Unlocking Donor Growth: Insights on Donor Advised Funds Giving Patterns

It’s Research Roundup week on my website (here are the previous posts, a leadership transition case study and a check-in on arts audience sentiment around DEI) and today’s research is about how donors give through their donor advised funds (DAFs). I’m writing a book about building high-functioning fundraising operations to drive individual giving, so DAFs are an important part of how an organization plans their individual giving strategies.

Chariot is a payment system for DAFs, so they are in a unique position to gather data and produce a report on donor giving patterns from DAFs since they are so close to the data. Their 2024 DAF Fundraising Report: The Inagural Benchmark Study on Nonprofit Fundraising from Donor Advised Funds offers some nice insight into DAF giving from analyzing five years of giving from 20 large nonprofits. It’s a very large study, analyzing over 90 million donations from 34 million donors totaling about $13 billion. The report considers only gifts below $25,000, which makes it especially relevant for understanding the mid-level and small gift donors nonprofits often overlook but urgently need to prioritize.

The study is valuable – otherwise I wouldn’t be sharing it – but it’s worth remembering that it’s in Chariot’s interest to drive more giving through DAFs and position themselves as a useful technology, so it’s bound to be bullish on getting nonprofits to try to boost DAF giving. That said, here are some takeaways that jumped out to me.

Addition on July 30, 2025: Here’s a roundup on this same report by Candid, the organization that combined GuideStar and Foundation Center to provide data and information about the U.S. nonprofit sector.

DAF donors are the kind of donors nonprofits need

• DAF donors give more than non-DAF donors. DAF donors give an average gift of 18-20 times larger than non-DAF donors and median gifts are 4-5 times larger.

• 30% of DAF donors give more than once in a year as compared to 25% of non-DAF donors. That’s a great sign because giving multiple times in a year is an indicator that the donor is engaged, interested, and more likely to continue giving in future years. Which brings us to the next point…

• Year-to-year retention rates for DAF donors is higher. Retention rate is a major focus of fundraisers because it’s cheaper and easier to keep the same donors giving than to go out and find new donors all the time. Not to mention, the longer a person gives the more likely that their donations will increase over time, making them increasingly helpful to the organization. The Chariot report shows that DAF donors are retained at a range of 22% to 8% higher than non-DAF donors. But the 22% difference was in 2020 and the 8% rate was in 2023, so the difference has been shrinking over these years. That might reflect a post-COVID donor reset, where some emergency donors didn’t continue giving long-term, which is typical after a crisis.

• Donations from DAFs are more spread throughout the year than other donations, which are clustered at the nail-biting end of the calendar year related to holiday giving and the close of the tax year for individuals. For DAF donors, there’s a little spike in March and April, which may be related to making charitable donations being top of mind as they prepare their tax returns for the April 15 filing deadline in the United States.

DAF donors also give through regular means

That higher engagement shows up in another way: 21% of DAF donors continue to give through other channels in addition to their DAFs. They’re also writing checks, making credit card donations, or buying event tickets in addition to their DAF donations. Nonprofits should take from this that they should continue to extend invitations and send multiple solicitations to DAF donors to maximize their engagement and giving.

The DAF donor pool is growing, where the non-DAF donor pool is shrinking

One of the main causes for hand-wringing in the nonprofit sector for the past several years is the “shrinking donor pool”. While overall giving has continued to grow (see my post on the Giving USA 2024 report that showed that giving outpaced inflation for the first time in three years), the number of donors has been shrinking. That means that fewer donors are giving higher amounts. While people giving larger donations is a good thing, it’s not good that fewer people in the United States are giving over all.

The Chariot report separates DAF donors from other donors, revealing DAF donors are moving in the other way from the shrinking trend. The number of DAF donors grew from between 15,000 and 18,000 in 2019 (I’m estimating from a bar chart – Exhibit 12 for those of you following along with the report) to more than 30,000 in 2023.

Takeaways and Caveats

One caution as I conclude this summary. Remember basic data analysis: the extent to which these donor patterns are related to DAF as a giving channel are all CORRELATIONS, not causation. This study does not get into why DAF donors have such different patterns than donors that give through other means. Further research would be needed to tease out the extent to which these results just show self-selection bias (donors that are more likely to give more just happen to choose DAFs as their giving channel, for example) or whether there’s something about DAFs that actually drives this donor behavior.

However, for a nonprofit, I don’t know that it matters much at this stage. Nonprofits should be making it as easy as possible for as many donors to give, and DAFs are an important channel. Not putting the time into setting up your ability to accept donations through DAFs means you’re missing out.

These results, combined with other research that the rate of giving from DAFs is increasing (meaning that less money is just going into DAFs and sitting there) has lessened my worries that DAFs are diverting money that would otherwise go straight to charities.

DAFs may not be the silver bullet for reversing the sector’s donor decline, but this research makes one thing clear: they’re a fast-growing, high-impact giving channel nonprofits can’t afford to ignore. Yes, correlation isn’t causation—but when the donor pool is shrinking and retention is everything, the smart move is to meet donors where they are. If that’s a DAF, then your systems—and your strategy—need to be ready.