What's in a Name? Debate For Philanthropists

BOSTON (TheStreet) -- Henry Ford, Eli Lilly, John D. Rockefeller, J. Paul Getty, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are among the legendary business figures whose philanthropic largess has paid for museums, schools and health care initiatives around the globe. Celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon have similarly parlayed their fame to help chosen charities.

Not all affluent benefactors are as willing to put their names out there. Choosing whether to be an anonymous philanthropist can often go beyond mere modesty.

Bill and Melinda Gates at a 2006 press conference with Warren Buffett. All are well-known philanthropists, but financial advisers say most donors should consider giving anonymously.

A sizable donation can permanently alter the privacy of the donor and affect their everyday life, especially if the extent of their net worth has been guarded.

"If it is a particularly large gift, and you have your name on it, it can become publically available on the Internet," says Eric Meermann, a client service manager with Palisades Hudson Financial Group, a financial adviser in Scarsdale, N.Y., who has specializes in philanthropic issues. "Your local community may begin to look at you somewhat differently once they know that you have a very high net worth. If you add a whole wing to the hospital, everyone's going to know that you, your family and your heirs are going to have a significant amount of wealth. If you are giving away large amounts of money, you may not want a lot of people to know that. You may just be a more private person."

He compares the effect of such widespread knowledge to what often happens to lottery winners.

"Once that information is part of the public sphere, other charities will get it and you will also be getting many more phone calls and solicitations from everyone coming forward," he says. "You can draw a lot of negative attention. You see this with lottery winners, although maybe not in a charitable way. They spend lavishly, become well known in their community as having gained all this wealth in a very public way and a lot of them run into a lot of trouble."