Donor Advised Fund Search

Back in 2020 The Helen Brown Group started collected publicly available information on DAFs in a spreadsheet for the HBG team to utilize when we conducted prospect research for clients.

As the spreadsheet continued to grow, it became apparent that the wider prospect research community would find this information useful as well, and DAFinitive^® was born a couple of years later!

Unfortunately, no. DAF sponsors don't typically publish their fund lists (although some do!). The good news is that DAFinitive® is consistently growing!

Our team of prospect researchers is using traditional prospect research techniques to continual source data from publicly-available websites and related material. Our typical sources include donor honor rolls and annual fund reports published by non-profits, community foundation and other sponsor organization's websites, news articles, press releases, etc., etc.

We are uploading new funds and/or adding new information to current funds on a weekly basis.

The filter options in DAFinitive^® allow you to search on the following:

• The name of the fund
• Name(s) of donor(s) and/or fund advisors
• Year the fund was founded
• Sponsoring organization
• State and/or Country where the sponsor organization is located or where the DAF has made gifts
• Interest areas
• Giving
• Keyword search on notes that the sponsor shared about the fund

Yes!  With our optional batch screening service, you can upload a list of constituents for batch screening against the DAFinitive^® database.

Please note that since DAFinitive^® does not include contact information for donors or advisors, the batch screening process identifies potential matches based on names alone. Your team will need to review and validate any returned matches before determining that a donor advised fund is connected to an individual in your database.

To learn more about the process click here.

If you are new to DAFinitive, you can subscribe to DAFinitive + Batch using our online registration page.

Or, to add the batch screening service to your existing subscription, please contact your account representative or hello@dafinitive.com.

No, but we’ve added the donor’s name(s) when the sponsoring organization specifically lists them (e.g. in a note or description). We don’t want to make assumptions about donors to (or current advisors of) funds, so even though the fund might be called “The Chris and Pat Washington Fund” you won’t see Chris or Pat listed as donor/advisors unless we’re sure. We’re adding more donors to the list of funds as we find them through our own research.

Thanks to our integration Kaleidoscope’s Insider Focus platform, the “K” badge that you see next to some donor/advisor names in DAFinitive^® is an indicator that the person is public company insider*. 

Clicking on the “K” will expand an additional tile where you can read their most recent corporate biography. 

In addition, subscribers to Kaleidoscope’s Insider Focus platform will be able to navigate directly to the prospect’s record in that platform to see full details of their SEC filings.

*A public company insider is someone who has a significant relationship with to a publicly traded company and is required to file certain information with the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC).  Typically, insiders include members of a public company board of directors, top executives such as the CEO and CFO, as well as individuals who own more than 10% of company stock.

Unfortunately, no. The information in DAFinitive^® is sourced using publicly-available data that doesn’t include contact information, and efforts to find and maintain contact information would mean that we find fewer funds for you to search! More importantly, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and a growing number of US privacy laws limit the collection of personally-identifiable information, including contact information. Our goal is to provide you additional information on the philanthropic footprint of your current constituents. Or, if you are prospecting for new constituents, additional prospect research may be needed to determine the best outreach strategy. If you would like assistance with your prospect research efforts, please reach out to our parent company, The Helen Brown Group at www.helenbrowngroup.com or info@helenbrowngroup.com.

Unfortunately, most of the time you can’t.  We have only found a few instances where the sponsor has provided the exact fund amount or a range, and when we do, we will add that information to the notes section of the record.  More frequently, our research will find that a sponsor will provide information on the minimum amount required to create a DAF at their institution.  We maintain a list of Sponsor defined fund minimums here.

All of the hyperlinks in DAFinitive® are verified as live accurate links by our team on the most recent date that a fund was updated.  Unfortunately, if the owner of the source URL changes a URL, links may become unavailable.  If you find a broken link, please feel free to notify us and we will attempt to update it.  Also note that most of the hyperlinks in DAFinitive® have also been saved to the Wayback Machine (https://archive.org/web/)  and you will likely be able to find an archived copy there.

Congratulations! You now know that they’re philanthropic, that they have money set aside to give, and they have an easy way to make donations. So, you may never know how much is in your donor’s account (unless they tell you), but you do know that they’re interested in giving it to nonprofits they care about.

And there are some additional stats that can help you as well:

According to the (really useful) Annual DAF Report 2025 by the Donor Advised Fund Research Collaborative (DAFRC), the average amount all US donor advised funds is around $91K, but accounts at community foundations have an average size of more than $633K!

And, some sponsors have minimums established for opening up a DAF at their organization that can be as high as $25K, $100K or even $1 million! We maintain a robust list of sponsoring organizations, with their associated minimum investments here.

We’re uploading new funds and/or adding information to existing funds every week!