Fundraising Report: DAF Assets Reached $327 Billion

June 17, 2026

By: Diana Miller

Partner, Assurance

“DAFs aren’t just changing how donors give—they’re changing how nonprofits need to fundraise.”

-Diana Miller

The 2026 DAF Fundraising Report, a 54-page study by agencies Chariot and K2D Strategies, quantifies the impact of intentional DAF strategy. Among nonprofit participants in the study, median DAF revenue growth from 2021 to 2025 was 75%. Median non-DAF revenue growth over the same period was 9%.

That is not a rounding difference. It reflects a structural shift in how major donors are moving money, and it has direct implications for how development teams should be allocating attention and channeling spend.

The report also pushes back on a common concern in the sector. Nearly half of existing donors who switched to giving via DAF more than doubled their annual giving, according to the authors. The fear that DAF adoption cannibalizes direct giving is not supported by the data.

Most DAF Gifts Are Smaller Than Fundraisers Assume

One of the report’s more counterintuitive findings: two-thirds of DAF gifts come in under $1,000. That sits below the threshold most organizations use to classify mid and major gifts, which means DAF solicitation has historically been treated as a major gifts function, even though the volume actually lives in the mass market.

Karin Kirchoff, founder and president of K2D Strategies and a co-author of the report, described this as one of the most significant data points in this year’s findings. The implication is direct: DAF messaging belongs in mail, email, and SMS campaigns, not only in major donor conversations.

The Data Infrastructure Problem Holding Nonprofits Back

The report identifies five operational gaps that prevent nonprofits from managing DAF revenue effectively:

Limited donor data on arrival: Most DAF gifts arrive with only a fund name, rarely an email or phone number, making donor identification and relationship continuity difficult.
No documented business rules: Few organizations have formalized how DAF gifts are received, recorded, or assigned, and DAF sponsors send gifts in inconsistent formats.
Manual entry risk: Most DAF contributions arrive as checks or bank transfers without source codes, requiring manual entry that introduces meaningful error rates.
Platform limitations: Most fundraising databases were built before DAF giving reached its current scale and lack the native fields required for proper DAF tracking.
Siloed ownership: DAF management lands in different departments across different organizations, from major gifts to planned giving to finance, with no consistent process or accountable owner.

Any one of these gaps degrades the quality of DAF donor data. All five together mean organizations are regularly misattributing gifts, losing donor visibility, and missing re-solicitation opportunities on one of their fastest-growing revenue channels.

What the Organizations Getting It Right Are Doing Differently

The International Rescue Committee is cited in the report as an example of deliberate DAF strategy at scale. The IRC’s approach focuses on two things: cross-departmental ownership rather than siloed DAF management within one team, and systematic donor education across every channel.

The tactical recommendations from the report are specific. Fundraisers should include DAF as an explicit giving option on reply devices and donation forms, add QR codes or URLs linking directly to a DAF giving page, and mention DAF eligibility consistently across email, direct mail, SMS, and telemarketing. The goal is to create what the authors call a DAF “echo chamber” for existing donors and look-alike audiences.

Timing matters less than most fundraisers expect. DAF grants are distributed fairly evenly throughout the year because grantmaking from a DAF is not driven by tax deadlines the way direct charitable contributions are. There is still a Q4 spike, but January is also elevated, partly because December gifts process into the new year, and partly because donors who funded accounts in December are primed to grant in January.

The Finance Implications Nonprofit Leaders Should Not Miss

For CFOs and controllers managing nonprofit financials, DAF revenue growth at this scale has accounting and forecasting consequences. DAF grants are not pledge-based, they do not follow predictable timing, and they often arrive without the donor identification needed to match against a giving history. That makes revenue recognition and donor relationship tracking more complex than a standard gift-processing workflow can handle.

Organizations seeing meaningful DAF volume should review whether their chart of accounts, gift-processing procedures, and fundraising platform configuration are built to handle it, or whether they are managing a growing revenue stream through workarounds.

Wiss works with nonprofits on the financial infrastructure side of fundraising complexity, including revenue recognition, gift accounting, and the audit implications of large or irregular contributions. If your DAF volume has grown faster than your accounting systems have adapted, that gap is worth closing before your next audit cycle.