EP 62: Unlocking the Power of Donor-Advised Funds with Chariot

This conversation is for informational and educational purposes only and is not professional advice.

Positioning review: No prescriptive adjustments needed. The conversation is naturally informational and descriptive, with the guest sharing how donor-advised funds work and how Chariot's solution integrates into fundraising platforms. All references to Handbid functionality are experiential and observational.

Lori: Welcome to Elevate Your Event, your favorite podcast for transforming fundraising events. Join us weekly for expert tips and creative ideas to make your next event a standout success. In this episode of Elevate Your Event, Jeff and I talk with Mitch Stein from Chariot about the mysterious world of donor-advised funds. Over $200 billion of funds are sitting in charitable accounts just waiting to be donated. Join us as we uncover the secrets, the ins and outs, and show you exactly how to seamlessly integrate DAFs into your upcoming events and donation campaigns. Don't miss out.

Jeff: Welcome back to the Elevate Your Event podcast where we talk about all the various ways you can make your next fundraising event better and maybe even increase the revenue at your fundraising event. And we've got a special guest. We've got Mitch from Chariot. So tell us a little bit about what Chariot does, just in terms of payments and donor-advised funds and how you guys got started and all that other great stuff that our listeners would love to hear about.

Mitch: Yeah, for sure. So hey, everybody. My name is Mitch Stein. I'm the head of strategy here at Chariot. We are a donor-advised fundraising solution for nonprofit organizations. So we help embed donor-advised fund giving directly into your donation forms and anywhere that a donor is inspired to give online. So historically, when someone wanted to give from their donor-advised fund, they had to log in to their portal, look up the organization, take all these extra steps, sometimes even call somebody to actually get a grant submitted. We take all those steps out and put it entirely in your existing fundraising flows. So to start off with, where did this come from? Our founders here at Chariot all made a commitment to give 10% of their income to charity, and they actually set up their first company or product, which was like a savings account for charitable giving called My 10%. They would automatically put part of their paycheck in there and hold themselves accountable to their giving goals and manage it in that account. And someone said, have you heard of a donor-advised fund? Because you're basically doing that without the tax benefits. So they set up donor-advised fund accounts instead. But then they had friends that were running the marathon or doing a bike ride or a 5K and raising money, and they couldn't use their DAF where they'd set all this money aside for charity in all those instances where they wanted to give. And so that was where the light bulb moment happened -- it should be the easiest thing to use your DAF for a charitable gift because that's exactly what it's for. So we can talk more about exactly what a DAF is, but I feel like it's a nice story about where this all came from.

Jeff: That's a great story. And I love the fact that they had the idea, and the idea came from the heart. And then they kind of put the headpiece to it later to say, let's now make this a little bit more tax advantageous. So maybe we should start with what is a DAF, a donor-advised fund. I like that we can call it a DAF. And I think a lot of our listeners probably know, but there's probably some that don't. So why don't you give us the elementary one, two, three on what a donor-advised fund is?

Mitch: Yeah, I'm happy to. A DAF stands for a donor-advised fund, which is a tax-advantaged savings account for charitable giving. So if you're familiar with a 401K for retirement or an HSA for healthcare spending, it's a very similar structure. You can put money into a donor-advised fund and you get your tax write-off on that full contribution immediately. Then over time, you can make grants out to nonprofits. And while the money is in the account, you can invest it in the market so it can continue growing over time, and you can contribute those gains to nonprofits over the years. People can also contribute appreciated assets. So if you've got shares of Apple that have gone way through the roof and you want to contribute that to your DAF, you get the full tax write-off on that contribution. You can also avoid the capital gains tax you would have owed if you had just sold it in the open market, and then it can continue to grow tax-free within the account. So it's often referred to as a triple tax-advantage vehicle for those reasons. The important takeaway is there's huge tax advantages to having a DAF. I would say it started getting more widely used 15, 20 years ago, particularly amongst the ultra wealthy. But what's happened in the last five years is there's been this explosion in usage. There are now over 3 million people using DAFs. And so yes, that's many people who are optimizing their taxes and contributing securities. But it's also a lot of people that are more like our founders -- they just wanted an accountable method to engage intentionally with their philanthropy. It's a benefit that's offered by employers similar to a 401K. That's actually how I have a DAF -- my employer is Chariot, they set up a DAF account for me, I can select an amount I want to contribute on a recurring basis. I put in monthly and the company matches $100 a month into that account. So it's actually a really cool alternative to corporate matching. That's just one example of how it's expanding in usage beyond just the ultra high net worth audience that it historically was.

Jeff: That's awesome. And is this typically managed by a Fidelity or the common organizations like that, or are they unique?

Mitch: I would say the ones that your audience is most familiar with are going to be Fidelity, Vanguard, Schwab -- these huge financial brokerage firms. They manage donor-advised funds for individual account holders. But there are 1,100 donor-advised fund sponsors in the country. So it's also a lot of community foundations, places that are called single-issue charities, like the National Christian Foundation or different Jewish federations. They have a specific cause area or umbrella they're focused on. So there are a few different providers that someone could hold their DAF with depending on their priorities and who they want to interact with. But most commonly, people are going to be seeing those Fidelity checks come in, Vanguard, Schwab. That's where they're getting the most volume because just those three make up 40% of the market, if not more.

Jeff: So let's talk about the restrictions -- the legal restrictions on what you can pay for out of a DAF versus what the account itself might have restrictions on, like a National Christian Foundation versus a Fidelity.

Mitch: Let's take those one at a time because these are both really important. The first being, because I'm getting that tax write-off up front when I contributed an asset or cash into the account, I don't get another tax write-off when I make the gift. So that's a really important thing for nonprofits. Oftentimes they'll automatically send a tax receipt for any gift. But when you get a distribution from a DAF, you cannot send a tax receipt because that's not a tax-deductible event -- they already got their tax write-off. So that's number one, and a really common area where people can get tripped up. The other is around the usage of DAF funds, which is really similar to anything else you would take a tax-deductible donation for, meaning you cannot use DAFs for anything where you get benefit in return as the donor. I can't buy a table. I can't pay for an auction item. And that's the real specific restriction with donor-advised funds -- it's a regulated vehicle, and they're paying attention to the usage of a gift for something where the donor is receiving something in return.

Jeff: So your villa in Tuscany idea, Lori, that's not going to happen with donor-advised funds.

Lori: Yes. Sad.

Mitch: But it's an important one because a lot of nonprofits are pressured by donors to look the other way or look around those rules. And I think a lot of fundraisers are tempted to say, oh, well, that's the donor's risk, it's not my fault if they misuse their DAF. And that is not true. You're putting your 501c3 status in jeopardy if you are taking impermissible gifts for impermissible reasons. So that's an important one where you've got to hold your ground. The best thing you can do is to have a policy. You can point the donor to the policy. You're going to say, sorry, this is the way we do things. It makes it impersonal. It's not you personally telling them they can't do something. You're just referring them to a standard public gift receipt policy that you have as an organization.

Jeff: I love that. I always send people to our Handbid policy. That always goes over really well.

Lori: Yeah, but if you partner with software, you can add some of those triggers in there.

Jeff: That's where I was going. I agree with you. I think we could not only have the policy part, we could restrict it. Like in our software, for example, Mitch, we could say, hey, wait a second, you're paying for this mixture of items. We could just disallow that from happening. Or if they have just a donation that doesn't have anything included in it, they can pay for a portion of that invoice with a DAF and then the other portion they'd have to pay by credit card or check. So we could help save a charity from themselves, I guess, is what we're trying to say.

Mitch: Yeah. When it can be incorporated in technology, that's really important. But I think there are lots of DAF gifts made at events or pledged to be made at an event. So it's certainly still a big part of event fundraising. It's just nuanced because you can't use it to buy your ticket or other items. They can't get anything in return for it.

Jeff: And so if you think about how Handbid works, someone is going to have an entire invoice and it's going to have their ticket and their raffle or drawing items they bought, their wine pull or whatever, and then all of the auction items they won, and then maybe what they donated in the paddle raise. Maybe they donated $1,000 in the paddle raise. We would have to, in our software, restrict -- if you wanted to pay with the DAF, we would only allow you to select the donation items as the items you can pay for, because the rest of it they're going to have to pay some other way.

Mitch: Yeah, I think that's a really good solution. And just everyone being aware of it, because folks listening to this are taking the right first step in educating yourselves. And some folks might not know what DAFs are. This is an area where most fundraisers are not comfortable. They aren't super familiar with how it works or the restrictions. So it's a really important topic to be raising with your teams, making sure everyone's aware of it because it's the fastest growing vehicle in philanthropy. There's $230 billion sitting in DAFs waiting to be donated. More money is going into DAFs than private foundations now. And in 2022, the latest year we have full-year statistics on, there was over $50 billion granted out of DAFs to nonprofits. So it's not some bespoke instrument that comes up every once in a while. This is where philanthropy is moving, and it's already huge -- almost one in five dollars in philanthropy are moving through a DAF.

Jeff: I love it. And don't you have to have a minimum amount of money in a DAF? Like you have to maintain a minimum?

Mitch: It depends on the provider. Those big national financial brokerage houses, I think they're all at zero minimum balances. And that's part of what's accelerated that broader usage. But a lot of community foundations or smaller financial institutions will have higher minimums -- $1,000, $5,000, $10,000 minimum balance and varying minimum gift sizes. Each individual gift might have to be at least $500 or something. But there's been a lot of downward pressure on those restrictions because the DAF market has been booming and it's competitive to get people to hold their DAF with you. If I'm more restricted than something else, that's often going to move people over to a different provider.

Jeff: And these are, I would imagine, like in terms of investment portfolios, your typical management fee that a Fidelity or somebody would charge?

Mitch: It's interesting you bring that up because there are some changes under consideration right now at the Treasury. There's actually a public hearing happening on May 6 that I'm going to try to attend and report back on, getting really nerdy in the actual policy legislation stuff. But yes, it is similar to a standard brokerage account today where someone's earning management fees, and whatever investment vehicles you're selecting within your account have standard fees. But I would just say pay attention because those rules and restrictions are certainly evolving. Every few years there seems to be some attempt at legislation that would implement new restrictions on DAFs, what their payout requirements are, for example. But that hasn't moved anywhere to date. That could always change. Today there's no payout requirement, meaning there's no time limit, unlike a foundation where I'm required to pay out 5% of my balance every year. With DAFs, there isn't a specific restriction like that. That being said, the actual payout rate historically has been over 20% per year since they started tracking it in 2009. So it generally is used with a high turnover rate, but there is no legal restriction on it. And it's a reason why there's some differing opinions on DAFs.

Lori: Is there a maximum that you can contribute to a DAF? I mean, if people can just keep it in there and they're not required to spend any of it...

Mitch: Well, the main restriction to keep in mind is that it can only leave a DAF account for a charitable donation. So it's not like I can take it back out at a future point in time. Once you put it in, that's the only way you can use it. So yes, you could sit on that balance for a while in theory, but it is to eventually be donated. The maximum -- I mean, there might be some state-by-state variations with particular tax codes, but it's not as common a problem. It's not similar to an HSA where the employee and the employer have a max contribution amount they can do tax-free. DAFs have much higher thresholds. If it's offered as an employee benefit, then they can set up their own restrictions. Like I said, my employer has $100 per month that they'll match. That varies widely depending on the provider and the employer, but it's not that same kind of legal restriction.

Jeff: And one other question you were asked earlier that I realized didn't get back to -- restrictions on the DAFs that are more specific.

Mitch: So National Christian Foundation -- this is less relevant for a nonprofit because there's nothing to do about this, it's just good to be aware of. But if a nonprofit has a specific cause area or angle, National Christian Foundation might select certain types of organizations that they don't view as aligned to their values. So they may have restrictions on where those donations can go. But if I'm putting my DAF account there, I'm viewing that as they're helping me make sure I'm donating where my values are aligned. In general, the vast majority of DAFs are doing their diligence to make sure that the nonprofit is a 501c3 in good standing with the IRS. So I can't just give money to Jeff as a donation.

Jeff: The Jeff Foundation. They have to actually prove worthy. I know how to fill out a 1023. I can certainly create a foundation if you need one.

Lori: $100 a month, Lori coming. I bet you Handbid would match. If you were going to give me $100 a month, I bet Handbid would match that.

Jeff: Yeah, just kidding. But what you just described, Mitch, actually happened to one of our clients. It was the National Christian Foundation. And their donor -- the NCF said no. They would not issue the donation to this charity. And because we're part of this whole process, we were notified and had to get involved at some level. That's when I first learned about that. And look, I get it. I understand the value in working with an organization like that if they share your values, they're looking out for you. But in this particular case, I think it was a misinterpretation of what the charity did. But it was interesting to see, and they could not do it. They had to write a check.

Mitch: Yeah, I think it's important for donors. I guess the important thing for your audience, assuming mostly fundraisers -- it's a great thing if a donor wants to talk to you about their DAF. Being able to have that conversation is good. One thing that's important to keep in mind is that I would always respond with, I'm not a financial advisor. Make sure you're putting that disclaimer out there because you do not want to be providing financial advice. But being able to engage in a conversation around that is like, yeah, we have lots of donors that use DAFs, these are some of the benefits they talk about, you should talk to your financial advisor about it. They might also ask you what the differences are between different DAFs, and so they go in aware -- most of them are super flexible, some come with restrictions. If you hold it at the Community Foundation, you'll probably get more hands-on service from them because that's their value add. And you're also holding those assets locally, providing some added benefits to the local community. Fidelity -- if you already have your brokerage account at Fidelity, it's two clicks to move some shares over to a DAF. So it's just super seamless. It's a really great conversation to have with a donor for relationship building. And it's great if a donor sets up a DAF, because they're basically setting money into a gift card to give to charity for themselves. So the next time you come back for a donation, because whenever anyone makes a gift, we're simultaneously making two decisions. One is a budgeting decision -- how much money can I part with right now to give to charity? Two, do I want to give it to this organization? And whenever I'm making two decisions, it slows me down and reduces my likelihood of conversion and the total amount that I'm going to give. When I separate those decisions, I'm way faster. It's like fun money -- I have this fun money account that I'm going to give to charity. It's not as burdened with that budgeting decision that slows people down.

Jeff: I love that. And that's insightful. I'm going to use that on my wife, actually, the two decisions thing. See if I can get away with some stuff.

Jeff: But let's go back to what kind of value Chariot adds because I was recently at an FCA board meeting for a division of FCA in the greater Denver area. And we had a board member give a 10-minute presentation on how to donate to that particular organization using a donor-advised fund. And I was shocked at not only that it took 10 minutes, but the number of FCA entries that were in his Fidelity account that he could pick from. He's like, I had no idea. He finally had to call national headquarters for FCA and ask which one of these is it. I want to say there were 50 or 60 rows in this table. And that gets tough.

Mitch: I mean, it's a super common problem. Either for that reason you mentioned where there's lots of chapters of a similar organization, or pick any cancer organization -- there's going to be 20 similarly sounding organizations, or Hope for Haiti, there's like 30 different ones. So this comes up all the time. And it's a super big problem because also if someone gave to the wrong organization in their DAF portal, I as the nonprofit had nothing to do with that. So I don't know if they were wanting to make a gift or if it went to the wrong place. It's totally out of your control. So it's one of the really important things about having a DAF giving tool in your fundraising platform or your website -- because you have preselected the EIN where they're making the gift. You're taking the pain point out of the process for the donor where they're not having to look it up and try to find it. You now know when they initiated the gift, for how much, you get their contact information. So you're really closing the loop on that whole gift process and putting it in your own environment where you've spent all this time optimizing to get people to donate to your organization. You want them to complete those gifts there and not send them off to a platform you have no control over. And spoiler alert, those platforms are not spending all their time to optimize for the biggest gift for your nonprofit. That's not their incentive. Their incentive is they make money when funds sit in their accounts.

Jeff: But what you're also bringing up is important because go back to the example I gave. There are a lot of national charities that have a ton of chapters. Some of those chapters have their own EIN, some don't. Some share the national corporation's EIN. Sometimes it's both within the same organization. And so when you work with a fundraising platform where it's built in, not only are you getting the EIN right, but now the organization knows that those funds were coming their way. Because think about just saying, hey, maybe the Arapahoe chapter of the FCA is using corporate's EIN. Well, now this check shows up in Kansas City. They have no idea, and they're like, awesome, somebody donated to FCA. Unless they knew they needed to funnel it somewhere, they wouldn't. So I think that point you brought up is really important for the listeners to understand -- when you go through a fundraising platform, those people are now paying an invoice or making a donation on that platform and paying with their DAF. You see that. That entire loop is closed.

Mitch: Totally. And that example you just raised about the check showing up -- the other important thing to remember is the check is showing up without helpful identifying information on the donor. So it's like, cool, we got $10,000, but it's from the Smith Fund at Fidelity. And you're like, where do I even begin to try to thank them? Just to try to tie this to a specific person. So capturing name and email as a given in the field that's part of your tool on your own website or fundraising platform is tremendously helpful. I just got off the phone with another nonprofit that recently started using Chariot and they got a $7,000 gift from a donor that had historically been making $100 gifts, because they had this DAF payment option available and the donor had previously been giving with a credit card. So now they knew the person has a DAF, they got a much larger gift, they knew who they were immediately. They completely changed their strategy with this person. They moved them from their general annual giving list to their major donor prospects and started stewarding them in a more hands-on way. Having that contact information and being able to say thank you immediately for folks making four-, five-, or six-figure gifts is super important.

Jeff: Let's dive into that a little bit because you mentioned something that we've talked about in other podcast episodes a lot, which is capturing that name and email and maybe a phone number. We've had over the years lots of conversations with clients as well as prospects around this prevailing belief that my super wealthy, high-end donors are not going to be willing to give me that information. I don't want to bother them for that information. Yet those might be the people donating through a DAF. And so that makes it tough. That's why when we have these conversations about registration and check-in, we have to go back and remind our clients -- do not create fake accounts for your users to get them into a software system. Do not bypass getting accurate information at the door simply because you feel like you're inconveniencing them, because then when this check shows up, you actually know how to contact this person.

Mitch: Yeah. So it's super important. And most folks don't actually know what the process looks like for the DAF donor in their own portal. Less than 4% of DAF gifts are given anonymously. So the vast majority are not given anonymously. And yet, if you ask a nonprofit their biggest pain point with DAF giving, they'll tell you anonymity. What they actually mean is I'm not getting helpful, actionable information about the gift and the donor. Because the vast majority of the time, they get a fund name. When I open a DAF account, I can name it whatever I want. It could be the Mitch Stein Fund, but it could also be the Puppies and Kitty Cats Fund. The vast majority of the time, it's not actually helpful. So I as the donor, even if I don't intend to give anonymously, there's no toggle for me to say share my name and email. That doesn't exist in the DAF portal. I'll just say no, I don't want to give anonymously, but I don't realize how little information they're getting. Donors who do know this, who are close to the organization and have been told about this problem, they'll put in the notes field, like, this is from Mitch Stein. They're helpful. But from a user experience perspective, the vast majority of people are not going to take those extra steps. So what we've done in Chariot is make it like a normal e-commerce checkout where, yeah, if you want to purposely delete your name and email to be anonymous, you have the right to do that. But the vast majority of people don't actually want that. Making it easy is the way you get people to provide helpful information.

Lori: Well, it's unfortunate because the people that are probably doing the workaround for the DAF donations is probably because they have the story of I have given to something and nobody ever responded back to me. I have that experience. My husband and I donated through some funds. My husband's a financial planner, so he donates strategically. He loves DAFs. But we donated and they never said anything to us. It was a significant donation, at least for us. And they never said anything. And finally, I just kind of mentioned it, and they were like, oh, you were the one that did that. And I was like, yeah.

Jeff: I would have said thank you, Lori. Donated to me.

Lori: Well, then they were super thankful. But I mean, just not even an acknowledgement that the transaction went through. You received it and you're actually utilizing those funds for what I donated for.

Jeff: Well, and we've gotten them at our charity too. And there's always a board conversation on where do we think this came from. It doesn't happen a lot. Every once in a while it's like, we got a $10,000 donation, does anybody know who this person is? And then there's a board conversation and someone goes, I know who it is. And then we're like, okay. It's not super clear sometimes. You're right, Mitch. It's one of those things where you've got to connect some dots and say, oh, they named it after their kid or something. We've said this many times at all these different events -- make it easy for your donors to donate. Make it simple. They're coming because they love you. They want to give money to you. When they come to an event, some people are there for maybe the drinks and the plated dinner. But most of the time, they're there because they've already bought into your story. So make it easy for them to donate, but then also make it easy for yourself to follow up with those people.

Mitch: So important. Another way to frame that is make it easy for them to donate and to do it again. Because the better you're stewarding them, the more likely they are to follow through. In your example, Lori, you're not feeling that inclined to give again the next year because you're like, did you even get my gift? The other thing that we hear a lot about is the back and forth to confirm gifts. Like, I've heard from a donor, yes, I'm going to give from my DAF. Great. I'm sitting around for the next weeks, months. Did you make it? Is it lost? And it's awkward. I don't want to go back and ask. We've heard stories where people ultimately took six months to sort something out and had to get on the phone with the donor, his assistant, his banker at Wells Fargo, and their team to finally figure out what happened to the DAF check. It actually had gotten mailed and lost in the mail. But it just makes the organization -- in that whole example, it always unfortunately reflects negatively on the nonprofit, even though they're not at fault. They have nothing to do with it. The donor's like, they never even thanked me or they never got my gift. It's because the payments in the back end, which is what we focus on all day long, is really messy and complicated. But there's a really elegant way to solve that, which is by making the initiation of the gift happen within your own systems.

Lori: It shouldn't take that long to figure out who donated to your organization and be able to turn around a touchpoint to them and say thank you. Your turnaround for a donation and a thank you should be very quick.

Jeff: The funny thing for us is sometimes when you're expecting it and you know they said they're going to give this money, the ones that have really puzzled us are the ones where we were not expecting it. It just showed up. It's like, wow, this was awesome. We were not expecting these people to donate, but I'm so glad we figured out who they were.

Lori: I love this story around the person that was a $100 donor and then suddenly just dropped $7,000 because they have a DAF and they made it easy for them to do it.

Jeff: Well, and let's be honest. Rich people are not generous. Generous people are generous.

Lori: I love that. That's good.

Mitch: We have something built in -- when the donor gets to their payment screen donating through DAF Pay, which is the Chariot tool, when they get to the final screen where they're confirming their gift, we remind them of their total balance.

Jeff: Oh, that's a really important anchor because often someone will be like, oh, well, first of all, DAF donors rarely know the actual current balance in their DAF because it's in the market, so it's moving. You're not checking it every day. So a few months could have gone by and you're like, oh, wow, market was up 10%, I actually have a lot more to give away.

Mitch: So we find that 30% of donors, once they're reminded of their DAF balance, end up increasing their gift size from what they originally intended. So it's really powerful to remind people. And there's a study done -- I don't remember all the exact statistics, but when someone was standing in a grocery store performing this research, they had two sample audiences. One in which they asked them when they walked in how much money was in their checking account, and one in which they didn't. And they asked them how much they were planning on spending at the grocery store. The people who were asked spent about 50% more when they were reminded of how much money they actually had in their account.

Jeff: So even simple things like at the grocery store. We should do this inside the Handbid software. Welcome to the fundraiser. By the way, we scanned your checking account.

Lori: People would love that. My husband and I are always joking. I never know how much money I have in my checking account. I don't either. Ever. But I'd love that feature.

Mitch: And it's not -- I know it might sound like a creepy thing. In order to approve a grant, we have to know the total balance because otherwise they could select an amount that wouldn't clear. So we have to check that. And then we can render suggested amounts based on their total balance in their account. And by the way, the average DAF balance is $120,000.

Jeff: Wow. So there's a lot of money there. Untapped potential. So is your top donation level $119,999, or you don't go that high?

Mitch: Our largest gift we've processed so far is over $100,000. And we've also seen several examples where people get to that screen and end up donating the entire amount -- the exact amount, like $12,978 or whatever -- and they actually drained their DAF on that one gift because they were reminded how much is in there.

Jeff: That's awesome. Well, and when you're at these live events and doing these fundraising events, you're already working with people's emotions. That's the whole point of a paddle raise, whether people want to admit it or not. You're trying to express the need and then giving that emotional moment where they're giving the money and they're part of your cause and your purpose. Well, imagine how easy it would be to go on there and go, oh, I was going to give a thousand because, like me, you come to an event and have a budget of what you're going to give. But when I'm at an event and I get emotionally touched and then I look at my balance from Chariot and it says I've got $50,000 in there, I'd be like, oh, I just love this organization, give them more money.

Lori: I love that feature. Get it before you sober up.

Jeff: 100%.

Lori: Lots of benefits for the in-person event. Lots of giving remorse on Sundays.

Jeff: I love that. That's a whole other podcast. Giving remorse. That is a good podcast. We're going to do that.

Mitch: That would be super fun.

Jeff: This has been helpful for me.

Lori: Me too.

Jeff: Thank you so much for coming on and explaining DAFs to our audience and the restrictions and how you set it up. It is important for charities to understand what those restrictions are on their side. And as we integrate Chariot into Handbid, we can put some of those protections in place for them so nobody gets in trouble. But what a convenience. We hear about it so much -- people coming up at the end of the night saying, can I pay with my DAF? I would love to be able to say, you can pay for this part of your bill with your DAF and then the rest you're going to pay on credit card or something like that.

Mitch: It's cool. Love it. Such a good use case. And it's only going up from here. This has been growing over 20% on average per year for the past five years. You just don't see that in philanthropy very often. So it's a super exciting part of the market.

Jeff: It is. And thank you for being in that part of the market because I see the value you're delivering to charities and to their donors. Going back to the FCA thing, I did raise my hand and said, this is one thing we could actually put in Handbid where you would literally just say pay with the DAF and you wouldn't have to pick it out of 55 rows in this table. And the guy looked at me like, are you kidding me? When is that going to be done, Jeff? So there's definitely value there for donors. They would love it.

Mitch: Yep. Awesome.

Jeff: All right, Mitch, enjoy the rest of your week. Thank you so much again for spending some time with us. I know our listeners learned a lot, as did we.

Mitch: Of course. Always happy to answer questions. People can find me on LinkedIn. If they've got more specific DAF questions for their organization, I'm always happy to chat.

Jeff: Awesome. All right. Well, we're going to wrap up this episode of the Elevate Your Event podcast. Thanks everybody for attending. And until we meet again, happy fundraising.

Lori: A special thank you to Mitch from Chariot. For more information, reach out to them at givechariot.com. If you enjoyed our show, please take a moment to leave us a review. You can find us on Apple, Google, and Spotify. Don't forget to subscribe for more great content. And if you're a fan of video, check us out on YouTube. Until next time, happy fundraising.