash, checking this box will indicate it as such.
• Date of Sale: Date the Stock shares were sold
• Amount from Sale of Stock: The amount the Stock shares were sold for.

At minimum, we recommend that the Ticker Symbol and the Number of Shares field be populated on Gift Entry.

Learn more about entering Stock Gifts in Virtuous here.

Receipting

With Receipts requiring special fields for Stock Gifts, make sure that you have a specific Query, Receipt Template, and maybe even a Receipting Group to manage these specific donations.

Build the Query: Because you enter these Gifts as having the Stock Gift Type, you can use this as a parameter (at minimum) for the Gift Query associated with your Stock-specific receipt. Refer to the example below.

Learn more about building a Query here.

Create the Template: Build your Receipt Template the way you would for any other type of Gift. The only difference here is the specific Merge Tags to include:

• Ticker Symbol
• Number of Shares
• Date of the Gift
• State that no goods or services were provided in exchange for the Gift
• State the below:
  • the purpose of the Gift; where the funds are going toward (in other words, the Virtuous Project) To learn more about using Projects in Virtuous, check out this Support Article.

To learn more about creating Receipt Templates, check out this Support Article.

As there are specific IRS rules for the donor to claim deductions on the Stock Gift involving the Holding Period, Deduction Limits, and the Fair Market Value of the Donated Stock, we recommend also including verbiage in your Stock Receipt encouraging donors to consult with their tax advisors when evaluating donated Stock Gifts. To learn more about determining Fair Market Value and other IRS requirements for contributing Stock donations, please refer to this guide provided by the IRS.

Generate Receipts: These will be generated the same way you generate any other Receipt - Stock Gift simply have specific rules set through the Query and templates with corresponding Merge Tags to acknowledge them appropriately.

To learn more about processing Receipts in Virtuous, check out this Support Article.