Section 4 of 14 · Running a DAF Program
The donors are already there. The grants have already been made.
What's missing is the process to catch them.
This is the section that does not exist elsewhere in practical form. Most development shops have DAF holders they have never identified — sometimes dozens of them, sometimes hundreds — and they are leaving significant grant potential on the table as a direct result. This is not a theoretical problem. It is the single most correctable gap in most planned giving and major gift programs today.
Identification is a discipline, not a one-time project. The donors are already in your database. The grants have already been made. The signals have already been sent. What is missing is the process to catch them.
Pull every gift that arrived by check, EFT, or electronic grant platform in the last five years where the legal donor of record is a DAF sponsor. Start with the major commercial and faith-based sponsors, and expand to community foundations and emerging platforms. Common entries on your gift records will appear under names like:
Every one of these is a DAF grant. The donor behind it is already in your database, or should be. Cross-reference the mailing address on the grant letter — and any advisor name on the transmittal — against your donor records. You will find matches more often than you expect. The donor is rarely anonymous in the true sense. The donor is hiding in plain sight inside your own CRM.
DAF grant letters typically include the advisor’s name, sometimes their address, occasionally a dedication or purpose note, and sometimes a reference to a specific program or appeal. This is your entry point. A donor who has already recommended a grant to your organization has self-identified as a prospect. They just have not heard from you in a way that acknowledges how they actually give.
Build a habit: every grant letter gets read by a human before it gets filed. Not scanned. Read. The details matter — a note that says “in honor of my mother” or “for the scholarship fund” or “anonymous to all but your executive director” is cultivation intelligence you will never recover if it gets routed into a shoebox.
A donor who gave $25,000 in one year, nothing for two years, then $40,000 the next is not an unreliable donor. They may be a DAF holder who funds during high-income years and grants strategically during others. A donor who gives heavily every other year is almost certainly bunching contributions for tax reasons and likely using a DAF to hold the intervening capital. A donor whose giving pattern looks erratic on a calendar-year view often looks perfectly rational on a three- to five-year view.
Do not treat these donors as lapsed. Treat them as major prospects between gifts. The cultivation work you do in their quiet years is what determines whether their next grant comes to you or to someone else.
Donors with DAFs reveal them without realizing it. Train your major gift officers, planned giving staff, and executive leadership to listen for:
Any of these is an invitation to ask one question: “Do you have a donor-advised fund?” Asked calmly and conversationally, almost every donor answers directly. Then follow up with: “Would it help if I sent you our EIN and legal name so you have it ready when you recommend the grant?” That second question converts recognition into action.
Most major screening vendors now include DAF indicators. Ask your vendor specifically what signals their model uses to flag DAF behavior — tax filings, public grant databases, advisor relationships, contribution patterns — and how confident they are in each signal. The quality varies significantly across vendors. A donor who does not screen as a DAF holder may still have one. A donor who does screen as a DAF holder may have closed the account. Screening narrows the field. It does not finish the work.
Once identified, DAF holders should be coded separately from standard major donors. Every dimension of their relationship differs: cultivation timeline, solicitation language, acknowledgment process, stewardship cadence, and planned giving conversation. A dedicated DAF segment in your database lets you track grant history, sponsor relationships, processing timelines, successor advisor structure, and successor beneficiary status in one place.
At minimum, capture:
That is the spine of a real DAF program. Most organizations do not have it.
Most development shops have no idea how many DAF holders sit inside their own database. Run the analysis, establish a baseline, and set a target for new identifications each quarter or year. Track it the way you track new major gift prospects qualified. This is prospecting discipline, not a one-time exercise — and like any prospecting discipline, what gets measured gets done.
A realistic starting target for most organizations: identify every DAF grant received in the last three years, match it to a donor record, and code the donor record accordingly. That single exercise, done thoroughly, typically surfaces more cultivation opportunity than any other database project a development shop can undertake.