While virtual technology is helping advisors to reach more people who need free financial advice, fewer Financial Planning Association members are offering their time.
Only 1,008 FPA members gave pro bono advice in 2020. That’s nearly 20% fewer volunteers than the year prior —down from 1,254, according to the organization. Meanwhile, other groups have seen an uptick.
Coronavirus has put FPA’s pro bono program to the test. The volunteers across its more than 40 local chapters, who are largely responsible for running their respective programs, have had to rethink their in-person structure.
“There was a little bit of a delay in the response at the chapter level,” says Kristin Pugh, an advisor and the volunteer chair of the FPA’s pro bono advisory committee. “People didn't have the right technology, or they didn't know how to implement it.”
Once chapters started using tools like Zoom, advisors giving pro bono advice have been more time-efficient, and the FPA has been able to reach more people in need than in prior years, despite fewer volunteers. Advisors gave pro bono advice to 7,839 individuals in 2020, compared to 7,299 in 2019, according to the FPA.
Even so, the organization is hoping to attract more volunteers to expand this kind of work and magnify the impact it has on individuals such as low-income families or abuse survivors who need financial planning. The FPA is bolstering its national support system and planning ways to recognize contributors.
“We need more volunteers, and we're putting measures in place and have measures in place to take care of them and take care of more people,” says Pugh, who is a financial advisor at TrueWealth in Atlanta, Georgia, which was recently
Volunteer-led
While there were fewer advisors giving pro bono advice with the FPA, this isn’t necessarily indicative of the industry.
The Foundation for Financial Planning saw an uptick in pro bono volunteers. The organization, which works closely with and financially supports the FPA’s pro bono program, had 1,737 volunteers in 2020, up from 1,687 in 2019, according to the foundation’s CEO, Jon Dauphiné. (This number is inclusive of FPA member volunteers, but has other programs in addition, according to Dauphiné.)
The Foundation introduced a new
XY Planning Network, the community of fee-based financial planners, currently has more than
The decline in volunteers with FPA didn’t come as a surprise to the organization.
“We were fully expecting those numbers to go down,” says Ben Lewis, Chief Communications Officer of the FPA. Many of the volunteers who run the program across the country had newfound demands from their own clients and families during the pandemic, he said.
Early in the pandemic, “I was working 50-60 hour weeks,” says Pugh, noting that there were blurred lines between home and work.
For the more than 1,000 FPA members who gave free advice last year, many were invigorated to help during a year that caused financial strain and emotional grief throughout the country, she says.
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“[Advisors were] watching the news, they’re seeing the stimulus package and CARES package rollout,” says Pugh. “Of all things that we can give — it's our guidance and advice and expertise, and just listening.”
But the pandemic made giving free advice difficult from an operational standpoint -- at least at first. Since state pro bono events and seminars have historically taken place in-person, some chapter leaders were unsure how to proceed once live meetings were discouraged at the beginning of the pandemic, Pugh says.
Chapter leaders reached out to her early on, asking for recommendations for how to operate virtually.
“We realized that we didn't have a best practice for all of that,” Pugh says. “So one of the answers to that was to roll out a nationwide Zoom subscription that chapter leaders could use, not just for pro bono, but just to maintain their normal quarterly meetings.”
The organization also reached out to individuals who had volunteered in the past and published a
Some chapters dropped their pro bono efforts this year altogether, Lewis said. He declined to specify which chapters, and said that the national organization puts no requirements on its local chapters to do this kind of work.
“I imagine there are some chapters that didn't have a pro bono program to begin with,” Pugh says. “On the flip side, there were chapters that did have a pro bono program but were kind of
paralyzed as to how [they were] going to carry this out going forward.”
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Pugh has been working on a guide on how to develop a sustainable pro bono program in their respective locations, explaining how to implement technology and develop a volunteer base. She expects it to be published at the end of this month.
Hurdles
Because financial advisors are typically accustomed to serving the wealthy, some can find it challenging to
Kevin Mahoney, an XYPN member and CFP of the D.C.-based practice Illumint, who offered
Local organizations can help make introductions, according to Pugh, who says that her local FPA chapter in Georgia partners with the Atlanta Volunteer Lawyers Foundation, which offers pro bono representation.
“It is much easier to have a captive audience, or to be able to seek out those individuals who need the help the most through these organizations that are already supporting them in some way,” Pugh says.
Some financial advisors also question whether they'll have answers for the people they want to help, according to Pugh, who recommended that these individuals try shadowing other pro bono planners to get a feel for it themselves.
“I don't think it's a complete 180, and I don't think that you have to have a whole separate skill set to work with pro bono clients,” who need the same emotional intelligence and budgeting know-how they use in their everyday client service, Pugh says.
As for the future of pro bono planning at the FPA, Pugh is hopeful the organization can help even more people, particularly now with the time-efficiencies of virtual tools like Zoom and not needing to commute.
“There is significant energy around pro bono,” says Lewis, adding: “I think this was just one of these weird anomalies over the past year. I feel really good going into 2021.”
