Over the past decade, we have seen an explosion of innovation in fintech. Thousands of new companies like Square, Coinbase, Shopify, Stripe, Wealthfront, and Acorns have launched products and services that leverage modern technology to help tens of millions of people spend, save, and invest better than ever before.
Daffy was founded on a fairly simple insight: What if we used the same innovative design and technology to help people give?
Every incumbent in financial services has giving built into their platform, typically through a proprietary donor-advised fund provider. But despite the incredible innovation of the past decade, almost none of the successful new companies do. They have made it so easy to spend, save money, buy and sell securities or crypto, and even offer complex services like tax-loss harvesting. But where is giving? 🤔
Giving matters. Over 60 million households give to charity every year in the US alone, and total giving in the US was nearly $485 billion in 2021. Giving is also a meaningful financial goal, and an increasingly important piece of professional financial plans. Research shows that people who set a goal for giving end up giving 32% more, and closing the Generosity Gap could mean an extra $1.27 trillion dollars over the next decade.
Our mission at Daffy is to help people be more generous, more often, and as excited as we are about the platform we have built, the fact is we can’t tackle an opportunity this large alone.
This is why today I am pleased to announce the launch of Daffy for Developers, a set of APIs designed to bring giving to your applications and services for free. Our dream is to see every financial application, every financial advisor, every accountant, and every workplace incorporate giving. This is why we've made Daffy for Developers accessible to everyone.
Build Giving Into Your App
As part of the launch of Daffy for Developers, we have open-sourced a few examples of applications built with the new Daffy APIs:
- Workplace Rewards. Want to have a contest to see which engineer on your team can close out the most bugs this week, or reward the salesperson on your team who closes the most deals this month? This simple Slack application allows you to send a Daffy Gift, a link where people can give the money to any charity, to any team member via a Slack DM. Just open a Daffy account, fund it with your corporate card, and give anyone on your team $100 to give to the charity of their choice.
- Shop and Give. Miss using AmazonSmile? This Chrome plug-in uses the Daffy API to keep track of your spending on Amazon and any site that uses Shopify. Every time you spend $250, it will automatically send a donation of $25 to the charity of your choice.
These applications are not only immediately useful, but they demonstrate the power and flexibility of the new Daffy APIs. If you want to build an app that donates $10 to a food bank every time you order DoorDash, you can do it.
Partner With Us
In addition to our powerful Developer APIs, Daffy also is announcing a set of Partner APIs designed to help enable even more powerful financial use cases. Chariot recently leveraged the new Daffy APIs to make it as easy for nonprofits to support donations from donor-advised funds as it is to support donations from credit cards. Chariot created a simple “Donate with DAF” widget that any nonprofit can add to its website, live event, or fundraising platform. This new widget makes it even easier for Daffy members to participate in online peer-to-peer fundraising events such as marathons, bike races, walkathons, 24-hour campaigns, and more.
The possibilities are endless:
- Every e-commerce site or marketplace can be enabled to let people donate a percentage of their purchase to non-profits they support.
- Every personal finance manager can help their users track their giving goal and incorporate their tax-free donor-advised fund into their list of accounts.
- Every brokerage application can make it easy to donate stock or funds to any charity.
- Every crypto application can make it simple to donate crypto to the charity of their choice.
- Every financial advisor can allow their clients to take advantage of the amazing tax benefits of having a direct integration with a donor-advised fund.
- Every roboadvisor can dramatically improve its tax-loss harvesting and direct indexing features by incorporating the donation of low cost-basis shares to a donor-advised fund.
Get Started Today
As of this morning, Daffy for Developers is now live on daffy.org/developer. There you will find everything you need to get started:
- Developer Keys
- API Documentation
- Example Code
In addition, anyone interested in partnering with Daffy to bring giving into their applications can reach out to partner@daffy.org.
Giving is too important to leave it to the large incumbents. Let’s work together to help make giving a native part of every financial application.