Donor Advised Grant: Fill & Download for Free

Donor Advised Funds are philanthropic vehicles that allow an individual donor to make a charitable donation today, take a current year tax deduction, and decide over time which charities to benefit. Here's how it works:Donors like them because they can seed away large amounts in good years, benefit from the tax benefit, and take their time to benefit the organizations and charities they decide to make grants to. For example, let's say in 2017, the donor has a large bonus and decides to put $100,000 in a Donor Advised fund. Now the DAF owns the funds in an account in her name, and as Donor she “recommends” the charities that will benefit. Of that amount, in year one, she pays her usual charitable gifts of $10,000 to church, university and health charities. Three years later, her university has a capital campaign and asks her for $25,000 toward a scholarship. The funds in her DAF can fund that commitment as well.The largest Donor Advised Funds are owned by community foundations or financial services firms, including FIdelity, Schwab and Vanguard.The top 10 Donor Advised Funds are listed here: Wealthy Americans Are Donating Tons Of Money To These Funds—And Reaping Huge Tax Breaks

I have created a donor advised fund (DAF) before and I am familiar with them.The donor process is pretty simple: you fill out a form, get your donor advised fund approved, then you donate money to the charity that sponsors the donor advised fund and indicate you want your money to go to your own donor advised fund within the charity.From there, whenever you want to make a donation from the fund, you can usually login to the DAF provider’s website and select the charity or charities you want to donate to, or email someone working at the DAF provider.A DAF is useful if you want to get an immediate tax deduction and donate later, if you want the convenience of avoiding multiple charitable receipts and deductions and money transfers, and if you want to get tax free investing with the funds that you want to donate later. A DAF is usually much more cost efficient than a private foundation, and has a minimum of several thousand instead of several hundred thousand or millions, so for everyone who wants to set up an organization to help others by making grants, I would recommend a DAF.To be more specific, I recommend the donor advised fund provider SocialGood because their donor advised funds come in three flavors: traditional donor advised funds that are fully controlled by the donor, curated donor advised funds where SocialGood researches charities to donate to based on donor guidelines, and custom donor advised funds in which SocialGood works together with donors to implement a charitable project or vision of their choice. I think these mix of choices can appeal to any donor, whatever their degree of control and specificity of vision might be.

The only way would be to contact donor advised fund providers and ask them to see if they can recommend a nonprofit to donors. However, not all donors rely on a donor advised fund provider to get donation recommendations, so this method may have limited success.Basically, nonprofits are equal when it comes to being in a position to receive grants from donor advised funds; it all comes down to how popular a given nonprofit is with donors.