DAF Strategy Report for 2026: How Nonprofits Are Connecting With A Growing Audience

In 2025, more and more nonprofits turned their attention to their Donor Advised Fund (DAF) audience. Supported by financial advisors, DAF has become a popular avenue for giving among donors because it’s easier and more convenient, and comes with added tax benefits.

Reports from the past year also showed an incredible amount of potential in DAF giving for nonprofits. Earlier last year, nonprofit conversations buzzed around these latest findings:

There is at least $54.77 billion in grants made by DAFs in a year.

There is $251 billion sitting in DAFs that have to be distributed to nonprofits.

And at year-end, The Chronicle of Philanthropy reported a spike in DAF giving over 2024, with dozens of DAF sponsors seeing record contributions and grant volume in December.

With so much incentive for both nonprofits and donor audiences, how is your nonprofit building a strategy for engaging DAF donors? Whether you’re already messaging this audience with intention or you’re ready to get started, what’s clear is that we’re in a moment of possibility. This report is here to look back at the traction nonprofits have already gained in educating their audiences around DAF giving. Looking back on the strategies that helped nonprofits grow their DAF donations in 2025, we’re highlighting how these approaches can inform your planning for 2026.

Read on to learn how often nonprofits are messaging their DAF donors, cost-effective strategies for engaging this audience in the mail, and how to leverage key moments to drive awareness and boost DAF giving:

1. Cadence is on the rise. Nonprofits are sending more messaging around DAF giving to build awareness and prime donors for key giving moments.

Across our nonprofit partners, we’re seeing many email programs begin to dedicate quarterly messages educating supporters about the benefits of DAF giving. These campaigns are strongest when they include dynamic visual content, and often suggest leveraging a DAF alongside a few other ways to give, such as recurring giving, employee matches, and planned giving. As always, finding ways to remind folks of the impact that these donations have on your mission and work is a powerful way to add context to your appeal.

2. The more you know: Organizations are learning about their DAF audiences and testing into cost-effective ways to engage them directly.

When it comes to tailoring content to your audiences, it’s a matter of finding the sweet spot between keeping yourself in a donor’s surround sound, understanding their motivations and affinities, and personalizing content that will inspire them to give more and deepen their relationship with your organization at the same time. The key to building a strategy that aligns all these elements is in a close look at your data:

CASE STUDY
For our partners at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, we uncovered a critical insight in their analytics: The majority of their DAF donors prefer to give exclusively through their DAFs and are less responsive to traditional direct donation appeals. We worked with their team to leverage this data point strategically, transforming their approach across offline campaigns. Rather than continue to solicit gifts outside of their preferred giving method, we tailored their creative to explicitly recognize and acknowledge DAF donors, reinforcing that we understand and value how they choose to give.

Aligning outreach strategy with data-informed insights in donor behavior, we created a more relevant, respectful, and effective engagement strategy – and in the two months we tested this campaign, we saw a 47% YOY increase in DAF giving.

3. Try new targeting and awareness campaigns. Programs are testing awareness campaigns with digital ads to bring in first-time DAF donors.

Finding and connecting with new DAF donors is a high-potential avenue for growth – bringing donors into your audience with the propensity to give at higher levels for the long term. In 2025, we saw some of our partners test digital advertising campaigns to educate a targeted audience about opening a DAF and encouraging them to donate to their program through it.

We helped our partners at Human Rights Watch test an advertising campaign on Facebook, retargeting recent DAF page visitors. While direct attribution is tricky because DAF donations cannot be tracked back to a source, we can watch link clicks in our advertising campaigns and watch for growth in DAF giving overall. In the three months this test campaign ran, we saw unsolicited DAF donations increase 17% – and DAF revenue from first-time donors saw a major increase.

4. Go big on DAF Day. Nonprofits are raising awareness sooner, and across more channels, for this campaign.

New on the scene as a dedicated giving day, DAF Day began in 2024 as an opportunity for nonprofits to raise awareness about this growing avenue for giving. In 2025, it grew dramatically in popularity, with more nonprofits adding dedicated messages to their calendar and adding DAF giving fields to their online donation pages.

Here are a few ways we saw our nonprofit partners building effective strategies to leverage DAF Day in their fundraising:

Start early with preview messages to prime supporters for DAF Day.

Just like the other giving days on your calendar, from Giving Tuesday to mission-specific holidays, preview messaging can be an effective way to prepare supporters to receive your appeals on DAF Day. In the graphic below from our partners at San Francisco-Marin Food Bank, a dynamic image incorporating movement to make DAF Day stand out on the calendar was a part of a preview that received a 2025 DAF Day Award from Chariot for “Most Compelling Email.”

Build awareness with language that defines DAFs and describes how they make charitable giving convenient.

As a dedicated giving day primarily aimed at driving awareness for donors of DAF giving, messaging in these campaigns will look a bit different than typical appeals in certain ways – prioritizing informational language and taking the time to define and describe DAF giving for audiences who are unfamiliar with the term.

Here’s how our partners at Massachusetts General Hospital made their language around DAF giving clear, informative, and accessible:

Connect DAF gifts to the tangible impact they have on your program.

In competitive giving landscapes like we’ve seen this past year, building trust by focusing appeals on the real-life impact a donor’s gift can make is driving powerful results. This messaging is important across audiences, and in 2025, we saw DAF Day appeals like those from our partners at Project HOPE spotlight the powerful impact of a DAF donor’s contribution:

5. Plan to spend time on your DAF audience at year-end. Inform, incentivize, and make DAF giving accessible.

Given the tax benefits of DAF giving, it’s no surprise that this donation avenue is at its highest during the end-of-year season. So how can nonprofits lean into that natural momentum to maximize their revenue from DAF donors looking to make donations at year-end? For our nonprofit partners in 2025, a few key strategies drove powerful results:

Lean into informative language around maximizing tax benefits.

Our partners at Americares found success with a direct approach to talking about DAF and other tax-smart ways of giving and year-end. With an opening line that pairs the possibility of tax benefits with the impact of the organization’s lifesaving work, this year-end appeal educates and inspires giving at the same time:

Add reminders about and access to easy DAF – everywhere you can.

One way to include dedicated messages to your DAF audiences without a major lift or a separate campaign segment? A well-placed P.S. reminder can go a long way. For our partners at San Francisco-Marin Food Bank, this allowed them to send their compelling year-end content far and wide while still being inclusive of DAF donors with an easy link for making contributions:

Another way to make DAF giving accessible to your wider audiences is to optimize your donation pages to include DAF as an option for payment. Here’s how simply this integrated the high-value giving stream for our partners at Project HOPE:

Test approaches to growing your DAF audience in a high-attention season.

The end-of-year giving season is a moment when donors are highly tuned in to nonprofit messaging, and DAF giving typically sees a big spike ahead of the start of each year due to the tax benefits it offers. High volume, high response times are excellent times to test into new tactics for growing your audiences.

In 2025, Planned Parenthood Federation of America began testing into acquisition strategies specifically for DAF likely donors. Beginning at the end of the calendar year, they have seen promising results with DAF AQT targeting.

For more strategies to get started communicating with your DAF donors, check out Strategies to Grow and Engage Your DAF Donors. To access more strategies for growth at year-end, including examples of how nonprofits included DAF gifts in EOY appeals, watch What to make of EOY: How nonprofits are adjusting strategy for 2026.