Donor Advised Funds Series, Part 2: Breaking Up is Hard to Do...Or Is It? - Veritus Group

I wish it were true that breaking up is hard to do. But it’s not. It can be as easy as not reporting back on the impact of a 2025 gift to a donor who has supported an organization for 10 years!

What is hard to do? Building and keeping strong relationships. And with nearly 23% of all individual giving now coming through Donor Advised Funds, there is A LOT of break-up potential if we don’t get some basics right. Looking at you, Leadership and Back Office team:

#1: Train gift processors (in-house or outsourced caging operations) in tying directed gifts back to donors using a soft credit, choosing the best Donor Type for new funds, and alerting Relationship Fundraisers if a gift has come in that they are expecting.

#2: Allow gift processors the TIME they need to correctly link gifts coming from DAFs and Community Foundations (and stock gifts, while we’re at it) back to the originating donor record. DO NOT let that be a secondary clean-up task that can be weeks or months later. Bake this into the KPIs! The more effective they are here, the more effective your Relationship Fundraisers will be. And this, in turn, translates into future revenue.

#3: Create an easy way for Relationship Fundraisers to alert gift processing about expected DAF, Community Foundation, and stock gifts AND for gift processors to review it.

#4: Clean up your Donor Type and Gift Type Codes to be more effective. Stop lumping all non-individuals as Organizations or all Foundations as a single type. I have been on client calls with a fundraiser, and they have had to go down three-plus levels on a gift to learn if it was a DAF, Stock, or an IRA QCD. This information goes to strategy. Bring clarity here, and you will help everyone in the process. Yes, I know you’ll need to re-write some report queries, but that is a small lift compared to what you’ll gain from the clarity.

I wrote on the Relationship Fundraiser’s role in working better with donors using third parties for their philanthropic giving. But again, gifts via DAFs now represent 23% of all individual giving. That is a hefty percentage, and it needs to be right.

On the topic of getting Donor Type and Gift Type more refined, this will allow you to do audits quarterly and work to solve:

• Which donors with a DAF Gift Type gave last year, but not this year
• Which DAF or Community Foundation gifts were not soft credited to a donor
• Which stock gifts were not credited to a donor
• Which donors use stock to give, so you can make a plan for getting broker information to them.
• Work to match where you can, including opening the DAF records to look at scanned letters for clues

Related: If you can accomplish this in your CRM, it is helpful to have fields on the Donor’s main “page” to link the DAF Sponsor and the DAF fund name. Yes, I know this can seem redundant, but having this front and center on the donor’s record AND having it as a separate data point to export and audit can make a big difference for Relationship Fundraisers in their role. Yet again, nearly 23% of individual giving is coming from DAFs. This really matters now more than ever.

I’ll get off my soap box now. Wishing you a great start to 2026!

Diana S. Frazier

Senior Client Experience Leader