Even as donor-advised fund (DAF) giving grows exponentially across all fundraising channels, many nonprofits still don’t have a holistic and proactive approach to DAF Fundraising. Without full alignment across the team, prime opportunities get missed to capture more DAF giving and better steward DAF donors. The key to effectively moving from a passive to active DAF strategy is to have an effective, empowered DAF champion. These leaders can come from a wide-range of roles and are critical to establishing a collaborative plan.
In this session, you’ll learn the inspiring story of how one DAF champion turned the challenges around DAFs into a powerful playbook for internal collaboration. Unlocking DAF giving's full impact requires breaking down silos and creating shared ownership across fundraising efforts.
At Blood Cancer United, Michael Crisona, the Senior Vice President of Advancement, led a transformative effort to better incorporate DAF giving across the organization. Historically, the responsibility for DAF fundraising sat solely within Advancement, but he saw opportunity to spur DAF giving in their peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns, which fuel their individual giving pipeline.
To close the gap, Michael brought together champions from across departments to build shared DAF literacy and a single process for tracking, coding and stewarding DAF gifts. They hosted cross-departmental briefings to explain how DAFs work, what to look for, and how to have donor conversations that included DAFs as giving options.
Once teams were aligned, Blood Cancer United added DAF giving options and messaging across most of their donor-facing experiences. The results: over $3.4 million in DAF gifts from more than 2.5k donors in less than a year, with 95% of digital DAF gifts being made in peer-to-peer forms. The change has brought critical revenue to events around the country and built a robust pipeline of major and planned giving prospects to cultivate.
Learning Objectives:
A roadmap to internal collaboration that can unlock DAF giving potential by aligning every department on DAF fundraising best practices.
Real world examples of how to “sell” the importance of DAFs to everyone from junior teammates to executive leadership in DAF strategy planning and execution.
An understanding of the most common obstacles or pitfalls of this work and how leaders are overcoming them to find DAF fundraising success.
