I can’t tell you much about the donor behind the recent $500,000 gift to Mount Calvary Christian. Neither can officials at the central Pennsylvania school.
Jared Griest, who leads Mount Calvary, found out about the donation in a phone call shortly after the school’s annual event for grandparents of students. The donor was in attendance, he says. Otherwise, Griest knows nothing. Such selfless generosity, he says, “is pretty amazing.”
Plenty of donors duck the bouquets of praise tossed after big gifts. But Mount Calvary’s story comes with a twist. Whoever made the gift cloaked their identity by donating through a start-up called Silent Donor. The company, which launched publicly two years ago, is betting that a growing number of Americans want to give money to charity but not their name.
Its business model is simple. Donors send gifts to a donor-advised fund affiliated with the company. For a fee — typically 5 percent of the donation, sometimes less — the DAF forwards the money to the charity designated by the donor.
Whether Silent Donor’s bet pays off, the venture illustrates the new ways that the anonymous donor — a perennial character in philanthropy at least as far back as medieval times — is showing up in the 21st century. With philanthropy increasingly conducted digitally and through intermediaries, donors have easy means to hide from the public and even the receiving charity. Donor-advised funds are the biggest of these go-betweens, but there are plenty of others.
The headline news is that these giving vehicles can provide cover to questionable activities, including funneling “dark money” from the wealthy to influence politics. Yet donors also are deploying anonymity for strategic and practical purposes unrelated to their policy goals or their humility. It’s become a handy tool for the busy and the privacy-minded, a virtual Swiss Army knife to address any number of concerns. That’s changing the dynamics of giving, introducing new tensions to the nonprofit-donor relationship, and challenging fundraising conventions.
Tsunami of Solicitations
Tim Sanders, founder of Silent Donor, reached out to me when the company publicly launched in 2022. At the time, he was seven years out of the University of Wisconsin at Madison and coming off a job as a project manager with GG&A, the fundraising and philanthropy-management consulting firm.
Sanders says the market opportunity for Silent Donor presented itself in the relentless stream of nonprofit solicitations that hit his inbox after he made a charitable gift as a wedding present for a friend. There was no easy way to give to charity, he concluded, without triggering an email tsunami.
Sanders also saw signs of a nascent but fast-growing privacy movement that he believes the nonprofit world is ignoring. Sales of software to block monitoring of your web browsing. The popularity of VPNs, or virtual privacy networks. The calls for stringent privacy-protection laws like those adopted in Europe.
Worried by identity theft and the sale of their personal data, consumers balk at handing over information in routine transactions, including donations, Sanders says. “Our plan was to create the path of least resistance for privacy-seeking donors,” he says.
Silent Donor calls itself the “world’s largest anonymous donation platform,” which is a hard claim to check, as it appears to have no direct rivals. Still, many other giving vehicles offer anonymity as a feature if not a chief selling point.
Digital giving platforms routinely offer some form of privacy. Individuals using Benevity for workplace giving can provide personal information to the charity or nothing but their ZIP code. GiveCampus — a digital platform through which colleges and schools run giving days and crowdfunding efforts — posts real-time lists of donors to online campaigns but offers the chance to opt out.
Giving vehicles for big donors also offer opacity. The philanthropist who gives through a limited-liability company can leave little or no trace. The same is true for the benefactor who gives in Bitcoin or another digital currency. And it’s not uncommon for foundations and individual donors who give to an organization through a fiscal sponsor to ask that their name be kept from the recipient organization.
Donor-advised funds are by far the biggest of the mystery-inducing philanthropic vehicles. Giving from DAFs tops $50 billion each year — more than what’s flowing to charities from foundations, according to the latest data. And unlike foundations, DAFs are not required to report grant details publicly on tax forms. Every DAF-issued gift can be sent without a scintilla of information of who’s doing the sending.
Phantom Donors on the March?
No source tracks anonymous giving industrywide, but the few figures available suggest that phantom donors are not growing in number, despite the new abundance of ways to put gifts in a black box. Over the past decade, about 9 percent of gifts of $1 million or more were made anonymously. That’s down more than 2 percentage points from the previous 10 years, according to the Chronicle’s database of big charitable gifts.
At GiveCampus, the share of donors who opt out of the roll call of contributors has remained steady at about 13 percent since the company started in 2015. CEO Kestrel Linder told me: “We almost never see — and almost never hear of — people who say, ‘I’m giving my money to this university or this private high school, and I don’t want them to know who I am.’”
Every DAF-issued gift can be sent without a scintilla of information of who’s doing the sending.
With DAFs, donor information relayed from fund sponsors to charities can be confusing and incomplete. Development-office gift processors sometimes erroneously conclude donations are anonymous. (See sidebar.) But research suggests only a small number of fund donors want to keep their identity hidden from the charities. Two reports — one from the American Enterprise Institute and another from the Donor-Advised Fund Research Collaborative — indicate that fewer than 5 percent of DAF transactions are made with the intent of hiding the donor’s name.
Reporting this story, I talked to more than 20 fundraisers, consultants, wealth advisers, donors, and giving experts. None suggested that anonymity is on the rise. “We’re seeing very, very little anonymous philanthropy,” says Mark Medin of the UJA-Federation of New York — this despite controversy over donations to Jewish organizations during the Israel-Hamas War.
Alyssa Wright, whose Wright Collective firm helps progressive organizations with capital campaigns and major gifts, says young donors want to be visible in their giving, in part because they want to find others to drive change collectively. “I feel like the anonymous gifts we see are, for lack of a better phrase, the last round of gifts from an older generation,” Wright says.
Ducking Social Media
Even if donors aren’t going undercover en masse, the calculus of making a gift publicly is shifting.
Donors have long made contributions anonymously for religious reasons or out of a sense of modesty or humility. The affluent also routinely decline to attach their names to big gifts so as not to signal their wealth to friends, neighbors, or colleagues. Parents or grandparents — the Mount Calvary donor, perhaps? — may not want their donation to color how friends or teachers see their child or grandchild.
Social media, with its enormous power and reach, has ushered in new fears. Platforms serve as megaphones for anyone who finds fault with a gift.
I spoke with a philanthropist who, with his wife, gives away about $250,000 a year, more than half of it through a DAF. They typically ask charities to make their gifts anonymous. (Not surprisingly, he asked that I not use his name here.) The two are both almost 70 and grew up in families where you were expected to give back to your community. “The notion that you would look for credit — through a name in the annual report, the name and the giving level, the name on a building or a fund — that just wasn’t how we were raised,” he says.
In family foundations with a defined mission and vision, it’s not uncommon to see family members choose anonymity when they go off script to give toward a personal interest. Such anomalous gifts can confuse charities looking to the foundation for support. And sometimes the donors simply don’t want relatives to know. “We’ll often see that anonymous giving is embraced when individuals break with family tradition,” says Nick Tedesco, CEO of the National Center for Family Philanthropy.
Philanthropy also has a rich tradition of giving anonymously to causes seen as controversial. In 1958, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that charitable donors have a constitutional right to anonymity, it noted that NAACP supporters “faced economic reprisal, loss of employment, threat of physical coercion, and other manifestations of public hostility.”
“Every major social movement in the history of America has relied on anonymous donors being able to come together without fear of retribution or retaliation,” says Elizabeth McGuigan, who tracks policy for the Philanthropy Roundtable.
The advent of social media, with its enormous power and reach, has ushered in new fears. Facebook, Instagram, X, Reddit, and similar platforms all serve as megaphones for anyone who finds fault with a donation. “There’s no quiet giving anymore,” says Phil Hills, a principal at Graham-Pelton, a fundraising consultancy.
In 2020, when Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and his wife, Patty Quillin, gave $120 million to Morehouse College, Spelman College, and the United Negro College Fund, students and alumni of other historically Black colleges and universities denounced the donations, saying their philanthropy-starved institutions were being ignored. “This is absolutely ridiculous!!” one angry Facebook commenter wrote.
The country’s polarization and “cancel culture” heighten uneasiness about donations to causes that sit on the fault lines of America’s divides. Donors who support a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas War sometimes give anonymously to avoid being mistakenly labeled as someone committed to broad pro-Palestinian criticism of Israel, says Chandra Anderson, a fundraising consultant who often works with Black-led social-movement organizations. “They don’t want to be removed from their community or shunned,” Anderson says.
Foundations, too, conceal gifts to avoid backlash. A grant maker told me privately not long ago that the organization made grants to support immigration groups through a DAF to avoid controversy.
“The current climate of cultural divisiveness has transformed the act of donating into a public and oftentimes politicized spectacle,” concluded a recent report by the Philanthropy Roundtable. Thanks to “doxxing” — posting the address and other contact information of individuals to encourage harassment — critics can confront a donor either via social media or “at their front doorstep,” the report notes.
Philanthropic families are increasingly “wary about revealing the size and scale of their wealth to the public for fear of solicitation or scrutiny,” says Tedesco, the family-philanthropy expert. They are also, he adds, “rightly concerned about the safety of their loved ones.”
‘They’re Looking to Hide’
While fears about security and public rebuke motivate some anonymous donors, the new giving instruments also are proving a useful tool for the strategic donor. For fundraisers, they introduce challenges evident in how Tim Sanders and others market their products.
“We deliver the donation on your behalf so you don’t ever have to deal with the deluge of messages urging you to send another donation,” reads a post on Silent Donor’s website. The headline: “Stop Annoying Charity Messages.”
Similarly, cryptophilanthropy executive Pat Duffy promotes the fact that anonymous digital-cash gifts prevent nonprofits from providing donor data to third-party marketing and wealth-screening companies. “If you’re like me, you probably don’t love the idea of the personal information you put in a donation form ending up on server farms designed to ‘steward’ you into being more generous,” writes Duffy, co-founder of the Giving Block, which processes cryptodonations.
Behind this marketing is a subtle truth: Through anonymity, donors can set the terms of their engagement with a nonprofit. Specifically, they can pick and choose which groups to stiff-arm.
In southern Florida, the Community Foundation recognized that many of the area’s seasonal residents — most of them snowbirds with connections to nonprofits back home — want to support charities in Florida but don’t want a relationship, says CEO Michael Chatman. “They’re looking to hide.”
Nonprofits are negotiating a tricky two-step, celebrating anonymous givers even as they encourage public giving to inspire generosity in others.
To distinguish itself in a crowded local philanthropy field, the foundation markets itself as a home for anonymous donors. Donor names are conveyed with only about half of its $400,000 in grants each year.
Donors who slip the mask of anonymity on and off can also control the timing for engaging with a group. The Center for Reproductive Rights saw an increase in anonymous donations by grassroots and midlevel donors after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling overturning Roe v. Wade. Tyler Kalogeros-Treschuk, director of individual giving, believes people were responding emotionally to an emergency. They were in a sense test-driving the organization.
“I imagine some people are looking to see how we evolve in a post-Roe world before they decide that they really want to double down on their investment and build that relationship,” Kalogeros-Treschuk says.
Experienced major donors sometimes give anonymously because they can’t make time for a charity relationship at a particular moment. “Some of these high-net-worth individuals may be building their business and getting their kids off to college,” says Wright, the consultant. “They’re just busy.”
Near the end of a fundraising campaign, it’s not unusual for donors who have given anonymously to reveal themselves and say, “We’re the ones who gave from the Vanguard fund,” Wright adds.
The Russell Family Foundation is assiduously transparent, making its grants and investments publicly available. But CEO Kathleen Simpson says at many foundations family members make personal gifts to hometown nonprofits anonymously because they are uncomfortable with their inherited wealth. “And you also don’t want to be continually approached, either. You want to live in your community as anonymously as you can.”
Foundations, too, give anonymously through DAFs or fiscal sponsors to avoid interacting with the recipient. “They want to give off-mission, and they don’t want to be solicited by other similar organizations,” says Ken Nopar, an executive with the American Endowment Foundation, a DAF sponsor.
Fundraisers vs. Anonymity
Fundraisers are adapting to this shifting nonprofit-charity relationship. They’re sending anonymous donors blind thank-you notes through DAF sponsors. They’re assigning staff to gather the breadcrumbs of information about mystery gifts. And they’re negotiating a tricky two-step, celebrating anonymous givers even as they encourage public giving to inspire generosity in others.
Stephanie Ellis-Smith, CEO of the philanthropy advisory firm Phila, worked in fundraising before the advent of these ready-made anonymity vehicles. She says she never had to spend time connecting the dots of nameless gifts, and she worries such work is adding stress to already overtaxed nonprofits.
Giving to charity, Ellis-Smith says, is an expression of your private values. Donors who withhold their names are depriving nonprofits of the chance to build a community of support that can offer an organization more than cash.
“I would challenge folks,” Ellis-Smith says. “What’s the least I can do to put a little bit more skin in the game, to feel more a part of the system. And that is showing who you are and standing behind what you’re doing. Stand behind your gift and speak to why.”
In my conversation with Jared Geist at Mount Calvary, he said the May donation was the first that the school had received anonymously from a DAF. “It was pretty neat,” he said of his interactions with Sanders and Silent Donor. “The whole process was really simple.”
Geist added that quiet giving is embedded in the culture of the church-based school, which doesn’t use naming rights in fundraising. (A few postgraduate scholarships are named for individuals). Major donors to capital projects are given the opportunity to choose Bible verses to appear in the building. The three largest gifts in Mount Calvary’s 48-year history have all been anonymous, including the recent $500,000 donation.
Sanders points to the school as an example of what’s possible for the nonprofit world if it stops trying to fight the privacy movement. For every donor like Mount Calvary’s, he says, there are thousands of others who want to give if they can be assured privacy. Nonprofits “just have to plug into this movement.”
As befitting the head of a company whose main product is secrecy, Sanders offers few details about the volume of gifts that Silent Donor manages. He tells me only: “We’ve helped thousands of donors across around 30 countries give millions of dollars to charity.” The company has yet to seek private funding from investors, but it might in the future, he says. “Very soon.”
