Donor-advised fund
An account at a sponsoring charity from which a donor recommends grants. The sponsor is the legal grantmaker; the donor decides in practice. There is no application process and no published guideline, because the fund is not a programme.
Part of the GrantTrove grant funding glossary — one entry for every field the catalogue stores.
Also called DAF
In detail
Grants arrive from the sponsor’s name rather than the donor’s, which is why a recipient can receive money from a large national sponsor and have no idea who chose them.
The money is a substantial and growing share of private giving, and it is almost completely invisible to prospecting: nothing is published in advance and nothing is competed.
Against a private foundation
A private foundation is its own legal entity, files its own return, and has a payout requirement. A donor-advised fund is an account inside somebody else’s charity, with no separate filing and no payout requirement of its own. Our funder records describe entities that publish; a fund inside a sponsor is not one, and no record here represents one.
How GrantTrove stores it
- We hold funders that publish and opportunities that have a source URL. A donor-advised fund has neither, so it is absent by rule rather than by oversight.
- The data sources page states which feeds are connected, so the boundary of coverage is published rather than inferred from what is missing.
Common questions
Can I apply to a donor-advised fund?
No. There is no application. Cultivating the donor is the only route, and that is relationship work rather than data work.
Who shows as the funder on a DAF grant?
The sponsoring charity, unless the donor chooses to be named.
Why are none listed here?
Because nothing about them is published in advance, and every record here carries a source link.