---
title: Donor Advisory
group: People and education
order: 5
summary: A local workspace for donors to prepare values, constraints, giving alternatives, evidence questions and follow-up, alongside the charter for an independent advisory service.
status: live
statusNote: The self-guided planning workspace is live. No advisor is engaged, recommendation issued or money handled. A staffed service still needs trained advisors, a legal home, independent funding and qualified professional partners.
conditions: [parked-money, single-lens, proximity-pull]
firstMilestone: A published advising protocol and conflict-of-interest policy, tried with ten volunteer donors whose anonymized feedback is published.
help:
  - Open an issue labeled program with questions you think an advisor should ask.
  - If you advise donors professionally and would follow the protocol pro bono, open an issue labeled program.
  - Try the Values Compass and the Portfolio Builder, then report where they fell short of the help you needed.
related: [/tools/values-compass/, /tools/portfolio-builder/, /tools/legacy-planner/, /open-problems/the-payout-question/]
---

## Prepare a donor discussion

[Open the donor workspace](#partner-workspace-donor-advisory) to record values and constraints, unresolved intake questions, alternative giving scenarios, evidence notes and decision checkpoints. Load a clearly fictional example or start from your own project alias. Save, edit and export a discussion packet in this browser. Scenarios do not produce charity scores or a recommended allocation.

Keep private financial information and personal details out. Nothing is sent to an advisor, submitted publicly or paid through the workspace. The service described below remains a charter for partners; the volunteer pilot in its first milestone has not been conducted by publishing this software.

## What it is

Donor Advisory would sit down with a donor, a family or a foundation and work through a giving plan using the Charitology method. The advisor’s job would be to help donors see their own choices clearly: which moral frameworks they hold, where on the [depth scale](/method/#depth) they want to act, how near or far they want to give and when the money should move. The donor decides.

## How it works

Every engagement would follow a published protocol. It would start with values, using the [Values Compass](/tools/values-compass/), and move to a draft allocation in the [Portfolio Builder](/tools/portfolio-builder/). It would then cover timing, including whether money held in a foundation or a donor-advised fund should move faster, and distance, with honest comparisons of what the same money could do at home and abroad.

Advisors would take no commissions and disclose every conflict of interest. Tax, legal and investment questions belong to licensed professionals, so the program would work alongside them rather than replace them. And until Charitology’s method passes public red-team review, advisors would not hand out rankings of named charities. They would point donors to public research instead.

## Why it matters for the system

Three conditions meet in a single giving plan. [Parked Money](/diagnosis/parked-money/) builds up because the system has no view on when money should move, so the default is whatever is easiest. An advisor would turn timing into a deliberate choice. The [Single Lens](/diagnosis/single-lens/) can narrow a plan to one framework without the donor noticing, and the advisor would show the others. The [Proximity Pull](/diagnosis/proximity-pull/) works partly through missing information, and the advisor would supply the comparison, so the donor can choose with eyes open whether to give near or far.

## Risks and limits

Advice can steer people toward the advisor’s own views. The protocol would put the donor’s values first, record the reasons for each choice and ask donors afterward whether they felt steered. Until partners, funding and a proper legal and governance setup are in place, the program accepts no money.

## What success looks like

Within five years, the protocol is public and in use, and donors who used it say their plans reflect their own values. A study has compared their giving with that of similar donors who didn’t use it.