Curated weekly intelligence on digital philanthropy, decentralized giving, and the future of impact.
After the market-structure bill failed, the rules that decide how a donated token is treated moved into the SEC-CFTC Harmonization Initiative and each agency's own orders. That record is public, dated and citable, and it can be revised, which makes reading it, and noting what you relied on, part of stewardship.
Ask a room of nonprofit leaders which giving vehicle is more transparent, the on-chain donor collective or the donor-advised fund, and most will name the fund without pausing, beca…
A foundation treasurer holding part of her reserves in a stablecoin, meaning a digital token engineered to hold a steady value of one dollar or one euro, has learned that the token…
A nonprofit deciding whether to build the capacity to receive gifts of property rather than cash needs some estimate of how large and how steady that kind of giving is, because the…
On September 15 the Senate let the furthest-reaching attempt yet to define a decentralized blockchain in federal law stall on the floor, because the motion to proceed to the Digita…
Nearly eighty state banking associations, together with the American Bankers Association and the Independent Community Bankers of America, sent every senator a letter this month as…
Foundation boards attract research attention because the board is the point where a donor's money stops being private property and becomes a charitable trust held for someone else'…
Anyone setting an international grantmaking budget for the coming year has to begin from a figure for how much private charitable money actually crosses national borders, because t…
A foundation treasurer who moved a slice of operating reserves into a stablecoin, a digital token engineered to stay worth one dollar, has probably noticed something she was never …
Fundraisers offer two explanations for the disappearing small donor, and current evidence fits neither one cleanly. The first is that people cannot afford to give, because wages st…
The people who built decentralized giving to remove the person in charge keep discovering that a new one has quietly formed. They did what the theory asked. They spread the tokens …
Independent Sector surveys public trust in nonprofits and in philanthropy on an annual cycle, because a sector that raises money on public confidence needs a consistent instrument …
A donor-advised fund earns its keep by the grants that leave it, so the milestone DAFgiving360 reported on July 28, 2026 looks like an unambiguous win, because its donors granted m…
Ask any donor who funds a named endowment where the authority over that gift actually sits, and most will say the foundation holds it in trust, because that is the arrangement the …
The digital dollar that nonprofits started using to move aid across borders was supposed to travel without a bank in the middle. This year federal financial-crime regulators propos…
For three years the most common reason a nonprofit gave for not accepting crypto, meaning digital money and assets that move over the internet without a bank in the middle, was reg…
Ask a donor who has just signed a seven-figure endowment agreement what would happen if the institution quietly spent the money on something the gift never named, and most will des…
Participatory grantmaking has become one of the most comfortable phrases in philanthropy, and that comfort is the problem. Funders convene community panels, run listening sessions,…
Anyone who has watched a decentralized giving experiment collapse into rule-by-whales has quietly wondered whether the technology was to blame, and a piece of governance research a…
For twenty years the safest assumption in American philanthropy was that Warren Buffett's money would keep arriving at the Gates Foundation every summer, because he had committed i…
United States securities regulators are preparing a rule that never mentions philanthropy and could still move the ground beneath on-chain giving, meaning charitable gifts made dir…
On June 9, the House Ways and Means Committee held a full-committee hearing on digital asset taxation, and the session treated charitable crypto gifts as a matter of tax procedure …
A bill that would settle one of the oldest open questions in digital giving just missed its first deadline. The bill is the CLARITY Act, formally the Digital Asset Market Clarity A…
A donor-advised fund is marketed as the donor's fund, and the law describes it differently. That distance is familiar to tax lawyers and rarely mentioned to donors, and it is now t…
The Center for Effective Philanthropy's State of Nonprofits 2026, its fourth annual read on how leaders are faring, surfaced a finding the sector has felt but rarely named. Nonprof…
The charitable provisions of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act have been in effect since the first of January, and most of the sector has read them as a set of separate adjustments. O…
For years the sector treated cryptocurrency giving as small money, the loose change of an impulsive donor who clicked a button during a price spike and forgot about it by morning. …
The promise of stablecoin giving was always that a digital dollar could move to a cause without passing through the slow machinery of banks, and that frictionlessness was the selli…
The nonprofit sector has spent a decade worrying about the aging of its donor base and the arrival of the next generation. According to new survey data from Bloomerang and The Harr…
A quiet assumption sits under modern fundraising: donor privacy is a preference, not a protected posture. If a regulator asks, the field complies. If a reporter asks, the field imp…
The appraisal requirement has been the single most consistent friction point in crypto philanthropy for the last three years. If you donated more than five thousand dollars in digi…
Anyone who has ever opened a membership vote knows the quiet disappointment of building a democracy that few members attend, and a new study of on-chain giving communities suggests…
For three years, corporate giving teams built machinery to prove they were good, and now the rules are telling them to build less of it. The European Union has adopted its 2026 Omn…
The gift you make next year may already have been shaped by a room you will never sit in. Most donors picture the decisive moment of a gift as the moment they give, the click or th…
The hardest philanthropic model to defend on paper is the one that is producing the best outcomes in practice, and the sector has spent three years explaining why trust-based givin…
A hundred million dollars in crypto donations is not a milestone. It is a threshold, and the sector that spent five years asking whether crypto giving was real has been asking the …
The youngest adult donors in America are giving at higher rates than their parents and grandparents, and the organizations waiting for them to age into generosity have already miss…
A tax break just arrived for every giver in the country, and the same law quietly made the most generous gifts worth less. For the first time in years a universal charitable deduct…
Trust in giving usually arrives after a scandal, and a financial regulator in Malaysia just decided not to wait. The country's Securities Commission, the same kind of body that pol…
A policy designed to let more Americans deduct their giving is projected to shrink the total amount given, and that contradiction is the point. Candid, a nonprofit data organizatio…
Donors are told that a donor-advised fund honors their wishes, and several states just passed laws because it does not always have to. A donor-advised fund, meaning a charitable ac…
The tax reform analysis predicted two opposite effects at once, and both are correct, which means the sector is about to split into two separate philanthropies operating under the …
Eighteen billion dollars moved through donor-advised funds in a single year, and the organizations receiving it had no seat at the table where that decision was made. That is the f…
When does a foundation's grantmaking become its public statement, and when does its public statement become the most important grant it has made all year? The Open Society Foundati…
Treasury announced a redesign of the Form 990, which is the annual financial disclosure that every charity files with the IRS, and the trade press has framed the move as a transpar…
Why does the dominant headline about donor-advised funds, the charitable accounts that let a donor take the tax deduction now and release the grants to nonprofits later, keep sayin…
What if the most consequential data point in nonprofit philanthropy this spring is the one no individual donor was reading, because it lived inside a sector-report PDF until it did…
For three years the most common reason a nonprofit gave for not accepting crypto, meaning digital money and assets that move over the internet without a bank in the middle, was not…
The sector had a tidy explanation for why crypto giving stayed hard, and this past year quietly proved it incomplete. The explanation was volatility. Donations arrived as Bitcoin, …
The pitch for on-chain giving was always transparency. Every donation posted to a public ledger, every transfer traceable by anyone who cared to look. A platform called Silent Dono…
The most famous failure in crypto history has returned, and it came back as one of the most ambitious experiments in giving anyone is running right now. The DAO, a decentralized au…
Most people who open a donor-advised fund believe they are buying control. They are choosing the timing of their gifts, the causes they want to reach, the privacy they prefer, and …
A donor-advised fund, meaning a charitable account that lets a donor take a tax deduction now and recommend gifts to nonprofits later, was supposed to be the one charitable decisio…
For as long as anyone in this work can remember, one number has carried the weight of the whole sector. Total giving. It rises in a strong year and falls in a hard one, and a devel…
A convergence this year between Stanford Social Innovation Review's analysis of grassroots giving and The Hill's reporting on what it called the ten-dollar donor recession landed o…
The Senate Banking Committee advanced the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act on May 14, 2026 in a fifteen-to-nine vote, with two Democrats voting yes and giving the bill its first bi…
The National Cryptocurrency Association released its second annual State of Crypto Holders Report on May 13, 2026, built on a Harris Poll survey of ten thousand US holders fielded …
Foundation Source released its 2026 donor survey on February 26, 2026, and the headline number reads like a recovery. Ninety-three percent of the high-net-worth donors it surveyed,…
TIME published its second annual TIME100 Philanthropy list on May 14, 2026, and the most revealing thing about it is who made it. The class is unranked, grouped as Leaders, Titans,…
The Center for Effective Philanthropy released A Sector in Crisis on January 28, 2026, and one pair of findings in it has a structure the sector is not used to seeing. Sixty-four p…
Michael and Susan Dell committed six and a quarter billion dollars in December 2025 to seed investment accounts for twenty-five million American children, one deposit of $250 per c…
The Giving Block published its 2026 Annual Report on March 4, 2026, and one number is doing most of the talking. The average crypto gift processed on the platform in 2025 was $11,0…
A year ago Ripple committed $25 million, the majority of it delivered in RLUSD, a stablecoin meaning a kind of digital money that holds a steady value like a digital dollar moving …
In July 2025 the Association of Fundraising Professionals released its Q1 2025 Fundraising Effectiveness Project data, and the numbers tell a story the sector has been quietly tell…
Most DAOs built for collective decision-making show low participation in collective decision-making. Across a census of 10,541 decentralized autonomous organizations on six platfor…
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