Somewhere on your donor list is a couple in their mid-seventies who have been giving your ministry the same faithful gift for a decade. This year, their financial advisor is going to mention a term they have not heard before: a Qualified Charitable Distribution. The advisor will tell them they can send money directly from their IRA to a nonprofit, up to a generous annual limit, and have it count toward their required minimum distribution without ever hitting their taxable income.
Then the advisor will ask them which organization they want it to go to.
If your website does not answer the next question the advisor asks — the ministry's legal name, its tax ID, the mailing address a custodian needs, and a real person to call when the paperwork gets stuck — the gift often does not go to your ministry. It goes to the one whose page answered first.
Why this quiet gift keeps growing
The QCD is not a new instrument, but it is having a real moment for three reasons that all landed at once.
The eligible age is 70 and a half, and the amount a donor can direct through a QCD in a single year is now indexed to inflation — meaningfully higher than the round number most donors remember from a few years ago. A married couple can each make their own. The dollars available are larger than most ministries assume.
The tax math changed for a lot of older donors. Between the standard deduction and the AGI floor conversations that have been running through the sector all year, itemizing charitable gifts no longer produces the deduction it used to for households in this age band. A QCD sidesteps the deduction question entirely. The gift never becomes income, so there is nothing to deduct — and nothing to be phased out.
And required minimum distributions are back on many advisors' checklists this fall. For donors who do not need the RMD to live on, sending it to a ministry is the cleanest solution to a tax problem they were going to face anyway. September through mid-December is when those conversations happen.
Why the giving page matters more than the mailer
A QCD gift does not start on your donation form. It cannot. The money moves from the custodian — Fidelity, Schwab, Vanguard, a local bank — directly to your organization, usually by paper check, sometimes by ACH. There is no credit card and no online form to fill out on your side.
What that means is the donor never touches your giving page for this particular gift. They or their advisor land on your planned giving or ways to give page, look for the four pieces of information the custodian needs, and either find them or move on.
The four pieces are always the same:
- Your organization's full legal name as it appears on the IRS determination letter, not a doing-business-as shorthand.
- Your EIN (tax identification number), formatted clearly.
- A mailing address where a physical check can be received and processed within a week — not a P.O. box that nobody empties.
- A contact name, email, and phone number for the finance staff member who handles complex gifts. Not a general info@ address.
If any one of those is missing or ambiguous, the custodian's paperwork stalls, and a January gift becomes a March gift, or a next-year gift, or no gift.
What to put on the page beyond the basics
The four pieces above are the floor. A few additions turn a good page into the one advisors bookmark.
A plain-language paragraph explaining what a QCD is, in the donor's words: "If you are age 70 and a half or older, you can give directly from your IRA to our ministry. The gift counts toward your required minimum distribution, and the amount is not included in your taxable income." Two sentences beats two paragraphs. Do not cite IRS section numbers on the public page; save those for the fact sheet.
A downloadable letter of instruction the donor can hand to their custodian, with your organization's information pre-filled and a blank line for the gift amount. This is the single highest-leverage thing you can add. It removes the "I need to look that up" friction that kills a lot of these gifts between conversation and execution.
A short note about designation and acknowledgment. QCDs cannot go to a donor-advised fund and cannot receive anything of more than incidental value in return. Say so, briefly. Also tell the donor how you will acknowledge the gift — most ministries do not send the standard "thank you for your tax-deductible contribution" line, because the gift is not being deducted; a plain acknowledgment that names the amount and the date is what the custodian and the donor's accountant actually need.
A quiet trust cue. Your audited financial statement, your Form 990, or a Guidestar/Candid seal — one of these, linked from the page. Older donors and their advisors do this diligence before they move real money. Making them dig for it costs you the gift.
When to build this and when to skip it
If your donor base skews younger and you have never had a QCD gift, this is not your first Q4 priority. Fix the recurring giving page and the year-end appeal landing page first.
But if you have ever received a check from Fidelity Charitable, Schwab Charitable, Vanguard Charitable, or directly from a donor's IRA custodian — even one — you have a QCD-eligible donor base, and the page is worth building this month. The gifts that land through this channel are typically two to ten times the size of a card gift from the same donor, and they arrive without ever touching your processor fees.
If you are staring at your ways-to-give page wondering whether the information a custodian actually needs is even on it, we help faith nonprofits put the right note in the right place before year-end.