News for Professional Advisors

We recently worked with a family who has a robust philanthropic plan, but wanted to make sure their personal and business giving strategies were laser-focused on their distinct goals.

Their personal giving is founded in faith-based causes while their corporate strategy is to be nimble and reactive to emerging community needs. They established a separate Donor Advised Fund (DAF) for business philanthropy, which can be a great solution for your clients who are business owners, ensuring that their giving strategy is flexible while keeping work and personal separate.

Establishing a corporate DAF — essentially functioning as a corporate foundation — helps corporate executives and business owners organize the company’s giving in a convenient, 501(c)(3)-qualified structure, avoiding the time and expense that would be required for the company to establish and maintain a separate charitable entity. The company can fund the corporate DAF as needed (especially in particularly good years), thereby organizing charitable donations to a wide range of nonprofits through a single source of funds. This structure can help maintain historical corporate giving levels even when the company experiences a down year.

The same is true on the personal side. Giving to the fund when certain assets are highly appreciated, or bunching donations together into a single tax year, can maximize the benefits of giving and create a stable foundation to support favorite causes even when the economy slows down.

In many instances, the Community Foundation takes on a back-office role for a company’s grant administration and giving strategy. For example, the Community Foundation can help a company create and implement a strategy for responding to and evaluating funding requests to align with the company’s goals for supporting and prioritizing causes.

By establishing distinct DAFs for corporate and personal giving, local business owners are able to lean on the Community Foundation to simplify the administrative work of philanthropy and focus on maximizing their impact. That clear separation between work and personal also helps create focus for each part of the overall philanthropic strategy, giving your clients a deeper connection to each charitable cause and enhancing the joy of giving.


If your clients are interested in streamlining their giving through a DAF, contact us today.