I'm wondering what the norm is across higher ed institutions for who is responsible for authorizing the sale of stock gifts and identification of the donor. At my previous institution, it all lived in our business department. The controller handled communication with brokers and, I assume, authorizing the sale of stock gifts, and 99% of the time was able to identify who the donor was. He would send notification to Advancement of the details of the gift and the donor for us to record.
I'll be the interim gift processor (for what feels like the thousandth time in my 10 years in this field) at my current institution where I've been for 9 months, and as I've been training in their internal procedures, I've learned that our financial institution communicates directly with our gift processor (no one in the business office is included). We are responsible for finding the identity of the donor, and once we know who it's from, we advise the financial institution to sell the stock.
This strikes me as odd - especially that no one in our business office is involved AT ALL. It makes me a bit uncomfortable that a gift processor in Advancement is solely responsible for authorizing the sale of stock. And, I don't know enough about how stock information gets transmitted, but the fact that the controller at my previous institution seemed to have access to donor names associated with stock transfers, it seems odd to me that this information is not provided. There were occasional times when he wasn't able to identify the donor, but he almost always was.
What am I right to expect? Was my previous institution more standard or the outlier and what I'm experiencing now is more typical?
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Gabrielle Read-Hess
Advancement Data Systems Manager
Coe College
greadhess@coe.edu------------------------------