How to Add DAF Giving to Your Website

Most nonprofit websites make donor-advised fund giving harder than it needs to be. Donors who want to recommend a grant should not have to search for your EIN, navigate a drop-down menu, or call your office to confirm your legal name. Every click between intention and action is a gift you might not receive — and every obstacle signals to the donor that your organization does not understand how they give.

The donor’s expectation is frictionless. Set by Amazon, reinforced by every modern financial interface, and confirmed by the sponsor’s own streamlined grant-recommendation workflow. When a DAF donor lands on your website and hits friction, the comparison is not against other nonprofit sites. It is against every digital experience they use in the rest of their life. You lose that comparison quickly.

The minimum every nonprofit website needs.

Your main donation page must include the following, visible without scrolling past the fold on desktop and prominently placed on mobile:

• Your organization’s exact legal name as registered with the IRS
• Your EIN (Employer Identification Number)
• A single sentence explaining that donors can initiate a grant recommendation through their sponsor’s website or mobile app
• A dedicated email address or phone number for DAF-related questions
• A clear location: either in the main donation flow or a link labeled unambiguously as “Give Through Your Donor-Advised Fund”

That is the floor. It takes an hour of staff time to implement. The gifts it captures in the first fiscal year alone typically dwarf the cost of the effort by an order of magnitude. Any organization that does not meet this floor is actively leaving revenue on the table every week.

The next level — a dedicated DAF giving page.

A dedicated page at yourorganization.org/daf or yourorganization.org/give/daf is the mark of an organization that takes the vehicle seriously. It also ranks in search engines when your donors google their own question — “how do I give to [your organization] from my DAF” — and it gives your advisors, board members, and major gift officers a single link to share in follow-up emails.

The page should include:

• A one-line opener that confirms the donor is in the right place — no long explanation of what a DAF is
• Your EIN and legal name, displayed prominently (not buried in paragraph text)
• Copy-to-clipboard functionality on the EIN, if your platform supports it — small detail, real usability gain
• Direct links to the grant-recommendation portals of the largest sponsors: Fidelity Charitable, Schwab Charitable, Vanguard Charitable, Raymond James Charitable, National Philanthropic Trust, and any others that match your donor base
• A short note on faith-based and community foundation options, for donors whose sponsors do not appear in the major list
• A named human contact — development officer, director of philanthropy, chief development officer — with email and phone, for donors who want to confirm details or structure a larger gift
• Optional: a DAF widget that lets donors search for their sponsor and initiate the grant recommendation without leaving your page

DAF widgets — what they do, and when they earn their cost.

Several vendors offer embeddable widgets — Chariot, Double the Donation’s DAF Direct, and a growing field of newer entrants — that let donors select their sponsor from a dropdown and initiate the grant recommendation directly from your site. Fees, integration depth, and sponsor coverage vary significantly across vendors.

A widget is worth the integration cost when your organization receives enough DAF volume to justify the maintenance, when your donors are distributed across multiple sponsors rather than concentrated in one, and when your website platform can support the embed cleanly. For smaller organizations with most DAF grants coming from one or two sponsors, a clean page with direct sponsor links often performs as well or better — with no vendor fee and no integration debt.

Verify current capabilities, sponsor coverage, and pricing directly with the vendor before committing. This is a fast-moving category.

What your DAF page should NOT do.

Do not explain what a DAF is at length. Donors who have one already know. Donors who do not have one are not going to open one because your landing page was persuasive — they are going to open one because their financial advisor or tax preparer recommends it. Your page is not a brochure. It is an instruction manual.

Do not bury the EIN at the bottom. Do not hide it inside a PDF. Do not route donors through a contact form to receive it. The EIN is public information, required on the grant recommendation, and should be the first concrete detail on the page.

Do not send donors to your general contact page when they have a DAF-specific question. The response cycle is too long for a donor who is already in their sponsor’s portal ready to submit.

Do not make the page look like an afterthought. DAF donors are often your highest-capacity prospects, and they notice when an organization invests care in the experience. A thoughtful DAF page signals institutional maturity. A neglected one signals the opposite.

The single sentence that belongs on every nonprofit donation page.

“If you have a donor-advised fund, you can recommend a grant to [Organization] through your sponsor’s website. Our EIN is [number] and our legal name is [name].”

That is the whole thing. Simple, clear, actionable, and universally applicable. If your donation page does not contain that sentence or a close equivalent, add it today. The hour it takes pays for itself many times over, often within the same fiscal year.

A broader point on infrastructure.

Your DAF page is one component of a larger donor-facing architecture — planned giving landing pages, legacy society pages, gift-type explainers, and the navigation structure that ties them together. Organizations that treat each of these as a separate project tend to produce inconsistent experiences across the donor journey, with different tones, different branding, and different usability standards on each page. Organizations that treat them as a unified planned giving website produce a coherent donor experience — and measurably better conversion at every step.

PlannedGiving.com builds integrated planned giving websites and landing pages designed around exactly this principle: every gift vehicle covered, every donor path consistent, every page engineered to convert. If you are rebuilding or extending your donor-facing web infrastructure, that is the scope of resource to look for.