Introducing WellAdvised: From Small Talk to Strategy

We built WellAdvised because the philanthropy conversation deserves better infrastructure.

Advisors know their clients care about giving. Clients want a framework to express their values, pass them on, and feel like their giving actually reflects who they are. The missing piece has always been a structured process that connects the two — one that surfaces values, organizes priorities, and produces something the client can actually hold, share with their family, and revisit year after year.

That's what WellAdvised does.

How It Works

The process has three steps.

Step one: the conversation. The client answers a guided set of questions covering their giving motivations, values, focus areas, geographic priorities, and preferences for how they want to give. It takes 15-20 minutes. It can be facilitated by an advisor in a meeting or completed self-serve by the client at home. The questions are designed to surface signal, not just collect answers — ranking exercises, sliders, and open-text fields work together to build a rich picture of who this person is as a giver.

Step two: AI synthesis. WellAdvised takes the client's responses — along with their giving history, how they felt about their past gifts, and even their LinkedIn profile if the client chooses to share it (surfacing board roles, volunteer work, and professional context that shapes their philanthropic identity) — and synthesizes everything into a professional Philanthropic Profile. This isn't a summary of survey answers. It's a narrative document that interprets the data, identifies patterns, and produces structured outputs that the client and advisor can use to guide decisions.

Step three: review and refine. The advisor and client review the profile together. Adjust anything that doesn't feel right. Update it as priorities evolve. A philanthropic plan should be a living document, not a one-time exercise — and WellAdvised is built to support that.

What Comes Out

The Philanthropic Profile includes six core components.

A Giving Identity — a narrative summary of who this client is as a giver. What drives them. What shaped their relationship with generosity. How they think about change.

A North Star Statement — a short, grounding articulation of where they want their giving to go over the next year. Not a permanent commitment. A snapshot of current priorities that anchors every decision that follows.

Focus Areas — the causes, populations, and geographies that matter most, ranked as primary, secondary, and supporting. Each area includes context drawn from the client's answers and giving history, explaining why it matters to them specifically.

A Generosity Statement — guiding principles for all giving decisions. The rules of engagement for saying yes and saying no. This is the section clients tell us they value most — because it gives them permission to be strategic rather than reactive.

An Allocation Framework — how the annual giving budget divides across focus areas, including a dedicated pool for unplanned opportunities and emergencies. Concrete dollar amounts, not just percentages.

And Giving Boundaries — what the client says no to, with actual language they can use when someone asks. "Thank you for thinking of us. We have a giving plan for the year and our commitments are already set."

Built for Real Families

Here's what a Philanthropic Profile looks like in practice.

The Wintschel family — a faith-rooted household in British Columbia — completed WellAdvised and received a plan that identified their Orthodox church as the anchor of their giving, organized secondary commitments around local food security and clean water, created a next-generation giving budget for their two sons, and built a crisis response framework with pre-positioned principles for how to act when disaster strikes.

The plan also flagged a pattern worth discussing: a long-running annual gift to an organization that consistently scored low on satisfaction. Not a directive to stop giving — just a prompt to have a real conversation about whether that commitment still reflects their values.

That's the kind of insight a form can't produce. It requires synthesis.

Who It's For

Wealth advisors who want to lead the philanthropy conversation with confidence, differentiate their practice, and retain clients across generations.

DAF providers who want to activate dormant fund holders with a values discovery process that drives disbursements — not just another email campaign.

Gift planners who want a structured, repeatable process that produces a professional deliverable they can share with clients.

Private foundations and families who want to align family members around shared values and build a giving framework that guides decisions together.

What Makes It Different

WellAdvised is not a survey. It's not a static PDF. And it's not a six-month consulting engagement.

It connects to WellFunded's intelligence layer — 85,000 Canadian registered charities with financial data, governance information, and peer benchmarks. The recommendations that follow in future modules are backed by due diligence, not guesswork.

It includes optional modules for faith-based giving, next-generation involvement (designed for families with children age 10+), and emergency and disaster response planning — so each plan is as specific as the client's life.

And it produces a branded, shareable document that the advisor and client own together. A plan the family can pin to the fridge, share at the dinner table, or hand to the next generation when it's their turn.

Get Started

If you'd like to see a sample Philanthropic Profile or talk about how WellAdvised fits into your practice, book a walkthrough.

To learn more about why philanthropic planning matters, read What Is a Philanthropic Plan? and The Philanthropy Conversation Most Advisors Aren't Having.