National Philanthropic Trust’s AUM Tops $1 Billion

NPT’s program did not suffer during the past three years. “Our trajectory was going up,” Heisman said. With a minimum DAF account size of $25,000, “we tend to float up to the higher end of the marketplace, and there seems to have been engagement in philanthropic planning by those folks, and that was great for us.”

Since its founding in 1996, NPT has gone through two downturns—the dot-com bust and the recent recession—and still maintained traction, Heisman said. “A lot of people didn’t think we were going to survive because we were not attached to a large financial service company and because our model was really different, or if we did, we weren’t going to keep pace. We outperformed a lot of our early observers.”

She attributed this to NPT’s relatively small size and its mission-driven operations, which enable it to provide flexibility in its services “from orchestrating international grants and managing unique assets to providing quality experience for our clients.”

Also helpful, Heisman said, is the charity’s extensive private label program. “We white label DAFs for large financial institutions, and are the only ones in the country that do it at the volume we do it.”

NPT partners include Harris, JPMorgan, iShares and UBS. “Every time their clients decide to create a DAF, they’re actually making a gift to NPT,” she said. “So that distribution model has really worked for us, and it has enable us to have some amazing donors and some great long-term relationships.”