Are Donor-Advised Funds Facilitating Anonymous Giving To Politically Engaged Charities?

Helen Flannery (Institute for Policy Studies) & Brian Mittendorf (Ohio State; Google Scholar), Are Donor-Advised Funds Facilitating Anonymous Giving to Politically Engaged Charities?:

Donor-advised funds are a prominent and rapidly growing charitable giving vehicle. As intermediaries, they serve as a layer of separation between donors and grantees, a layer that provides a significant degree of donor anonymity. With this in mind, we examine whether donor-advised funds help facilitate giving to politically engaged charities — a type of giving that donors may particularly prefer not be publicized. We find that donor-advised fund sponsors distribute grants to politically engaged charities at a rate nearly 1.7 times that of other giving methods, with an even higher rate for national sponsors in particular. We further show that giving to politically engaged charities is greater when sponsoring organizations are more financially reliant on donor-advised funds, and when sponsors receive more funding from private foundations — this latter finding indicating that donor-advised funds are anonymizing political gifts from private foundations. 

In additional analyses, we find that donor-advised fund sponsors publicly promote anonymity at higher rates than do operating charities; however, sponsors that do more promotion do not give grants to politically engaged organizations at markedly different rates than less vocal sponsors. Finally, we find that donor-advised funds give grants to anti-government and hate groups — organizations at the extreme fringe of the political spectrum — at a rate 3.5 times that of other giving methods; in fact, we find that donor-advised funds account for more than one-quarter of all non-government giving received by these organizations. Collectively, our results suggest that donor-advised funds play a key role in the wider network of money in politics.