Record a received DAF grant
Updated last week
Use Giving source: DAF grant on the donation form to record a donor-advised fund grant your organization has already received. This records money that arrived. It does not request a grant, connect to a DAF provider such as DAFpay or Chariot, track pending grants, or charge the gift again.
Before you start
Have the grant letter or remittance in hand: it names the sponsoring charity and any advisor, fund, or anonymity instructions. Recording the donation needs donation access; creating a new donor from a picker needs donor-management permission.
DAF grants accept received payment methods only: Cash, Check, Wire Transfer (including incoming EFT), and External Processor. Card, ACH, PayPal, and in-kind methods are not offered for this source. A received payment has one giving source across all of its allocations, including split gifts.
Record the grant
From a donor profile, select Add giving in the header, then select Add Donation.
In Giving source, select DAF grant.
In DAF sponsor, search for and select the sponsoring charity. The sponsor is the financial owner of the donation.
Optional: in Location (optional), select the sponsor office associated with the grant, or leave Not recorded. The selected location applies to the whole payment, including split allocations.
Under Grant disclosure, choose how the grant identifies the advisor.
Enter the amount, donation date, and designations, and select a received payment method.
Optional: for each allocation, select Apply to sponsorship to cover periods of an existing commitment. See Apply a received gift to sponsorship coverage.
Select Save, review the Confirm donation summary, and confirm.
The confirmation summary shows the giving source, the financial owner, the disclosure with the advisor or fund details, any reference, the allocations, any sponsorship coverage, and the acknowledgment plan.
Gift date, deposit date and sponsorship choice
Enter the actual gift date shown by the remittance. For a check, record Deposit date separately when known. These are separate dates; changing the source does not change them, and leaving an existing gift date unchanged preserves its saved value.
If the selected advisor has one active sponsored recipient, Gratona can suggest that recipient. Review the choice before saving. If there are several recipients, choose the intended recipient or split the received payment across allocations. A suggested recipient does not apply coverage: select the explicit sponsorship coverage option and review the confirmation if the gift should cover periods of an existing commitment.
Choose the grant disclosure
Grant disclosure controls which identity fields the form shows and what the acknowledgments may include.
Disclosure option | Required fields | Acknowledgments may show |
|---|---|---|
Not recorded yet | DAF sponsor | Neither identity |
Name the recommending donor | DAF sponsor, Recommended by | The advisor, and the fund name if entered |
Share the fund name only | DAF sponsor, DAF fund name | The fund name, never the advisor |
Anonymous grant | DAF sponsor | Neither identity |
Not recorded yet is a working state for a grant whose details you have not confirmed. Anonymous grant means the gift is intentionally anonymous; the two are recorded differently even though neither shows an identity. Choosing Not recorded yet or Anonymous grant clears any fund name you entered.
A reusable fund name is not a grant reference. DAF fund name is the fund's standing name, such as Smith Family Fund. Grant reference is the identifier for this specific grant, such as the grant or check ID.
Changing the disclosure away from Name the recommending donor clears the advisor and any selected sponsorship coverage. When coverage is already selected, Gratona asks you to confirm the change first.
Select or add the DAF sponsor
The DAF sponsor picker groups results in up to three lists:
Your institutions: giving-institution records your organization already uses.
Existing organizations: ordinary organization records that match your search. Selecting one asks whether to convert it to a giving institution and keep its history; confirm only when that is what you intend.
Directory: a starter directory of known DAF sponsors. Selecting a directory entry links or creates the institution record. This is not a provider connection: Gratona does not contact the sponsor or receive grants through it.
Use the Add institution option when no result matches. A giving institution is an organization record used for fields such as DAF sponsor and IRA custodian. A new giving institution has no donor portal access; converting an organization that already has portal credentials preserves its existing account controls. Do not mark a church or company giving its own funds as an institution merely because it is an organization.
The Add institution option creates a new record from a name; contact details and custom fields are edited on the institution's profile afterward, or entered with the full form in the Add Donor flow. Enter only details confirmed by the remittance, and keep supplied contact details valid. Reuse a matching existing institution or directory entry before adding another. Directory reuse does not merge historical duplicates or match an institution in another CRM automatically. For the complete picture, see Manage DAF sponsors, IRA custodians, and institution locations.
Institution location
When a DAF sponsor is selected, the form shows Location (optional). Choose one of the sponsor's active locations or leave Not recorded; the default location is marked (default) in the list. The selected location applies to the whole received payment, including every split allocation.
The saved gift keeps the location name and address recorded when it was saved. Later edits to the sponsor's locations, default changes, and archiving do not rewrite a saved gift, archived locations cannot be selected for new gifts, and existing gifts are never auto-filled with a location. For adding and editing offices, see Manage DAF sponsors, IRA custodians, and institution locations.
The DAF grant and soft-credit receipt variants can include the recorded office name and address; values are blank when the gift has no usable saved location.
Add the advisor
Recommended by appears when Grant disclosure is Name the recommending donor. The advisor can be an individual or an organization. If the advisor has no record yet, select Add donor in the picker: it opens the Add Donor form, and the new record is selected for the gift without saving the donation. Add donor appears only when your role can manage donors and a donor form is available.
After you save
The donation is recorded once, owned by the DAF sponsor: the sponsoring institution receives the hard credit. Recognition follows the individual you select under Recommended by, not whichever donor profile the form was opened from. When Grant disclosure is Name the recommending donor and an advisor is chosen, each allocation automatically receives a donor-advised-fund soft credit for that advisor, so the advisor is recognized without a second donation or a manual duplicate credit. Fund-only, anonymous, and not-recorded grants create no advisor credit; never invent an advisor to complete the record. Gift-level Grant disclosure does not change the donor's global privacy preferences. For how credits appear on profiles, see Soft Credit.
The manual Add Soft Credit control appears only for Direct gifts. For DAF grants, use Grant disclosure and Recommended by so Gratona assigns advisor recognition automatically.
Acknowledgments
DAF grants use a dedicated DAF grant receipt variant, and the advisor thank-you uses the receipt's soft-credit variant. New source-specific starter templates, including the DAF advisor thank-you starter, begin disabled and use wording appropriate to the acknowledgment. Review the content and enable the required template before relying on email. The advisor thank-you requires the shared Soft Credit variant to be configured and enabled. The parent Donor Payment Receipt template in the applicable email set must also exist and be enabled; enabling only a variant is insufficient when the parent receipt is disabled. Review and enable the required variants in Automated email before you rely on email for these gifts. See Auto Emails.
When a DAF grant is split into allocations, the advisor thank-you is one acknowledgment that covers every allocation and shows the full gift total, even when the allocations use different program email sets. The first allocation's email set supplies the template and send settings; Gratona does not fall back to a template from a later allocation's set.
If a required variant is missing or disabled, that acknowledgment is not sent; other independently eligible acknowledgments are not necessarily prevented. The standard receipt is never used as a fallback. The advisor thank-you applies only when Grant disclosure is Name the recommending donor and an advisor is selected. An email address, recipient email preferences, suppression, and per-gift opt-outs also affect delivery, so check the confirmation acknowledgment plan.
Open the DAF advisor thank-you tab to review the named advisor message. That tab and Soft Credit share the same saved template and enabled setting, so changes affect both uses. Opening the tab preserves existing custom content. An unchanged copy of the Standard Donation body is blocked for DAF acknowledgment previews, printing, delivery and admin tests; replace it with appropriate grant or recommendation wording and review the result.
Two opt-outs are independent: Don't send the DAF grant acknowledgment to the sponsor, and Don't send the advisor thank-you email.
When the required acknowledgment variant is available and can render, an owner without an email address can use Print acknowledgment from the confirmation preview. Printing is manual and does not send email.
Edit an existing gift
To reclassify an existing gift, open it from the Donations Table and choose to edit it. Use Giving source to change the source explicitly where permitted, and review the changed financial owner, source, and recognition before you save. Older gifts remain Direct until someone intentionally changes them, and the Giving source control is available when editing them. Ownership changes can be locked by integration mappings, recorded refunds, or reconciliation requirements. Do not delete or duplicate the gift to work around a lock.
Send the gift to another CRM through Zapier
New Donations and Updated Donation include Giving Source, DAF disclosure, fund name, disclosed advisor, grant reference and the recorded soft-credit line items. Map the sponsor as the financial owner, use the soft-credit line items for advisor recognition, and honor disclosure. See New Donations for constituent, transaction and date mappings.