Seven Ways to Fundraise from a Donor-Advised Fund

This week I spent half an hour with about 125 fundraisers, on a session hosted by Raisin, talking about donor-advised funds. The questions submitted beforehand weren't really about what a DAF is. They were about what to do about them.

So here's the practical half of that session, written down.

Start with what the money actually is

First, it's important to get a sense of the landscape. There is $17.3B sitting in 74,528 fund accounts across 205 Canadian sponsors. Every dollar of it has been donated, receipted and claimed. At law, it's no longer the donor's money to "keep" but rather they can advise on where it gets directed. Last year $3.33B went in and $2.00B came out. All of it comes from CRA T3010 filings, and we publish it free at wellfunded.io/daf-data.

The actual number is less important than the structure. A DAF isn't a new way to pay but a new structure. We think, treating it like a cheque with a different logo can be detrimental to the stewardship and fundraising process.

To start, it's important to understand that there are two main transactions and they can be years apart.

The first is the donation. A donor puts assets into a fund and gets a receipt. That usually happens because of a business sale, a block of appreciated securities, an inheritance or a tax year that needs solving.

The second is the grant. The donor recommends a charity, the sponsor approves it, and the money goes out.

The best part is that the emotional decision to part with the money has already been made by the time you make the ask. To borrow an analogy from Mike Todd over at Transform Philanthropy, it's like spending from a gift card versus a Visa. It's always more enjoyable to spend the gift card because it is like "free money" to the donor.

When you're fundraising from a traditional donor, you have to do two jobs. Convince them they'll be economically okay parting with their money, and convince them you're the right place to give it to. With a DAF, you just focus on the latter.

Once you see the two moments, the rest of this post makes sense. You don't receipt the grant, because the receipt was issued on the way in. The grant isn't tied to a tax deadline, because that pressure was on the way in too. The donor can be invisible to you, because the grant comes from the sponsor. And the decision gets shaped in conversations between the donor and the people around them, often their advisor, well before your appeal lands.

So everything below is a version of the same job: be known and be reachable before that conversation happens.

1. Mine your database for advisors

Some of the people who influence DAF gifts are already in your CRM, and you may never have talked to them about the power of being a champion.

Wealth managers, accountants and estate lawyers give to you. They come to your events. Some of them sit on your board. They're also often part of the conversation when a client sets up or funds a DAF, and when that client asks who's doing good work locally.

You have them coded as donors but they're also a referral source.

Advisors know this conversation matters, and a lot of them still don't start it. A 2026 US study by The Philanthropic Initiative found 99% of advisors say discussing philanthropy with high-net-worth clients is important, yet only 45% discuss it with most of their clients. More than a third said they don't know how to start. You can help with that.

We'd suggest running the search. Job titles, firm names in the employer field, board and committee lists. Then reach out, and be direct about it. It helps to give them talking points and an easy project they can put in front of a high-net-worth client if the opportunity comes up.

2. Say "donor-advised funds" on your website, and put a human beside it

It sounds wild, but if your ways-to-give page doesn't say donor-advised funds or DAFs, some donors may assume you don't accept them and move on. Or, it may not be that they don't believe you accept them, it's just that the process of understanding how to direct it to you is full of friction - and friction kills the moment.

We're working through roughly 600 charities to connect them with a client of ours. For too many of them, reaching an actual person takes more effort than it should.

A contact form or a general info@ address can make that harder than it needs to be. If an advisor or a DAF administrator is trying to verify something on a Thursday afternoon, a phone number and a name go a long way.

We'd suggest making three things easy to find: a direct phone number and email, your CRA registration number, and the name of the person who handles DAF gifts, even if that's your ED. If a sponsor's staff can confirm who you are and who to call in under a minute, you're easy to say yes to.

Of everything on this list, this one costs the least.

3. Get to know the sponsors that overlap with your work

You likely don't need to know all 205. It's worth knowing the few whose donors overlap with your cause and your region.

The money is concentrated. 66% of all Canadian DAF assets sit with ten sponsors. By province, it's $7.89B in Ontario, $3.63B in Quebec and $2.88B in British Columbia.

64 community foundations hold $7.06B between them, and six bank-affiliated sponsors hold $4.52B. If you work in one city, your community foundation may matter more to you than a national platform. If you work internationally, the field narrows, and it's worth knowing which sponsors are set up to grant outside Canada.

One distinction can trip people up. A community foundation often has two pockets. There's the money it grants at its own discretion, through community funds and field-of-interest funds. That's a conventional granting relationship with deadlines, criteria and an application. Then there are the donor-advised funds it administers for individual families, where the family recommends where the money goes. Same organization, two different processes. Some sponsors outside the community foundation world run charity-facing programs as well.

We'd suggest applying to the first. For the second, the rest of this list is where the work is.

A good place to start is picking five sponsors, learning who works there and introducing yourself. It's worth asking how their grant programs and donor-advised funds work, since many of them run both.

4. Ask your donors, on your forms and in your conversations

We'd suggest adding "Do you give through a donor-advised fund?" to your giving form, your event registration, your legacy conversations and your major gift discovery.

DAF donors aren't only the ultra-wealthy. Online-native platforms (for example, Charitable Impact) hold 31% of all DAF accounts in Canada and 4.9% of the money, with an average fund of about $37K. Many DAF donors likely look a lot like the donors already in your database.

5. Code DAF donors in your CRM

Because the grant legally comes from the sponsor, a DAF donor can be invisible to you unless they tell you directly or the sponsor passes their details along. How often that happens varies a great deal. In a session we ran with 60 Canadian charities, 14% said they'd received a donor email address and 14% a mailing address. Sponsors are working within what the donor authorized and what their own systems can produce, so it differs from one sponsor to the next.

That's why the path you control is worth building. We'd suggest a field in your database and a code you can segment on, so the answer from tip 4 doesn't get lost. Once it's there, you can steward a person rather than a fund name.

6. Thank the donor, through the sponsor

A DAF grant isn't receipted. The receipt was issued on the way in, possibly years ago.

What you can do is thank the person. Half the charities in that session had received a fund name, which is often enough to write something specific rather than generic. Some sponsors will forward an acknowledgement to the donor if you ask. We'd suggest writing to the donor, sending it through the sponsor, and asking what the sponsor's process is.

Call the sponsor up and ask. Don't be shy here. In our experience, most are very happy to share this information where they can, because they want a great experience for their clients too.

Don't get us wrong, we think this is an awfully manual experience and we're working to build a better one. But for now, we believe being bold and persistent is best.

7. Be visible to the intermediaries, not only the donor

The chain today runs donor, advisor, sponsor, charity, beneficiary. That can feel like a lot of layers until you remember that charities are intermediaries too. Every charity stands between a donor and the people who benefit. The layers further upstream are doing a similar job, just from a different spot in the chain.

Being visible to that chain is ordinary, unexciting work. An annual report a sponsor's staff can find without emailing you for it. Impact data that answers the obvious questions. A profile that makes it easy for someone to check you out before they raise your name.

Three things we'd avoid

1. Receipting a DAF grant. It's an easy processing mistake to make. The donation was receipted when the money went into the fund, so a second receipt against the same dollars is a CRA problem you don't want.

2. Believing a DAF sponsor can steer advised money your way. Asking staff to point a fund holder's dollars at you tends not to work. That recommendation belongs to the donor, and putting someone in the middle of it can cost you the relationship.

3. Making December your only DAF touchpoint. December is still a busy month for DAF grants, so a year-end appeal isn't wasted. But DAF grants go out all year, and the tax pressure behind traditional year-end giving sits on the contribution side, when money goes into a fund. We'd suggest staying in touch through the year so you're not only showing up at the busiest moment.

A note on restrictions

18% of the charities in that session had received any instruction on how a DAF gift should be used. If that holds more broadly, a good share of this money arrives unrestricted, which would make it some of the more flexible funding in the sector. It comes from 60 charities rather than a national study, so it's a working assumption rather than a finding, and worth checking against your own files.

It does line up with what US sponsors report. DAFgiving360 said 74% of its grants last fiscal year weren't designated for a specific purpose.

Where to start

Most of this costs nothing but attention. If you do nothing else, we'd suggest searching your database for advisors, putting donor-advised funds on your website with a phone number and a name beside it, and spending a few minutes on the DAF data working out which sponsors are near you.

Then claim your free charity profile. It takes about ten minutes, and it's one of the ways funders find you when they go looking.