Four Years of Helping People Be More Generous at Daffy

Four years ago, on September 30, 2021, we launched Daffy publicly with a simple, but ambitious idea: help people be more generous, more often.

Our goal was fairly audacious. Like most organizations in this sector, we knew that charitable giving was already huge in the United States — over $592 billion in 2024 alone. But as big as that number was, Daffy is the crazy company that believed it could be even bigger.

Our secret insight came down to just two simple ideas: the donor-advised fund, an incredible financial tool that had been mostly targeted at the wealthy, and credible academic research that stated that pre-commitment could lead to more giving. Traditional providers weren’t designed or incentivized to innovate or make giving more accessible, but we saw a huge opportunity to reimagine the donor-advised fund (DAF).

This might seem obvious to some. After all, how many people would successfully save for retirement without goals or automation?

As Daffy celebrates its fourth birthday today, we are happy to share that the data suggests that software really can make people more generous. Whether you put aside a few hundred dollars a year for charity, or a few million, Daffy truly has become The Donor-Advised Fund for You™.

Driving Generosity with Relentless Innovation

Daffy launched four years ago with three clear differentiators in the sleepy world of donor-advised funds:

New modern platform & technology, including a native iPhone app
Native support for Bitcoin, for both contributions & investment
Flat membership-based pricing, instead of AUM fees

Since then, Daffy has really proven how much room for innovation in this historically slow-moving category. In the time it took Schwab Charitable to execute a rebrand, Daffy has launched more new features in the last few years than the industry has collectively implemented in the last few decades.

A quick highlight reel of our Top Ten:

The reward for this relentless innovation has been not only what we now believe is the best donor-advised fund platform available on the market today, but also incredible validation of our hypothesis that technology can play a critical and significant role in helping people be more generous, more often.

Results: Let’s Talk Metrics

By putting these new, innovative features in the hands of our generous members, Daffy has been rewarded with rapid growth. At the close of 2024, Daffy had achieved a 100%+ compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) in members, a 200+% CAGR in assets, and an astounding 300+% CAGR in donations.

In 2024, Daffy saw over $58M in stock contributions, more than $42M in crypto contributions, and, with the launch of the Private Stock Donation Program, over $23M in private stock donations.

While these metrics are inspiring, the real question is whether or not the Daffy hypothesis would hold. Can software help make people more generous? Can helping people set a goal for their giving and put money aside for charity proactively lead to more giving as the research suggests?

The data says yes.

When we track the giving of Daffy members based on when they joined, we see the same pattern in every quarterly cohort. Daffy members join, they contribute more and more over time, and they donate more and more over time. And if you look at every quarterly cohort since Q1 2022, on average their donations increased from their first quarter by over 2.5x by Q4 2024.

In other words, it looks like Daffy members donated 2.5x more since the quarter when they started.

Looking Forward: 2025 & Beyond

As we enter the busiest season of the year of charitable giving, we have a lot planned for the months ahead. We’ll be expanding Daffy for Work and the Private Stock Donation Program, as well as launching new features to make it even easier to put money aside for charity.

Our goals continue to be audacious. We see a market of millions of great charities and hundreds of millions of people who care about their work. Donor-advised funds already hold more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in assets, and most projections have this going to trillions in the years ahead.

To our community of thousands of members, thank you. You’ve made this milestone a reality, and together, we are building the future of giving.

Our advice remains the same. Be intentional about your giving. Set a goal. Take advantage of the good years to put some money, stock, or crypto aside for charity. Use recurring donations to support the organizations you care about every year. Giving is not about what celebrity billionaires decide to support. Giving is something that a vast majority of families do every year, and we’re excited to see Daffy scale to support everyone.

We can’t wait to share what’s next, and as always, if you have ideas for how Daffy can better serve you and the causes you care about, we’d love to hear from you.

Daffy is The Donor-Advised Fund for You™