Florida charity withdrawal and clean close-out

Inventory every Florida-facing appeal before selecting a cessation date: donation pages, recurring gifts, direct mail, email segmentation, text campaigns, events, peer-to-peer pages, grant requests, professional solicitors, commercial co-ventures, and charitable sales promotions. Reconcile the proposed date to the CRM, payment processor, bank deposits, campaign contracts, and website changes.

If gifts arrive after the chosen date, determine whether the appeal was still active, the gift was recurring, or the donor acted without a current solicitation. Preserve the facts. Florida requires notice of the date solicitation activities ceased, so the organization should not certify a date contradicted by its own campaign records.

Section 496.405 of the 2026 Florida Statutes says a registered charitable organization or sponsor that ends solicitation activities or participation in charitable sales promotions in the state must immediately notify FDACS in writing of the date those activities ceased. Use the organization’s exact legal name, Florida registration number, EIN, responsible contact, and documented stop date, and follow the Division’s current delivery instructions.

Ask FDACS how any open renewal, annual financial report, deficiency, fee, or record-specific item should be handled. Save the signed notice, delivery evidence, agency response, and a dated Check-A-Charity result. A lapsed registration or an omitted renewal is not the same as an accepted close-out notice.

Florida also requires specified changes to registration information to be reported on the prescribed material-change form within the applicable period. The current FDACS form addresses changes in information submitted with the initial or last renewal filing. A name, address, control-person, tax, legal-status, or other reportable change may need separate treatment even when the organization is also planning to end solicitation.

Do not use a change form as an unexplained substitute for the statutory written cessation notice. Build a transaction list showing which facts changed, when they changed, which form or notice addresses each fact, and what FDACS accepted.

Terminate or amend Florida professional-solicitor, fundraising-consultant, and sales-promotion arrangements according to their contracts and state requirements. Remove the Florida solicitation disclosure from pages only after the organization has confirmed that covered solicitation ended; do not erase historical campaign evidence needed for reporting or review.

Reconcile the final Florida-related contributions and expenses to the organization’s federal return or the applicable FDACS financial report. Preserve board oversight records, conflict-of-interest certifications, contracts, campaign reports, contribution records, and required retention material. Ending solicitation does not erase duties tied to the period when the campaign was active.

A charity may stop Florida solicitation while continuing its legal entity and programs elsewhere. Conversely, dissolving or withdrawing a corporation through Florida’s Division of Corporations does not by itself notify FDACS that solicitation ended. Define whether the entity will continue, whether Florida authority should be withdrawn, and whether Florida tax, employment, local, grant, or contract accounts remain.

If the organization is dissolving or transferring charitable assets, obtain organization-specific legal and tax advice for governing documents, restrictions, liabilities, recipients, and final returns. A clean file keeps the FDACS cessation response, entity record, asset support, tax work, campaign evidence, and record-custody plan as separate but coordinated proof.