How the Survey of Donor-Advised Funds Was Conducted

The Chronicle’s eighth annual survey of donor-advised funds

is based on information provided by 102 of the nation’s gift funds, community foundations, and other nonprofit groups.

Donor-advised funds allow people to donate cash, stock, or other assets to special accounts, claim a tax deduction for the gifts, and determine how, when, and to which charities money in the account should be paid.

Assets rose by about 21 percent at the funds surveyed, growing from $15.9-billion in 2005 to $19.2-billion last year.

Assets in donor-advised accounts declined at 17 of the groups that responded to the survey — and among those, only six reported a loss in the number of accounts they held.

The organizations in the survey awarded a total of $3.5-billion in grants in 2006 from their donor-advised fund accounts — an increase of nearly 18 percent.

The figures in the survey were based on data provided by 20 commercial investment companies, 38 community foundations, 11 colleges and universities, 10 Jewish federations, and 23 other groups, such as religious, international, or social-service charities.

All organizations known by The Chronicle to offer donor-advised funds were included in the survey, except for the community foundations, which were among the 50 such groups that raised the most money in 2006, based on an annual study by the Columbus Foundation, in Ohio.

Accounts Increase

Americans continue to create more donor-advised accounts each year, The Chronicle found.

The number of funds in operation at organizations in the survey rose by more than 11 percent from 2005 to 2006, topping 100,000 accounts last year at the 98 groups that provided figures for both years.

Thirteen organizations said the number of accounts they oversee had dropped; the total number of funds those groups lost was 313.

One organization in the survey, Domini Global Giving Fund, in New York, operated only for part of one year, and in August began to restructure due to new rules included in the Pension Protection Act of 2006.

That legislation also affected a handful of other organizations in this survey. The assets of Lutheran Community Foundation, in Minneapolis, for example, grew substantially because of a change in how the law defines funds. The law broadened the definition of donor-advised funds to include donor-designated funds, which the group had previously not considered part of its donor-advised fund assets.

Most respondents, however, said the new law did not affect the data they provided for this year’s survey.

Other organizations in the survey were unable to provide comprehensive figures for both 2005 and 2006. For instance, the Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, reported that while it offers a donor-advised fund to its contributors, the arrangement has not been used yet.

The survey of donor-advised funds was compiled by Noelle Barton and Sam Kean, with assistance from Maria Di Mento and Heather Joslyn.