For the third webinar in our DAF Day series, we’re diving deeply into the theme for this year: Move Billions, Faster. $326 billion are committed to giving in donor-advised funds, but the infrastructure to deploy these funds has been too often neglected.
We were joined by industry speakers on both the sending and receiving ends of donor-advised fund payments who will break down why grant payments remain one of the hardest problems in philanthropy, and how the sector is working together to move money faster, more securely, and with better data.
For grantmakers, that means sending more grants electronically and leveraging shared infrastructure for managing nonprofit due diligence and payment security. For nonprofits, it means adopting the technology to remove donor friction to DAF giving and opting in to a system that makes it easy to receive electronic grant payments.
Speakers:
- Megan Hyman, President and CEO of the Dallas Jewish Community Foundation
- Travers Oliver, Head of Philanthropic Services at Founders Pledge
- Deana DeSilva, Fundraising Director at Pan-Mass Challenge
Host:
- Mitch Stein, Head of Strategy at Chariot
In this recap you’ll learn:
- Why nonprofit payments are unlike any other payment
- Why the shift away from checks is happening now
- How grantmakers are modernizing disbursements
- How receiving nonprofits are keeping up
- What grantmakers and nonprofits can do next
1. Why nonprofit payments are unlike any other payment
No invoice, no warning
A typical business payment is a two-way exchange: an invoice goes out with payment instructions, and money comes back against it. A DAF grant is a push payment. Money simply arrives, often with no advance notice and no shared reference number, from a grantmaker who may have no prior relationship with the organization being paid.
Travers explained why that puts so much weight on the sender:
This isn't a standard business relationship where 30 businesses you work with send you an invoice with straightforward payment details. It's dependent on the grantmaker to find this information. If I want to send a check to Mitch, where does Mitch live? Is this the right Mitch? Is the address I found online correct?
Grantmakers may be sending to any of roughly 1.5 million unique organizations, most of whom they have no existing relationship with, relying on IRS records and website data that may or may not be current. And when a check arrives unannounced, the nonprofit may have no idea who sent it, or why.
The matching puzzle on the receiving end
The Pan-Mass Challenge receives close to 300,000 donations a year across checks, credit cards, Venmo, Facebook, and DAFs. As a peer-to-peer organization, every gift also has to be matched to the rider it supports.
Nobody's going to write your name on the check because it's coming to the Pan-Mass Challenge. It's really a puzzle for us: getting that information in, finding those unexpected arrivals, and then matching them up to the intended donor.
The longer that matching takes, the more calls come in from donors who haven't been thanked and riders whose fundraising pages haven't updated.
Manual processing consumes small teams
Megan described the operational weight on the sending side. The Dallas Jewish Community Foundation runs on 12 employees, three of whom own the weekly grantmaking process. Before the foundation modernized, printing checks, validating recipients, and preparing letters pulled two of those staff members away for two full days every week.
The cost goes beyond staff time. As Travers put it:
If we can't deploy capital safely and securely, those funds aren't going to the nonprofits that need them.
2. Why the shift away from checks is happening now
Check fraud is rising
Megan came to philanthropy from financial services, and was struck by how reliant the sector remains on paper.
There's all kinds of sophisticated fraud that can happen: lifting the account information off of checks, changing the name of the recipient and depositing those to someone else's checking account. It's just an extremely fraud-ready way to send money.
Storing bank details across CRMs and fund accounting systems carries its own risk, which is why DJCF made the intentional decision not to host ACH information in its own software.
Trust is the central, most important tenet of a successful donor and grantee relationship. My job as a payment processor of that trust is to facilitate it, protect it, preserve it.
Donor expectations have changed
Travers described being asked for a check on the beach at the Jersey Shore, and not having a checkbook in his beach bag. The moment stuck with him.
Why would I be sending thousands of checks if I wouldn't be doing that individually? As a society, our expectation has changed. We can open a DAF at the click of a button on our phone.
The largest players are responding. Fidelity Charitable announced plans this year to phase out checks and require ACH enrollment, and Mitch shared that at least one large DAF sponsor moved to electronic payments after fund holders took their account elsewhere over check-only grantmaking. Donors increasingly expect their grants to arrive the way every other payment in their lives does: quickly, traceably, and without a stamp.
Gift processing keeps getting harder
When Mitch asks rooms of gift processors whether their job has gotten harder, easier, or stayed the same over the past five years, the answer is unanimous: significantly harder. Deana walked through why. Every payment method arrives with its own portal, its own timeline, its own verification, and questions from donors about processing fees, security, and data privacy. Even ACH, a clear improvement over checks, typically lands with a bank reference ID that has nothing to do with the grant ID, leaving teams to reconcile money and meaning separately.
3. How grantmakers are modernizing disbursements
DJCF: faster payments without giving up governance
Generic bill-pay tools are built around invoices and vendor relationships, which is exactly what grantmaking is not, and DJCF found them an awkward fit. With Chariot Disbursements, the foundation kept its multi-layer approval process, including board oversight and donor privacy protections, while collapsing the delivery timeline.
Once those payments are approved, within an hour the receiving nonprofit has it in their account.
Checks used to reach nonprofits 10 to 15 days after the weekly grant run. ACH cut that to three days, but the data arrived disconnected, creating a boomerang of follow-up between DJCF and receiving organizations. Now delivery is down to one day, with all gift details in the same place as the funds, as standardized structured data that’s easy to sync with your CRM.
There are also economies of scale: once a nonprofit is verified through a know-your-client process that meets national financial institution standards, every grantmaker on the platform benefits from that same validation. Read the full story of how DJCF modernized grant payments and freed its team from the back office.
Founders Pledge: 98% of grants now electronic
Founders Pledge previously paid almost entirely by wire, with time-consuming verification calls on both ends. Coming up on a year with Chariot, roughly 98% of its grants go out electronically.
It's one centralized portal that many grantmakers can leverage and use. The nonprofits don't have to continue to go through the same process over and over again.
The efficiency gain freed the team to focus on the complex and international grantmaking that actually needs human attention. And the donor pain points that used to generate complaints, like grants taking two or three weeks to arrive, have simply disappeared. The full case study covers how Founders Pledge doubled its grantmaking volume without doubling its operational risk.
4. How receiving nonprofits are keeping up
The Pan-Mass Challenge spent years enrolling in ACH wherever possible, which reduced check volume but never solved the data disconnect. In March, the team onboarded Chariot Gift Processing. Since then, about 1,200 deposits representing more than 4,000 donations have arrived in one place, with a consistent format that flows into the CRM, and without adding headcount.
Now that we're getting into the busy season and we spend more time in Chariot and less time on check processing, it's actually a complete breath of fresh air.
DAFs are worth the effort: PMC has seen 25% year-over-year DAF growth, and is up 38% this year. Deana credits rider education plus making DAFpay visible at the top of the donation page, because most donors don't realize giving from their DAF can be that easy. Longtime supporters who wrote $50 checks for years are now giving $250 through their DAFs. Read more on how their DAF giving is breaking records in our Pan-Mass Challenge case study.
5. What grantmakers and nonprofits can do next
Make the case internally
The panel was candid that change is hard. Nonprofit teams are experts in their missions, not in payments, and many organizations have had bruising experiences with new tools, so a healthy dose of diligence is warranted. Their advice is to lead with the gift data, pick partners invested in both sides of the transaction, and start before the volume forces the issue.
Be a loud advocate and fix it before it breaks. Our grantmaking volume doubled year over year, and this was a lifesaver.
Megan added that modernizing is ultimately a talent story, not just an operations story:
Those same employees are even more valuable to our fund holder base, because now they're calling fund holders who haven't used their fund in six months and saying, would you like to make a grant? To me, that takes the value so much further than being an order taker who sends mail.
Change, but change for good
Deana closed with a message for nonprofits still weighing the move away from checks. PMC has lived the alternative: checks arriving five weeks after they were initiated, checks lost in the mail that had to be canceled and reissued, and donors and riders waiting on answers the whole time.
Yes, change is hard. Yes, it's worth it. Teach your staff how to work with it and the importance of it, and watch that average gift grow, because it does really make a difference. What you're trying to do is change, but change for good.
Claim your Chariot account
The most direct way to make that change is to claim your free Chariot account, which lets your nonprofit receive electronic grant payments, with the donation data attached, from 21+ DAF provider partners including DJCF and Founders Pledge.
Claiming your account opens a real bank account provided by Column N.A., Member FDIC, that is legally owned by your nonprofit, and more than 15,000 organizations already use one. This is the reason our compliance verification process is so thorough. Federal law requires banks to verify whoever opens an account, and that same diligence is what keeps bad actors away from your funds. Your information is used only for verification, never for a credit check, and never shared or sold. Receiving disbursements is free and funds are FDIC insured*.
Our onboarding guide walks through every step, and you can read more about why our verification process is so thorough here.
Get ready for DAF Day: October 8, 2026
This webinar is part of the DAF Day prep series, building to the sector-wide goal of moving billions, faster. Here's how to be ready before October 8:
- Get on the DAF Day Giving Page: add your preferred DAF giving page URL in your account settings. This is how donors find you on October 8.
- Download the free marketing toolkit at dafday.com. Graphics, copy templates, and campaign guidance ready to use.
- Enable DAFpay. Chariot integrates with 70+ fundraising platforms and is available as standalone form components for paid Chariot users.
- Add DAF giving information to your website: your EIN, mailing address, and a named contact for donor questions.
Questions? Email the DAF Day team at dafday@givechariot.com.
Chariot builds the infrastructure that makes DAF giving easier on both ends of the payment, from DAFpay to Gift Processing to Disbursements. If your organization is ready to modernize how it sends or receives DAF grants, fill out our contact form to learn more.
And one encouragement from Megan for smaller organizations: any qualified 501(c)(3) can receive DAF grants, no national brand or large development team required, and sponsors like DJCF will send grants as small as $100. It's a way for local organizations to position themselves alongside the blue-chip names and encourage supporters to keep their philanthropy at home.
That's exactly where the DAF Day series goes next: join us for "DAF Fundraising for Smaller Nonprofits" on August 5 at 12pm ET. Register here.
