When you receive a gift, check if information is hidden in accompanying material. There’s no single method for how sponsors of donor-advised funds pass along donations, and that can cause confusion. When funds are simply transferred electronically to a charity’s bank account, groups may not think to ask the bank whether there’s accompanying information about the donor, says Melissa Bank Stepno, CEO and president of the Helen Brown Group, a prospect research consultancy with a searchable database of DAF sponsors. “The information that would allow an organization to steward a donor is simply not passed along as it goes downstream. It’s difficult to find.”
It’s key to train data-entry and gift-processing staff where to look for donor data, Stepno says. “They are much more important to our organizations than we give them credit for,” she adds.
Don’t assume donors want to keep their identity from you. As DAF account holders make gifts online through their accounts, the digital interface often asks if the donation should be anonymous, says Dan Heist, a professor at Brigham Young University and co-director of the DAF Research Collaborative. “Sometimes donors are confused about what anonymous means. They think that when they click ‘anonymous,’ the charity will still get their name and address, but the charity just won’t publicize it.”
Making that distinction clear will be included in a fundraisers’ “wish list” for DAF sponsors that the collaborative is assembling, Heist says.
The Boys & Girls Club of Greater St. Louis occasionally asks DAF sponsors to check whether donors intended to withhold their names. “A lot of [sponsors] have come back to us with, ‘They said they’ll reach out to you,’” says Jesse Winters, vice president of resource development. “And most of the time, they have reached out to us.”
Don’t give up if the DAF gift comes from an unfamiliar fund. The database manager at the St. Louis Boys & Girls Club does a bit of online sleuthing to try to connect the name to an individual, family, or corporation. “We’re taking some additional steps to try to figure out who that is,” Winters says. “More and more, we’re finding that if they give us the fund name, we can usually track it down.”
The organization assures donors it has found that their name won’t be made public. The message, according to Winters: You invested in us, and you’re trusting us with your money. So we want to make sure that you know what’s happening with that money.
Ask the DAF sponsor to forward your thank-you note to the donor. “Don’t just sit there and kick the desk,” says Ken Nopar, senior philanthropic adviser at the American Endowment Foundation, whose DAF funds have about $7 billion in assets. Not all sponsors will serve as messengers, but AEF and many community foundations and smaller sponsors will, Nopar says.
Consider using a DAF payment processor. One example: DAFpay, launched last year by the start-up Chariot, is embedded on the donation pages of organizations including the American Cancer Society, Pan-Mass Challenge, and PETA. Donors can make gifts directly on the page without visiting their DAF account, and nonprofits can customize the donation form to collect any data.
“I would say essential information is shared in more than 95 percent of our transactions — typically the first name, last name, and the email address,” says Chariot co-founder Drew Schneider. “That’s enough for the nonprofit to put that donor in their CRM and contact them, thank them.”
Pan-Mass Challenge, a bike-a-thon that supports the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, switched to using DAFpay from DAF Direct, a widget developed by Fidelity Charitable, the largest DAF sponsor. Donors can make gifts from a wider range of sponsors through DAFpay, CFO Michelle Sommer said in an email. “We also appreciate that DAFpay provides the donor email so we are now able to send an acknowledgment via email and our riders can thank their DAF donor via email.”
Safeguard the identity of anonymous donors within your organization. The ACLU recently improved the security of the donor database that it shares with its affiliates. “We have taken more care with anonymous donors to create a more secure record internally so that we reduce the risk of that donor’s name getting known by staff as well,” says chief development officer Mark Wier.
Assume anonymous donors are watching your organization. It’s typically difficult to know whether an anonymous donor is making a gift in response to a particular message or communications channel — social media, email, annual report, and so on. As a result, you have to double your efforts to hit the mark on all your communications, says Tyler Kalogeros-Treschuk, director of individual giving for the Center for Reproductive Rights.
“Absent the ability to send a personalized thank-you note or to follow up with a call, we really have to make sure that our messaging is on point, that we’re continuing to elevate the programmatic work,” Kalogeros-Treschuk says. “We believe that’s fundamentally what’s driving people.”
