Donor-advised funds are a fast-growing segment in the American philanthropic arena and have been for years, but until recently people didn’t have a clear picture of where the grant money from these vehicles went because there was no single data source and there are challenges given the way granting data is recorded.

But with a recent report, entitled The Data on Donor-Advised Funds: New Insights You Need to Know, we now have a better idea of where the money goes.

The report was researched and written by the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University—Purdue University Indianapolis, with support from the Giving USA Foundation and the Fidelity Charitable Trustees’ Initiative. The Lilly Family School analyzed granting data from a small number of organizations that represented roughly half of all granting dollars from donor-advised funds between 2012 and 2015, a figure amounting to more than $22 billion in grants.

According to the report, grants from donor-advised funds generally reflected overall U.S. charitable giving trends during the measured time frame with one key difference—namely, they devoted a larger share of their money to education than to religion. That was a reversal of the overall giving percentages estimated by Giving USA.

Specifically, education-related causes grabbed 28% of donor-advised fund grants measured by the report from 2012 to 2015, followed by religion at 14% and public-society benefit, which also took 14%. (The latter category includes the likes of United Way chapters, Jewish appeal funds and federations, veteran’s affairs organizations and civil rights nonprofits.)

That differed from the overall charitable distribution numbers recorded by Giving USA, where 32% of the money went to religion, 15% went to education, 12% went to human services and 12% went to private foundations.

Human services took in 11% of grant money from donor-advised funds, while the public-society benefit sector got 7% of the overall donation money measured by Giving USA. The categories including arts, culture and the humanities; international giving; and environmental and animal-related giving received single-digit amounts of grant money both from donor-advised funds and overall charitable distributions. (Note: Donor-advised funds are prohibited from granting to private foundations.)

According to the Giving USA report, distribution patterns among donor-advised funds track more closely with the trends of high-net-worth donors, who tend to give away a larger share to education than to religion.

As defined by the National Philanthropic Trust, donor-advised funds are a philanthropic giving vehicle administered by a charitable sponsor. This structure allows donors to establish and fund an account by making irrevocable, tax-deductible contributions to the charitable sponsor. Donors then recommend grants from those funds to other charitable organizations.

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