DAF Day 2025

Comprehensive insights into giving by organizations operating Donor-Advised Funds across Canada

WellFunded | Canada's Most Complete Charity Intelligence Platform

Trusted by leading Canadian DAFs, foundations, and wealth advisors managing over $1.3B in charitable assets.

Everything you see is from 2023 CRA filings—and that's a lot (but not all!)

We tracked 284 organizations operating DAFs that represent ~90% of Canada's DAF ecosystem.

What you're seeing is the most comprehensive look at where money flows through philanthropic intermediaries in this country.

Note: Includes distributions from DAF accounts, endowments, and other fund types held by these organizations.

Total Organizations

284

Operating a DAF
Total Funds

27,421

Across DAF Operators
Total Assets

$0

Held by DAF Operators
Total Revenue

$0

Generated by DAF Operators
Total Gifts Made

$0

Distributed by DAF Operators
How All DAFs Allocated Their Giving by Cause

Collective giving patterns across all Donor-Advised Funds, grouped by primary impact area.

Breakdown by Impact Area
Impact Area Gifts Amount %
Healthcare 9,486 $247,561,104 20.4%
Education 5,411 $190,866,793 15.7%
Religion 7,995 $120,130,121 9.9%
Community Development 4,348 $116,895,941 9.6%
Poverty Alleviation 4,659 $114,750,967 9.5%
Capacity Building 616 $81,634,752 6.7%
Arts and Culture 4,089 $77,413,816 6.4%
Uncategorized 1,298 $62,896,410 5.2%
Human Rights 1,578 $41,140,726 3.4%
Disaster Relief and Humanitarian Aid 829 $36,576,785 3.0%
Environment 1,678 $33,927,407 2.8%
Gender Equality 1,665 $28,702,159 2.4%
Animal Welfare 1,591 $15,121,798 1.3%
Senior Citizens Support 1,125 $15,013,011 1.2%
WASH (Clean Water) 129 $10,329,240 0.9%
Science and Technology 364 $8,427,605 0.7%
Sports and Recreation 679 $6,641,804 0.6%
Other (1 impact areas < 0.5%) 199 $4,958,988 0.4%
Total 47,739 $1,212,989,427 100.0%
Where DAF Money Goes Geographically

Distribution of DAF giving across Canadian provinces, based on charity mailing addresses.

Provincial Distribution
Province Gifts Amount %
Ontario 20,231 $520,557,727 42.9%
British Columbia 9,254 $291,783,981 24.1%
Alberta 6,388 $152,721,233 12.6%
Quebec 5,356 $113,492,507 9.4%
Other 402 $42,413,510 3.5%
Manitoba 2,159 $38,090,594 3.1%
Nova Scotia 1,168 $19,012,734 1.6%
Saskatchewan 1,404 $17,518,618 1.4%
Newfoundland and Labrador 397 $8,613,504 0.7%
New Brunswick 746 $6,889,267 0.6%
Prince Edward Island 119 $758,438 0.1%
Northwest Territories 55 $565,352 0.1%
Yukon 41 $313,388 0.0%
Nunavut 19 $258,574 0.0%
Total 47,739 $1,212,989,427 100.0%
Individual DAF Lookup

Search for a specific Donor-Advised Fund to see detailed giving patterns.

Giving Breakdown for
About This Data

This dashboard tracks all distributions from organizations that operate DAFs—including community foundations that also hold endowments and other fund types.

Based on sector reporting, we estimate 40-60% of tracked dollars come specifically from donor-advised accounts, with the remainder from other fund types held by these same organizations. This represents the most comprehensive public view of Canada's DAF ecosystem using available data.

All data is sourced from the Canada Revenue Agency T3010 Registered Charity Information Returns for the 2023 fiscal year.

This is publicly available open data that all Canadian registered charities are required to file annually.

This analysis includes all organizations that:

  • Reported operating as a Donor-Advised Fund (T3010 line 5860 = 'Y')
  • Manage more than one individual fund (T3010 line 5861 > 1)

This ensures we're analyzing organizations actively operating as multi-donor DAF platforms rather than single-fund reported organizations which may operate more as a foundation, or may have been misfiled by the organization due to a misunderstanding of the meaning of line 5860.

You may notice that summing all gifts shown in the cause and geography charts doesn't exactly equal the total gifts made figure displayed at the top.

Why? The CRA T3010 form has inherent discrepancies between the aggregate total gifts line item and the sum of individual gift detail rows. This is a data quality issue in the source data itself, not an error in our analysis.

The CRA data that identifies gifts made between charities contains thousands of rows with missing, incomplete, or inconsistent location information.

When we cannot reliably cross-reference a receiving charity's province or geographic region due to data quality issues, these gifts are grouped into "Other". This represents a limitation of the source data, not missing analysis on our part.

Open data from the Canada Revenue Agency varies wildly in quality and consistency across different organizations and reporting periods.

We've invested significant effort in cleaning, validating, and standardizing this data to provide insights that are as accurate as possible within the constraints of the source material. In one case where 2023 filings contained obvious errors (e.g., One of Canada's largest DAF reporting zero funds), we applied minimal corrections using their corrected 2024 filings.

Some data quality limitations remain inherent to the CRA's reporting system.