Melanie Schnoll Begun is a guest author and contributor to our Outside Perspective Series.
We connected recently with Melanie Schnoll Begun, Managing Director, Head of Family Office Resources Field Engagement for Morgan Stanley, a leading global financial services firm. Melanie is also President of Morgan Stanley’s donor-advised fund program, Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust, Inc. (MS GIFT). Melanie shares her thoughts below about the critical role that financial advisors can play not just as specialists, but as central connectors whose deep knowledge of their clients allows them to align their wealth with their values.
Most financial advisors today endeavor to provide access to comprehensive guidance that consolidates and coordinates all aspects of their client’s financial picture: investment philosophy, tax management and wealth preservation, asset growth, personal goals, family dynamics – and increasingly, charitable aspirations. Such financial advisors view charitable giving as an integral part of their clients’ overall wealth plan – considering their specific philanthropic interests and goals – and offer access to expert guidance accordingly.
When it comes to philanthropic planning, outcomes tend to stem not just from financial or legal acumen, but from your financial advisor’s ability to understand you at a deep, personal level. Within the Centers of Influence (COIs) ecosystem, financial advisors sit at the center of their clients’ lives, offering a panoramic view of their aspirations, values, and family dynamics. That perspective helps make your financial advisor uniquely positioned to connect you with experts that can help align your charitable efforts with your broader wealth planning strategy.
Whether you’re a long-time charitable donor or new to philanthropy, involving your financial advisory team in your charitable planning journey can help elevate your giving to not only achieve greater impact for the causes you support, but also help you enhance related tax advantages, build a meaningful legacy and foster multigenerational connections within your family. They can also help you choose the appropriate charitable giving vehicle(s) for you, such as starting a private foundation, which offers an enduring structure for your philanthropy that can be passed down to your children.
Read on to explore three distinct ways that financial advisors can effectively function as key COIs for their clients’ philanthropy.
1. Strategic Relationships
Financial advisors often serve as the central hub for their clients’ broader ecosystem of experts – legal, financial and philanthropic. For this reason, it strongly behooves philanthropists to understand the leverage and reach of their financial advisor COIs. By working closely with professionals who specialize in philanthropic strategy and best practices, your financial advisor can help you design a charitable plan that is not isolated from your overall financial picture. These relationships allow your financial advisor to bring in the professionals necessary to assist with important aspects of your charitable giving – from tax management strategies to long-term legacy creation. By building a team of COIs who bring diverse expertise, your financial advisor can help you receive valuable advice across various areas of philanthropy, including tax management strategies, giving vehicles, and program design.
For instance, Foundation Source partners with Morgan Stanley’s Philanthropic Advisory team and Financial Advisors to help clients determine if they would benefit from structured giving, such as through a private foundation, donor-advised fund (DAF), charitable trust or pooled income funds. If so, their philanthropic and Financial Advisors can work with Foundation Source to facilitate the necessary set-up and ongoing management. Thanks to the rise of philanthropy-based software that supports charitable giving, philanthropy expertise continues to become a more practical and cost-efficient offering for financial advisors to provide their high-net-worth clients.
2. Facilitate Impact Measurement
Before selecting charities, your financial advisor should connect you with a Philanthropic Advisor who can suggest simple-to-use tools and resources to measure outcomes to inform grantmaking decisions. Grant impact measurement tools provide a high level of transparency and help advise donors like you how far your charitable dollars may go before you ultimately make a charitable donation. Setting benchmarks and reporting social outcomes through a registry like Impact Genome, an MS GIFT donor-advised fund partner, verifies the impact of social programs and rates them on a scorecard. This helps you understand the impact of your grant dollars before you make a charitable donation or investment decision. Once informed about the social outcomes of future nonprofit funding decisions, you and your financial advisor will be equipped to benchmark mission-aligned nonprofit organizations more effectively to define success.
Impact measurement experts, tools and resources arm donors with numeric and qualitative data that demonstrates real-life outcomes that their dollars can help make possible, whether that be protecting vulnerable environments, funding cancer and Alzheimer’s research, fortifying religious traditions, and more.
3. Navigate Complex Family and Legacy Dynamics
With experience in managing interpersonal dynamics, your financial advisor can help identify potential barriers to your giving such as dissension among family members over a philanthropic mission. To help clients navigate these cross-generational challenges, Morgan Stanley Financial Advisors engage the firm’s Family Governance and Wealth Education team who creates strategies to help enhance the value of a family’s capital through the transfer and preservation of their shared values, and the creation of an enduring family legacy. These experts are instrumental in legacy planning (e.g., securing naming rights for clients’ charitable works) and can encourage clients to engage their younger generations in their philanthropy to strengthen family ties and ensure dynastic stability. Additionally, next generation leaders may be nominated by their Financial Advisor to participate in our 7-month-long Next Gen Dynastic Cohort, which prepares heirs to step into the family’s philanthropic enterprise.
Financial advisors can be much more than your trusted guide. Draw upon their extensive COI capabilities to help maximize your philanthropic and financial goals.
Want to contribute to our Outside Perspectives Series and share your philanthropic insights?
Write to us at for a chance to be featured in an upcoming blog!
Want to learn more about the ways we support private foundations?
Whether you are looking for support for your existing foundation or want to create a private foundation, our philanthropic specialists are here to help. Together, let’s #begiving.
