Donor Advised Funds (DAF)
Donor Access Funds
A donor advised fund is a centralized charitable account that helps individuals, families, and businesses to efficiently distribute their charitable contributions.
The donor gives to a fund which is hosted by a charity (such as Fidelity Charitable) or their local community foundation. That entity will then distribute the funds to charities, as advised by the donor.
Technically, the organization hosting the fund has full discretion of the use of the funds. In practice, the donors control how the funds they contributed to the donor advised fund are distributed. There are benefits to donors who use such a fund, but we’ll leave all that to your tax advisor.
Since an individual’s donation is technically sent to the donor advised fund (not the charities such as Open Collective Foundation) it supports, Open Collective Foundation’s tax receipts will be addressed to the DAF rather than the donor who directs the contribution.
For more information on donor advised funds, we recommend the following resources:
Every donor advised fund has a slightly different process!
- If your fund can contribute via electronic bank transfer, please ask them to initiate a contribution via the Collective’s page. This is much faster than by check. Should you have the option of having them send an email notification for the transaction, please have it sent to [email protected].
- If your fund needs to contribute via check, please feel free to provide them with our mailing address. The check should be made out to Open Collective Foundation - NOT the name of the Collective you intend to support.
No matter which method they use, when you initiate the contribution, please make sure to include the name of the Collective as the “designation” for this gift or include it in another available comments or notes field. If there is no place to do this, email us with donation details (Date, Amount, Donor/DAF Name) so that we know where to allocate the funds.
Most donor-advised funds are familiar with fiscal sponsorship, but if they have any questions, please feel free to direct them to us and we will be happy to fill them in.
Also, sometimes OCF appears as 'OpenCollective Foundation' or OPENCOLLECTIVE FOUNDATION
Last modified 6mo ago