FinTech / Non-profit
Donor-Advised Fund & Charitable Giving Platform
A donor-advised fund platform serving donors, charities, and administrators. Contributions in, grants out, with charity verification, scheduled giving, giving cards, and investment pools in one system.
- Role
- Platform development, payment integrations, admin tooling, QA, and long-term support
- Plaid bank linking
- Card issuing and transactions
- Check issuance
- Scheduled job orchestration
The challenge
What the business was running into
- Donor-advised funds have long been the most efficient vehicle for charitable giving, but the administrative infrastructure was complex and inaccessible to smaller donors
- A three-sided platform required purpose-built workflows for donors, charities, and administrators, each with different data needs and compliance requirements
- Handling diverse asset types, including cash, stock, and securities, required robust financial processing and compliant documentation at every step
- Money leaves this system by check and by card, so a scheduled job that runs twice does not create a duplicate row, it creates a duplicate grant
The approach
Donor-advised funds are the most tax-efficient vehicle for charitable giving, and for most of their history they were also the least accessible. Setting one up meant a foundation, an administrator, and usually a lawyer. This platform packages that machinery into a product: a donor contributes, receives the deduction documentation immediately, holds the balance in an investment pool, and recommends grants to charities whenever they choose.
Three audiences use the same system and need very different things from it. Donors want a balance, a giving history, a way to set a goal and schedule recurring grants, and a card they can use at the moment they are asked to give. Charities want their profile, their documents, their grant activity, and read-only logins for staff who should see the money arriving without being able to change where it lands. Administrators want the queues: charities awaiting verification, checks on hold, balances to correct, inquiries to resolve, and a dashboard covering the entire fund. Each role got its own workflows rather than one interface with permissions bolted across it.
The financial plumbing is where charitable software either earns trust or loses it. Contributions arrive from linked bank accounts, cards, or securities. Grants leave as checks or card transactions, and checks introduce their own lifecycle of holds, expirations, and reissues, because a grant that sits uncashed for six months is still someone's money. Charity verification sits in front of all of it, so funds cannot reach an organization nobody reviewed.
One detail says more about this class of system than any feature list. The recurring grant runs are scheduled jobs, and scheduled jobs occasionally overlap. In an ordinary application that produces a duplicate record somebody deletes later. Here it produces a second grant, real money sent twice, so the job scheduling carries an explicit locking mechanism to make that impossible. Financial software is mostly ordinary until the moment it is not, and the difference lives in details like that one.
Key capabilities
What the system does
Donor account and giving history
Contributions, available balance, pending deposits, and full transaction history in one place, with tax documentation generated for every contribution rather than assembled at year end.
Grants, scheduled and paused
One-time and recurring grants to chosen charities, with the ability to pause a schedule, reissue a grant that never landed, and search past giving by period. Giving goals let donors set an intention and track against it.
Charity verification
Charities are reviewed before they can receive money, with document upload, account matching, and an explicit active or inactive status. A grant cannot be sent to an unverified organization by accident.
Giving cards
Card-based giving with activation, transaction handling, and lost or stolen card replacement, so a donor can give at the point of the ask rather than logging in later.
Bank and check rails
Linked bank accounts for funding, plus check issuance with hold and expiration handling, because a charitable grant that sits uncashed for months is an accounting problem the platform has to own.
Investment pools
Balances placed into investment pools while they wait to be granted, with allocations visible to donors and published to the public site.
Charity portal
Charities manage their own profile, documents, and grant activity, with read-only access for staff who need visibility without the ability to change banking details.
Administrator console
User and charity management, verification queues, check capture, balance corrections, inquiry resolution, and dashboards covering the whole fund in one view.
Outcome
Sophisticated charitable giving, previously the preserve of high-net-worth donors with legal counsel, packaged as a product an everyday donor can use.
Results
What changed for the business
Democratized donor-advised giving
Made sophisticated charitable giving accessible to everyday donors, not just high-net-worth individuals or institutions with legal counsel.
Faster fund disbursement
Charities receive funds faster with automated processing replacing manual paperwork and check handling.
Giving that runs on schedule
Recurring grants process on their own, which turns a donor's intention into a standing commitment rather than a monthly reminder they have to act on.
Full transaction visibility
Administrators have a complete audit trail for every donation, grant, and disbursement, with zero reconciliation gaps.