A coalition of nonprofit and business groups wants thousands of Americans to join them on October 10 to liberate more of the $230 billion+ tied-up in Donor Advised Fund accounts. To that end, they’ve dubbed the 10th day of the 10th month of the year DAF Day.
A donor-advised fund (DAF) is a tax-advantaged investment account from which individuals can make donations to charities.
In the hopes of catalyzing “a single day of unprecedented generosity,” organizers encourage nonprofit organizations to create programming that will inspire supporters to give and individuals to either create and tap new DAFs – you needn’t be a tycoon to do so – or make significant contributions from existing DAFs.
The appeal seems to have made an impact – so far more than 500 nonprofits have signed on to participate in the first DAF Day, according to Mitch Stein, head of strategy at Chariot, the philanthrotech start-up leading this initiative.
Notable participants include megaplayers such as the American Heart Association, Boys & Girls Clubs of America and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and smaller organizations like Fenway Community Health Center, Orangutan Outreach and Well Aware. Twenty online fundraising platforms have also signed on.
DAF Day is the first national effort to bring together the philanthropic sector to maximize the use of DAFs. Historically DAFs have all too often sat untapped for long periods of time after being funded.
Many nonprofit professionals have wanted to tackle this challenge, but the hurdle of getting a major campaign started was often too much for any one group to handle, Stein explained. To counteract that problem, DAF Day provides nonprofits with a target date to work towards, a free downloadable toolkit, a series of webinars on running successful programs and a public relations campaign to seed support.
A successful DAF Day will also benefit Chariot because it is the creator of DAFpay, an app that enables donors to easily tap into their DAFs from the websites of nonprofit organizations. Among its current clients are the American Cancer Society, Pan-Mass Challenge and the Michael J. Fox Foundation.
Stein expects a wide variety of approaches by nonprofits to move supporters to give on DAF Day such as:
- Tapping board members to share personal stories of success they’ve enjoyed by donating through their DAFs
- Reaching out one-on-one with supporters to make them aware of the initiative – and to remind them to give on October 10
- Securing lead gifts and publicizing them in advance of and on DAF Day in ways that encourage supporters to emulate that generosity
The breast cancer charity Susan G. Komen added a way for supporters to easily tap their DAFs to all its peer-to-peer fundraising program websites (e.g. Race For The Cure) earlier this year and has enthusiastically embraced DAF Day, said Trish Davis, vice president of major gifts and planned giving.
Komen is “very optimistic” that DAFs will become a major source of donations as her organization becomes more adept at making supporters aware of the ease of making DAF donations. Early experience so far this year has shown that average donations coming from DAFs are “much larger” than credit card donations, she said.
A twenty-year veteran of supporting nonprofits as a volunteer and a professional, Davis said “this is a strategy that nonprofits must lean into.”
Organizers have not announced quantitative target for the number or amount of donations they hope to see when the first DAF Day is held on October 10, said Stein because statistics for what was given at this time last year are not readily available. “We are trying to move an historically off-line, delayed and disconnected way of giving to one that is increasingly done online,” he explained.
A better basis for comparison will be available for DAF Day 2025 because Chariot will have statistics on all the gifts that came in through DAFpay and a survey will be sent to participating nonprofits this fall to capture other DAF-related contributions, Stein said.
For an early read on what DAF Day stimulates on October 10 there will be a live tracker on www.dafday.com. “I’ll be sure to have that tab open on my computer all day,” quipped Stein.