Nearly five years ago, we launched Daffy publicly with a simple but ambitious mission: help people be more generous, more often.
It’s a mission that not only shapes the products and features we build, but also how we define success.
One of the biggest advantages of a donor-advised fund is that it allows people to put money aside proactively for the organizations and causes that they care deeply about. That money is then invested, tax-free, giving them the power to be generous whenever they are inspired.
But how do you define performance for an account where donations are the goal.
As Daffy has grown to tens of thousands of members with more than a billion dollars in charitable assets, we’ve learned that people don’t just want to understand how the investments in their charitable fund are performing or how much tax-free growth has increased what they can give. They want to know whether they’re giving at the pace they intended, how much they’ve already put to work through donations, how many charities they’ve supported, and how their giving has evolved since opening their fund.
Today, we’re proud to announce that we have redefined performance for a donor-advised fund, with a focus on generosity.
What Traditional Performance Charts Get Wrong About Giving
The best investing apps have spent years refining how they present performance: clear charts, useful metrics, and an immediate sense of whether your money is growing. We wanted the same clarity for charitable giving, so we borrowed many of those ideas for Daffy’s new Portfolio page.
The problem? They are all based on a simple assumption that a bigger balance is better. After all, who doesn’t want to see the number go up?
A donor-advised fund (DAF) is not the same as a savings account or a brokerage account. Traditional banks, brokerages, and DAFs that charge fees based on assets under management make more money when customers keep more assets on their platforms. Money coming in is celebrated. Money going out is typically shown as a withdrawal.
This makes sense when your goal is to save for retirement or a new home. It does not make sense when the goal is giving.
A DAF has a fundamentally different purpose. The balance of your fund may fall because you gave $10,000 to charities you care about. That isn’t a loss, it’s the purpose of the account.
Behavioral finance makes it very clear that, right or wrong, loss aversion is a powerful force in guiding financial decisions. If you aren’t careful, you can dissuade people from giving.
A chart that doesn’t distinguish between “the market went down” and “I was generous” is thwarting generosity. A DAF needs a fundamentally different definition of success.
Your Generosity Should Never Look Like a Loss
The redesigned Portfolio page introduces a new concept, the amount you’ve already donated plus what’s available for future giving. It’s your past generosity combined with your future giving potential, and we gave it a simple name:
Giving Power
If you donate $10,000 at any other donor-advised fund, your balance falls by $10,000. At Daffy, your Giving Power doesn’t. You didn’t lose $10,000. You gave $10,000 to an organization that you support. You realized a goal.
Once you’ve set money aside for charity, we believe a Daffy fund has two jobs: help those charitable dollars grow tax-free while they are waiting to be donated, and help you put them to work for the causes and communities you care about.
The redesigned Portfolio page lets you see both sides of that story together.
A More Complete View of Your Fund
We didn’t stop with Giving Power. The redesigned Portfolio page brings the full story of your fund into one place.
- One interactive chart. Toggle between Balance, Contributions, Donations, and Giving Power to understand what is driving your results across periods ranging from one month to all time.
- Fund insights. Understand how your fund has grown over time, including when you opened it, your total contributions and donations, average annual contributions and donations, and investment returns.
- Giving insights. See the number of donations you’ve made, the number of charities you’ve supported, and your pace of giving.
- One member has made more than 600 donations to 29 charities since joining Daffy in early 2022, contributing an average of $19,000 a year and giving roughly $17,700 annually. Another member really embraced recurring giving, making more than 1,260 donations to over 50 charities and giving more than $150,000 since joining in 2024, with a donation rate of 40%.
- Your donation rate is an industry standard metric that every donor-advised fund publishes, but few share with their members. It measures how much you’ve donated this year relative to your balance at the start of the year. Daffy wants to align our goals with yours, and our goal is to see charitable assets deployed, not just stored.
- Private foundations are legally required to distribute at least 5% of their assets each year. Our goal is for Daffy members to give at more than twice that rate. Now members can see how their donation rate compares.
- Detailed portfolio view. Review asset classes and subclasses, as well as portfolio units and unit prices for pooled portfolios. Daffy supports over 680 ETFs and more than 2,200 individual stocks, and the breakdown in your fund is now clearly visible.
A Better View of Your Giving
Daffy makes it easy for our members to be more generous by helping them take the first and most important step of putting money aside for charity.
Many Daffy members have been delighted to see that by putting their money aside for charity, their funds have grown. Compounding is a powerful force, and Daffy leverages those returns to give its members the ability to be even more generous.
We hope the new Portfolio page amplifies that goal by helping our members increase both their contributions and their donations.
That’s what Giving Power is all about.
If you’re already a Daffy member, log in and explore your redesigned Portfolio page. If you’re not yet a member, join Daffy today and start building a more intentional habit of giving.