Gift acceptance policy: what to review before you accept
- Acceptance clauses the policy needs
- 18
- Of those, clauses that must require review
- 9
- Gift kinds the policy can let staff accept unreviewed
- 3
Every figure on this site comes from the policies you write and the method shown beside each figure: your categories of record, your labels, your headcount. Where a page states a fact about a form or a framework it names the document it came from, and those are the NIST and IRS documents cited on the page. Nothing here is legal advice.
A gift acceptance policy is the one policy on this site whose absence is visible from outside the organisation. The IRS asks about it directly on Schedule M of Form 990, the schedule for noncash contributions, and the answer is on a public return. What the question tells you is what the document has to do: line 31 asks whether the organization has a gift acceptance policy that requires the review of any nonstandard contributions, so a policy that lists what you will accept without naming who reviews the awkward cases is not answering it. This page is about the review: what counts as nonstandard, who should sit on the committee, the two thresholds worth setting before anybody is offered anything, and the clauses that save trouble later. The document itself comes out of the free builder.
Open the Gift acceptance policy template Free to use. No account, no card, no trial clock.
List what you might be offered, not what you have been
Real property, vehicles, closely held stock, publicly traded securities, cryptocurrency, art, equipment, in-kind services. The list is short and it is the whole scope of the policy, because every clause that follows is about one of these categories being offered on a Friday afternoon.
Split it into what staff may accept and what must be reviewed
Readily convertible to cash and carrying no obligation goes in the first pile and needs no committee. Everything else is nonstandard and is the reason the policy exists. Getting this split explicit is what stops a review process becoming a delay on every gift, which is how review processes die.
Name the reviewers and give them authority to decline
Two or three people, with a value above which the board sees it. The authority matters more than the number: a review that cannot say no is a delay dressed as a control, and the gifts this policy is for are precisely the ones somebody senior will feel awkward refusing without a document behind them.
Write the clauses that protect the organisation, then keep the decisions
That you give donors no tax or legal advice, who obtains an appraisal and who pays for it, and that you will not accept a gift requiring you to act outside your purpose. Then keep a record of each reviewed gift and what was decided. That record, not the policy, is what a board member asks for two years later.
A policy the Gift acceptance policy: what to review before you accept does not cover?
Tell us about the policy the builders do not cover and we will say whether they can.
About the Gift acceptance policy: what to review before you accept
Does a small nonprofit need one?
If it might ever be offered a noncash gift, yes. The question on the return has no size threshold attached to whether you have a policy.
Can we use a template?
Take the structure. The list of what your organisation will and will not accept is specific to your purpose and your capacity to hold things, and that is the half a template cannot supply.
What if a donor objects to the review?
That is the policy working. A donor unwilling to have a nonstandard gift reviewed is telling you something the review would have found.
Who should sit on the committee?
Enough people that declining is comfortable, few enough to decide quickly. Two or three, with a board threshold above them, works for most organisations.
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Keep the version, and the signature against it
Keep each policy against its version number, send it to the people it binds, and keep the record of who agreed to which version and when.
- Download the policy as a file you can edit, circulate and keep.
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- Keep this policy, with its version number and the date it was issued.
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- Send the issued policy to the people it binds, from inside the workspace.
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