2019 Donor-Advised Fund Report

The 2019 Donor-Advised Fund Report examines 2014 through 2018 fiscal year data from 989 charities. For the ninth consecutive year, there was growth in all key metrics—number of individual donor-advised funds, total grant dollars from donor-advised funds to charitable organizations, total contributions to donor-advised funds and total charitable assets in them.

Over the past decade, donor-advised funds have experienced tremendous growth. The growth rate has compounded in recent years. Most notably, grantmaking from donor-advised funds to qualified charities has nearly doubled in the past five years. In 2018, philanthropists recommended grants to charities from their donor-advised funds totaling $23.42 billion. The same rapid growth also applies to contributions to donor-advised funds, which totaled $37.12 billion in 2018. This represents an 86 percent increase in contributions over the past five years. Read more.