You’re volunteering to give financial planning advice, for free, to people who couldn’t otherwise pay for it. Here is what that involves on both sides. It is not a contract of employment, and you are never paid.

1. You’re not paid, in money or anything else

No compensation, directly or indirectly, for anything you do here. No gifts. And if extra work comes up during an engagement that nobody anticipated, you can’t charge for that either. The client pays nothing and incurs no costs at any point.

2. What you’ll help with

You and the client agree the scope between you. Most arrive with something specific in mind, and you do your best to answer it. Commonly that means:

• Developing goals
• Managing assets and liabilities: debt consolidation, savings, investments
• Managing cash flow: budgeting, banking, paying bills on time
• Identifying and managing risk: medical, disability, life, property and casualty insurance, benefits, settlements and claims
• The financial effects of a health condition
• Providing for education
• Building financial security
• Tax considerations
• Preparing for retirement
• Estate and legacy matters

That list is illustrative, not a limit.

3. What you won’t do

You never hold or control a client’s assets, and you never act under power of attorney for them. That isn’t what this is.

4. The standard you work to

You act as a fiduciary in everything you do for AGB. The client’s interest comes first, ahead of yours and ahead of your firm’s. You disclose any conflict of interest before it can affect your advice, and if it cannot be managed, you step back from that client. None of this is softened by the work being free, or brief, or unpaid. A pro bono client has less room to absorb bad advice than a paying one, not more.

Your obligations to the SEC, FINRA, and state securities and insurance regulators apply here exactly as they do in your paid work. If you hold the CFP® certification, so do CFP Board’s Code of Ethics and Standards of Conduct, which already require you to act as a fiduciary whenever you give financial advice.

5. Getting what you need to advise

After the client gives us their basic profile, you tell them what else you need to know, and they work with you to get it. You use that to understand their circumstances properly before advising.

If you can’t get what you need, you narrow the scope to what you can genuinely help with, or you end the engagement. Both are legitimate outcomes. Neither is a failure.

6. How long it lasts

As long as it’s useful. You and the client can meet as many times as you both find productive, and there is no set number. Some clients come back years later when something in their life has changed, and that is welcome.

What stays outside the scope is a continuing service: implementing the plan for them, monitoring it, or managing anything on an ongoing basis. Advice when they need it, yes. A standing relationship where you run things, no. If a client wants that, they’ll need to engage someone for it, and clause 7 means it cannot be you.

7. Never sell

You will not sell, cross-sell, market or promote your own services, products or practice to a pro bono client, in a meeting, after one, or at any point later. You will not use anything you learn here for business development. This is the promise the whole program rests on.

A pro bono client can never become a paying client of yours, or of your firm. Not after the engagement ends, not years later, and not if they ask you. There are no exceptions to this and no process for requesting one. If a client wants to hire a planner, you help them find one who is not you.

8. Your record is public, and you’re standing behind it

Your background, including any disciplinary action or bankruptcy, is disclosed as required, and is publicly available here:

• FINRA BrokerCheck
• SEC Adviser Info
• CFP Board verification

You confirm that your public record is complete and accurate, that every professional license and certification you hold is in good standing, and that you have told us about anything bearing on your fitness to advise that the record would not show. What appears on the record is reviewed against a written standard, not case by case, and you will hear the finding before any decision is final.

You authorize us to verify your CFP® standing and your registration records, including the disclosure history published on them, before your availability becomes bookable and periodically after that. You’ll tell us promptly if your certification, registration or disclosure history changes.

We don’t run a commercial background check. You have already been through CFP Board’s fitness standards, and in most cases Form U4 and fingerprinting as well, and what those found is on the public record we read. What that record can’t tell us is whether you are the person described in it, which is why we ask for a photo taken at the time and a page your firm publishes about you. If that changes, because a partner requires screening or because our own risk picture changes, we’ll ask you first rather than run one on the strength of this paragraph.

9. Recording: the client’s choice, not yours

Whether a meeting is recorded is the client’s decision. They are asked when they confirm their first meeting, as a choice with nothing pre-selected, and they can change it at any time or for a single meeting. You have no control over this in either direction: you cannot switch a recording off, and you cannot ask for one the client did not choose.

We hope most clients say yes, and we tell them why. They get a written summary of the conversation. If they ever change adviser, the new one starts informed and they never repeat themselves. And if anything inappropriate ever happened, AGB has a record to review. That last reason is ours as much as theirs, and we would rather say so plainly: if a client raises a concern about the advice or about how the conversation went, we need to review what was actually said rather than weigh two recollections. It protects you too, since a recording is also the fastest way to clear a concern that turns out to be unfounded. A flagged recording is reviewed by a person at AGB, never by the adviser.

A handful of states require every person on a call to consent before it can be recorded, not just one. We apply that stricter standard to every meeting, wherever you and the client happen to be. Two reasons. Your client is often in a different state from you, so the weaker rule was never safe to rely on. And the law has only ever moved in one direction on this.

In practice that means the client chooses at their first confirmation, you agreed to it when you signed up, and every recorded call opens with a spoken notice. That notice is part of the recording, so the consent and the record are the same file. You will hear it at the start of a recorded call, the same as the client does. Before that you will not know, and you should not need to: treat every meeting as though it is recorded, because the standard does not change, only the record does.

Recordings are stored securely, access is restricted and logged, they are kept for a defined retention period rather than indefinitely, and they may be disclosed where we are legally required to disclose them.

10. Who is responsible for what

The advice is yours. You give it as an individual professional, not on behalf of Advisers Give Back or its affiliates. Neither AGB, nor your firm, nor their directors, officers, employees, agents, members or grantees takes responsibility for whether it was accurate or appropriate. The client makes their own judgment about your qualifications and whether to work with you.

You and the client each agree to indemnify, defend and hold AGB and those people harmless from any loss, damage, cost or liability arising from those services, acts or omissions. The client likewise agrees to hold you harmless for the same.

AGB carries Errors and Omissions insurance covering volunteer advisers for the advice they give through the program. The current policy is downloadable from the Settings page of the Adviser Interface, so you can read exactly what it covers and show it to your own firm’s compliance team if they ask.

11. What the client is responsible for

Their own decisions. They are under no obligation to follow any of your advice, in whole or in part. They may find that completing the process is a condition of something a sponsoring organization offers them, and reporting their plan or progress to that organization is theirs to do, not yours.

They also need to return your calls and messages. If a client goes quiet, tell us, and you can end the engagement if it comes to that.

12. Confidentiality

What a client tells you is private. You don’t share their non-public financial information with anyone without their permission, and you share the advice or the plan itself with the client only.

You may report non-confidential information about the program to a sponsoring organization: broadly what topics you’re helping with, and whether engagements are open or closed.

Keep client information inside the AGB platform rather than copying it into your own systems, and never ask for account numbers or passwords. Keep document requests to only those you need to give the advice.

It runs the other way too. Clients know you by your first name only, and they never have your contact details. Calls come through the platform, and email goes through a shared address, adviser@advisersgiveback.org, which routes each message to the adviser that client is matched with. Don’t give a client your own email, phone number or firm details. That is what keeps the boundary in clause 7 real, and it is what lets a client with a complaint be heard without you ever being personally exposed.

13. Help you can call on

The engagement is yours, but you don’t have to do all of it yourself. You can direct tasks to others at your discretion: AGB staff, allied professionals, paraplanners, or CFP candidates. Clause 12 applies to anyone you bring in.

14. If something goes wrong between you and a client

Talk to each other first. Most things end there. Anything still unresolved goes to non-binding mediation under the Commercial Mediation Rules of the American Arbitration Association. If it survives that, it goes to binding arbitration under the Securities Industry Arbitration Rules.

15. Term

This covers what’s described here and nothing more. It ends when the services are complete, or on written notice from either you or the client, except the obligation to indemnify, defend and hold harmless, which survives for the applicable statute of limitations.

16. You’re a volunteer

You volunteer as an independent professional. This creates no employment, partnership or agency with AGB. You’re not paid, you accrue no benefits, and you can’t present yourself as an employee or spokesperson or commit AGB to anything.

You can stop volunteering whenever you like, for any reason. Tell us, or do it yourself from the bottom of the Settings page in the Adviser Interface, where you can deactivate your account, which pauses everything and keeps your history so you can come back, or delete it, which removes it. We can end your participation if this agreement is breached, if verification fails or lapses, or if a conduct concern is upheld. Meetings already booked get honored or reassigned, with the client told either way.

17. If this agreement changes

If we change it materially, we’ll tell you and ask you to accept the new version before your next meeting. Previous versions and the date you accepted each one stay on your record.

18. What you can expect from us

Not contractual terms, just what we undertake to do:

• Clients screened for eligibility and prepared for the meeting.
• A brief before each one, so you’re never starting cold.
• Scheduling, reminders, follow-up and admin handled for you.
• A named person to escalate to when something goes wrong.
• Your volunteer hours recorded, and available for CFP Board reporting.
• Errors and Omissions insurance covering your volunteer work, with the current policy downloadable from Settings in the Adviser Interface.