Tax Changes Drove a DAF Boom. Here’s How to Unlock More Giving.

This year may be the ideal time to ramp up your strategy to secure gifts from donor-advised funds.

Assets held in donor-advised funds topped $326 billion at the end of 2024 — a figure that doesn’t yet reflect a surge in late‑2025 contributions that were propelled by stock‑market gains and looming tax changes.

Across the board, institutions that sponsor DAFs — like the charitable arms of investment firms, community foundations, and many other organizations — urged donors to open or add to their accounts and maximize their charitable deductions before the new tax law went into effect on January 1. That means DAFs have never before been so flush with cash, just as many nonprofits are looking for new funding sources.

DAFs often serve as rainy-day funds, says Mitch Stein, head of strategy at Chariot, which makes DAF gift-processing software. “Because there’s typically a lot of need when there is any kind of economic downturn,” and because the money is already earmarked for charity, “people are motivated to put that money to work,” he says. 

We asked Stein and several other experts in capturing donations from DAF donors to share advice on how to unlock more giving. Here are their top tips.

Conduct a wealth screening to identify likely DAF holders.

Giving through a DAF can be more attractive to donors than other giving vehicles because the money must be given to charity. 

“It’s as if they have an Amex in their pocket that’s prepaid for $10,000 and they have to spend it,” says Craig Shelley, CEO of the fundraising consulting firm Schultz & Williams. It’s money they have already set aside, which makes it much easier to get them to give it, he adds.

It’s as if they have an Amex in their pocket that’s prepaid for $10,000 and they have to spend it.

A wealth screening may reveal the donors in your database who might already have one, he says. There are a variety of wealth-analysis products on the market, including KindSight’s iWave, DonorAtlas, DonorSearch, and Windfall for Nonprofit.

If you are raising money from high-net-worth individuals, it is likely that more of them have DAFs than don’t, Shelley says. “If they don’t have a family foundation, you can almost assume they have a DAF.”

Once you’ve identified your likely DAF holders, you can better target your messaging to them and consistently include DAFs as a giving option. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel — your outreach can mimic what you’re already saying to your major donors.

“Segment your donors based on their perceived capacity,” Shelley recommends. “If someone’s only giving you $500 but they could give you $5 million, that’s a person who should get a different kind of messaging.”

Just be prepared that you may have to do some education. Some people may not realize they have a DAF, but “they know they have some fund that their financial adviser told them to set up for charitable giving,” he says. 

Invest in staff and technology to maximize results.

Community foundations have become popular with DAF donors who want to support local charities.

When Jocelynne Rainey took over in 2021 as president and CEO of Brooklyn Org, then known as the Brooklyn Community Foundation, there were just two staff members focusing on DAFs: the chief operating officer and a donor-services manager.

“One of the things that I recognized when I first got here is that we needed more administrative help across the board in order to really be able to expand our work,” Rainey says.

To drive that growth, she created a new vice-president role and also hired an administrator and a compliance manager.

This four-person department, now led by the vice president of philanthropic initiatives instead of the COO, has boosted the community foundation’s DAF assets from $100 million to $150 million in just five years.

Brooklyn Org uses CommunitySuite to track donations and streamline giving for donors: “We’re able to have a more user-friendly portal for our donor-advised fund holders and make sure that they’re able to get the support they need,” says Rainey.

On the backend, she likes that the software also automates financial reporting and acknowledgment letters — “a lot of the things we were doing by hand” previously.

Recognize when not to chase DAF donors.

If your charity is a small shop with just one or two fundraisers, spending a lot of time to cultivate new DAF donors may not be the best use of your limited resources, advises Philip Gabel, a researcher who runs the weekly online newsletter Nonprofit Management Navigator.

If your charity is a small shop with just one or two fundraisers, spending a lot of time to cultivate new DAF donors may not be the best use of your limited resources.

“A smaller organization would have to load these related expenses onto their current staff with no real guarantee of any success,” he says. It can be particularly difficult to get the attention of the biggest national providers of DAFs, he adds, so it’s best left to larger organizations that can dedicate development staff to making inroads at places like Fidelity Charitable or Charles Schwab’s DAFgiving360.

However, DAF donors can still be found close to home. If you’re a small nonprofit, stick to local DAF sponsors like community foundations, Gabel says: “That’s really where your bread and butter is.”

Community foundations can serve as matchmakers.

Building relationships with community foundations is an important way to meet DAF donors in your area. Nationwide, community foundations hold more than $52 billion in DAF accounts, standing at the ready to help local charities. 

As Rainey of Brooklyn Org puts it, “Our approach is very much ‘Brooklyn back to Brooklyn, neighbors supporting neighbors.’”

She says donors who hold DAFs at community organizations usually have a deep curiosity about what is going on locally, and she’s happy to play matchmaker for them: “We approach it from the perspective of, ‘Hey, I see that you’ve been giving to this education program. I would love to introduce you to some of the programming that’s happening in Brooklyn.” 

I’m always thinking about how to introduce a donor-advised fund holder to a nonprofit.

Brooklyn Org regularly brings together donors to hear nonprofit leaders speak about their work in areas like food assistance or affordable housing. After one recent briefing, Rainey, says two Brooklyn youth-development organizations — one for girls and one for boys — walked away with new commitments from DAF donors.

To create that kind of opportunity to connect with donors, most community foundations would welcome an unsolicited letter of interest from a local nonprofit leader, Rainey says: “I’m always thinking about how to introduce a donor-advised fund holder to a nonprofit, and where can we and how can we support them.”

Plan ahead for DAF Day 2026.

A new giving day on the fundraising calendar has gained traction quickly — and even though it was created by a software company, nonprofits say it’s delivering real results.

The brainchild of Chariot, DAF Day began in October 2024 as a way to activate donors and build excitement about giving to charities through DAFpay, its gift-processing widget, as year-end fundraising heats up. Interest grew exponentially in its second year, with 4,400 nonprofits and more than 30 DAF sponsors joining the 2025 effort.

After the most recent event on October 9, Chariot introduced its DAF Day Awards to showcase creative campaigns that raised the most money online.

Among the honorees were the Public Theater’s interactive quiz about donor-advised funds, Planned PEThood of Georgia’s social-media video of a cat teaching viewers about DAFs, and the Michael J. Fox Foundation’s downloadable guide for donors.

This year’s DAF Day will be on October 8. If your organization plans to participate, tie the day into your broader DAF marketing over the next few months, Stein recommends.

“You want to start auditing your communications and your website for mentioning donor-advised funds, for how you steward and follow up with donors,” he says. “Get those in order so that you can really knock it out of the park on DAF Day.”