The Secret to Lifelong Relationships with DAF Donors
Picture this: You're a donor that has given $250 through a credit card every year to your favourite charity.
Then you sell your business. Facing a large tax bill, your advisor tells you to put a chunk of your earnings in a DAF (Donor Advised Fund), so you do.
You then go to your favourite charity’s website. They have DAFs clearly listed as a way to give, so you happily start giving with your DAF. Your giving is now $5,000 a year, and you’re feeling pretty good about it!
But then 3 years later, you receive a letter in the mail from this charity. It says “we miss you, come back!”
Clearly there’s been a mistake - but how could this oversight happen? You start to wonder if that charity even cares about your $5,000…
The underlying issue here has come up for nearly every charity I’ve worked with over the past 3 years.
And it’s all in the data.
Often DAF gifts live in a foundation file. Sometimes there’s no link to the individual donor it belongs to. Sometimes it’s soft credited, but many databases don’t show soft credited gifts in reporting. That means if you pull a LYBUNT report, this DAF donor with their soft credited gifts will get pulled in.
So what’s a fundraiser to do?
In the example above, the charity cares about DAF gifts and is fundraising for them well. They might have even soft credited the gift. But there wasn't systems to prevent this donor from falling through the cracks.
So how do you fix it?
Unfortunately, you have to create work-arounds. It will look different for each system, but the goal of that work-around must be to show the DAF gift on the individual donor’s record and in reports.
That’s why I bring a data expert, Aldera Chisholm, to all my Planned Giving projects. The backbone of a solid fundraising program is good data - and we make it happen.
Because you could have the best messaging in the world, the most skilled relationship-builders, and still hurt your relationships through ineffective data and reporting.
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