Public Reference

Industry Primers

Bottom-up NAICS industry primers written for both public-market and private investors. Leaf industries are researched from the ground up; every group, subsector, and sector above them reads as a contrast across the industries beneath it.

2122 industries · 24 sectors · NAICS 2022

Researched with AI assistance from official U.S. statistics and independent sources, with citations on every page. Figures are not individually verified against pinned evidence — primers marked Evidence-verified are. Industry research, not investment advice. Methodology.

IndustryNAICS 81321Other Services (except Public Administration)

Grantmaking and Giving Services (U.S.) — Industry Rollup Primer

NAICS 2022 code 81321. NAICS = North American Industry Classification System, the standard code set U.S. statistical agencies use to group businesses. This is a five-digit NAICS industry that rolls up three six-digit child industries: 813211 Grantmaking Foundations, 813212 Voluntary Health Organizations, and 813219 Other Grantmaking and Giving Services.

1. Overview

This is the industry of organized American giving — the foundations, disease charities, and community fundraisers that pool money and move it to a cause. In federal terms it is a ~$182 billion receipts industry with roughly 209,000 paid employees across about 21,700 staffed locations [1][2]. In plain terms, it is the machinery behind the $600-billion-plus that Americans give to charity each year [5][6].

The single most important fact for an investor spans all three children: every operating entity here is a tax-exempt nonprofit. There are no shares, no dividends, and no acquirers. You cannot buy the Gates Foundation, the American Cancer Society, or your local United Way, and no one else can either. So there is no "pure play," and this primer says so at the top.

What there is — and where the three children genuinely differ — is a for-profit layer wrapped around the charities: the asset managers and trust banks that collect fees on foundation and donor-advised-fund money, the software and payments vendors that run charity fundraising, and, uniquely in the health segment, the biopharma and drug-royalty streams that charity "venture philanthropy" helped create. The distinctive job of this rollup is to show how those seams — and the economics behind them — change as you move from foundations to health charities to federated fundraisers.

Forward-looking judgment: the money in this industry is large, durable, and growing with markets and the great wealth transfer — but it flows through nonprofits, so the investable winners are the diversified fee-earning and software businesses attached to the charities, not the charities themselves. The three children route that money to different investable seams, and knowing which is which is the whole point of this page.

2. What's inside — the three child industries and how they differ

All three children share one wall — no equity, nonprofit operators, indirect exposure only — but they differ sharply in size, ownership, direction of travel, and where value leaks to for-profit investors. The contrast table is the core of this primer.

813211 Grantmaking Foundations 813212 Voluntary Health Organizations 813219 Other Grantmaking & Giving
What it is Endowed foundations & charitable trusts that give from a capital pool (Gates, Ford, Lilly) [4] Disease-focused charities that raise from the public for research, prevention & patient support (Heart, Cancer, Alzheimer's) [4] Federated fundraisers that raise broadly and pass money through (United Way, community chests, Jewish Federations) [4]
Share of level — receipts ~72% (~$130.8B) [3] ~16% (~$29.2B) [3] ~12% (~$21.8B) [3]
Share of level — employees ~53% (110,793) [1] ~27% (57,356) [1] ~20% (41,324) [1]
Share of level — employer firms ~63% (12,586) [3] ~16% (3,096) [3] ~21% (4,257) [3]
Money source Endowment investment return + donor gifts/bequests [4] Public donations, events, sponsorships, some royalties [4] Workplace/employer campaigns, donations, grants (pass-through) [4]
Who "owns" them No equity owners; controlled by donor-appointed boards. Mix = independent/family, corporate, community, operating foundations. Assets extremely concentrated (Lilly + Gates ≈ $236B) [8] No equity owners; boards hold for mission. National 501(c)(3) + local chapters + paired 501(c)(4) advocacy arms. "Public charities," broad donor base [4] No equity owners; volunteer boards. ~1,800 locally governed United Way affiliates + community federations; largest pooled-giving cousins (commercial DAF sponsors) sit statistically in 813211 [16]
Direction of travel Assets growing to record ~$1.5T; grant volume defensive (5% mandate); slow share loss to DAFs/LLCs [7][11] Top-line squeeze — shrinking, top-heavy donor base + event fatigue; venture-philanthropy playbook maturing [15][12] Secular decline of the core — workplace giving erodes, donors disintermediate; DAF cousins rise [16]
Concentration (HHI) 202 — fragmented by firm, extreme by assets [3] 447.9 — a few household names + long tail [3] 128.7 — least concentrated of the three [3]
How to invest (the seam) Asset managers, trust banks & outsourced-CIO firms that earn fees on the $1.5T (BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, Northern Trust, BNY, State Street, Marsh McLennan/Mercer) [10] Fundraising software & payments (Blackbaud, PayPal) plus the unique biopharma/royalty seam (Vertex, Royalty Pharma) [12][13] Nonprofit software (Blackbaud) + DAF-linked asset managers (Charles Schwab; privately held Fidelity) [13][14]

Three takeaways from the contrast:

  1. Foundations dominate the dollars but not the labor. 813211 is 72% of receipts but only 53% of employees, because a foundation's "receipts" are largely investment income, not earned, labor-intensive revenue. Voluntary health organizations are the mirror image — 27% of employees but 16% of receipts — because running walks, events, patient services, and donor acquisition is people-heavy. That single divergence tells you these are different economic animals filed under one code.
  2. Two of the three seams are fee-on-assets; one has genuine upside. The foundation and federated-fundraiser seams both pay off as asset-manager economics — a fee skimmed off charitable money under management. Only the health segment has an engine that manufactures real equity/royalty upside inside the charity itself: venture philanthropy that funds drug development and sells the resulting royalties (Section 4).
  3. One name touches all three. Blackbaud (Nasdaq: BLKB), the dominant nonprofit-fundraising software vendor, sells into every child. It is the closest thing to a single listed proxy for the whole 81321 rollup [13].

Adjacent codes to keep separate (all three children draw these lines): contract fundraisers (561499), telemarketing bureaus (561422), social-advocacy and political organizations (81331, 813940), religious congregations (8131), and the hospitals, universities, and research labs that deliver services rather than fund them (622, 611310, 54171) [4].

3. How big it is

Federal ground-truth figures for the 81321 rollup — and note that the three children sum almost exactly into them, which is a good sign the level is measured consistently:

Metric (federal) Value Source / year
Receipts / revenue (employer universe) ~$181.9 billion Economic Census, 2022 [2]
Firms (employer) 19,915 Economic Census, 2022 [2]
Establishments with paid employees 21,717 County Business Patterns, 2023 [1]
Paid employees 209,473 County Business Patterns, 2023 [1]
Annual payroll ~$17.12 billion County Business Patterns, 2023 [1]
First-quarter payroll ~$4.19 billion County Business Patterns, 2023 [1]
Top-4 / top-8 firm receipts share (CR4 / CR8) 17.2% / 24.3% Economic Census, 2022 [2]
Top-20 / top-50 firm receipts share (CR20 / CR50) 33.4% / 43.8% Economic Census, 2022 [2]
Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) 116.6 Economic Census, 2022 [2]
SBA small-business size standard $34M–$47M avg. receipts (varies by child) SBA, 2023 [18]

County Business Patterns (CBP) and the Economic Census (EC) are U.S. Census Bureau programs. HHI is a standard concentration measure where under 1,500 counts as "unconcentrated"; CR4/CR8 = the combined revenue share of the four/eight largest firms. SBA = U.S. Small Business Administration; its size standard is a program-eligibility cutoff, not a measure of industry size, and is set per child code, so there is no single 81321 number.

A rollup-specific quirk worth flagging: the combined industry is less concentrated than any of its parts. The rollup HHI is 116.6 — lower than 813211's 202, 813212's 447.9, or 813219's 128.7 [2][3]. Pooling three distinct segments dilutes every firm's share of the combined total, so at the five-digit level no single organization commands even a modest slice of receipts. By this measure 81321 is one of the least concentrated industries in the entire U.S. economy.

But the undercount and the assets caveat together flip that picture — read them before using any figure here:

  • The employer count is a fraction of the real entity count. CBP counts only establishments with paid employees [1]. The bulk of 813211 — well over 120,000 private foundations, and by some counts toward 150,000 including operating and dormant entities — has no staff at all, run by trustees or an outside advisor with zero payroll [7]. The health and federated segments also have all-volunteer local groups below the threshold. So the ~21,700 employer establishments capture the staffed minority; the true number of legal giving entities is many times larger, dominated by tens of thousands of tiny, unstaffed foundations. The federal payroll and employment figures are accurate for what they measure — they simply do not see the long tail.
  • Receipts are not "the money in the sector," and they mean different things across the children. For foundations, receipts are mostly investment income plus fresh gifts, not earned revenue; for federated fundraisers, receipts can double-count as money passes through to other charities. The measures that actually matter for the sector's scale sit off this table: U.S. foundation assets reached a record ~$1.5 trillion [7], donor-advised funds hold roughly $300+ billion more [11][14], and those pools dwarf the $182 billion receipts figure. So the receipts-based "unconcentrated" reading coexists with extraordinary asset concentration — the 50 largest foundations alone hold ~$536 billion, and Lilly plus the two Gates entities ~$236 billion [8]. The industry is fragmented by firm and concentrated by capital at the same time.
  • The biggest pooled-giving vehicles are filed next door. Commercial DAF sponsors (Fidelity Charitable, Schwab's DAFgiving360, Vanguard Charitable) — some of the largest grant-makers in the country — are generally classified under 813211 or as public charities outside this code, so the fastest-growing part of organized giving is partly invisible to the 813219 line that would seem to house it [14].

For scale context outside the code: total U.S. charitable giving was $592.5 billion in 2024 and $617.2 billion in 2025 — the first year above $600 billion [5][6]. That is the entire giving system, not this industry's receipts; never substitute one for the other.

4. The investable universe — where value concentrates across the children

There is no equity in any of the three children. Exposure is always one step removed, through the for-profit ecosystem — and the three children route you to different corners of that ecosystem. Reserve the tickers below for this section and Section 10.

Seam A — Asset management, trust banking & outsourced-CIO (mainly 813211, partly 813219). Every dollar of the ~$1.5 trillion in foundation assets — and the DAF pools — generates fees for someone who invests, advises, or custodies it. The relevant metrics are institutional assets under management (AUM), net flows, fee rates, custody revenue, and client retention — none foundation-specific.

Company Ticker How it touches the industry
BlackRock BLK Largest asset manager; mandates, private-market access, and OCIO for endowments/foundations [10]
Morgan Stanley MS #1 U.S. outsourced-CIO (OCIO) provider via Graystone [10]
Marsh McLennan MMC Owns Mercer, the world's largest OCIO (~$670B); bought Vanguard's nonprofit OCIO book in 2024 [10]
Northern Trust / BNY / State Street NTRS / BK / STT Custody, asset servicing, and advisory for foundations and endowments
Charles Schwab SCHW Serves the DAFgiving360 charity; earns custody/asset-management economics on DAF assets [14]

OCIO = outsourced chief investment officer, a firm that runs an endowment's whole portfolio under delegated authority. Two large specialists built specifically around endowments and foundations — Commonfund and Cambridge Associates — are privately held, as are Fidelity and Vanguard's charitable arms, so they are not directly investable [10][14].

Seam B — Fundraising software & payments (all three children; the common thread).

Company Ticker How it touches the industry
Blackbaud BLKB Dominant donor-management, giving, and grant software; the one name selling into all three children; recurring revenue ~$1.1B; repeated take-private target (~$80/share, ~$4.3B, Clearlake) [13]
PayPal PYPL Donation processing and the separate PayPal Giving Fund charity [13]
Salesforce / Visa / Mastercard CRM / V / MA Nonprofit CRM and the card rails behind online and offline donations (all small, indirect slices of diversified giants)

(CRM = customer relationship management; AUM = assets under management.) Consolidation on this seam is a private-equity theme: GoFundMe Pro (formerly Classy), Apax-backed Bonterra, Hg-backed Benevity, and Bloomerang/Qgiv are all privately held [13].

Seam C — Venture philanthropy & drug royalties (unique to 813212). This is the only place inside the industry where a charity manufactures genuine investment upside rather than just paying fees. The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation seeded the science behind Vertex Pharmaceuticals' (VRTX) CF franchise, then sold its resulting drug royalties to Royalty Pharma (RPRX) for $3.3 billion in 2014 — about ten times its normal annual revenue [12]. Breakthrough T1D, Blood Cancer United, and the Michael J. Fox Foundation now chase versions of the same model. A private investor can sit on the buy side of those royalty sales — a real, return-bearing seam in an otherwise dividend-free sector.

The "owners" of the industry are its donors. The mega-endowments (Lilly ~$79.9B, Gates ~$77.2B, Ford ~$17.5B, Hewlett ~$14.2B, Robert Wood Johnson ~$13.4B, Getty ~$13.0B) are controlled by donor-appointed boards, not shareholders [8]. Do not confuse a corporate foundation with a same-named family foundation — Ford Philanthropy (the automaker's arm) is entirely separate from the independent Ford Foundation, and the Lilly Endowment is legally separate from Eli Lilly & Co. [4].

5. How the money works

Because the operators are nonprofits, the usual lens — revenue growth, margin, multiple — does not apply to the core. Each child runs on a different engine, and the rollup is the sum of three unlike economics:

Child Money in Economic engine The metric that matters
813211 Foundations Endowment investment return + donor gifts Total return on an invested corpus, spent down at a mandated floor Investment return vs. payout + costs + inflation
813212 Health charities Public donations, events, sponsorships Raise a dollar for well under a dollar, deploy to mission; a few convert research bets to royalties Program-expense ratio; donor retention; venture-philanthropy hits
813219 Federated fundraisers Employer campaigns, donations Raise cheaply, keep a small admin share, re-grant the rest; DAF sponsors earn fees on "float" Cost to raise a dollar; program-expense ratio; DAF payout & AUM

Three shared mechanics are worth carrying across the level:

  1. The 5% payout floor (813211). By law a private foundation must distribute at least 5% of its investment assets each year for charitable purposes, and pays a flat 1.39% federal excise tax on net investment income [9]. That legal floor gives the industry an unusual feature: roughly $70–80 billion of grant volume a year is effectively non-cyclical, floored regardless of donor mood [9].
  2. The program-expense ratio (813212/813219). For the fundraising children, the operating-margin equivalent is how much of each dollar reaches the mission. Watchdogs treat ~65–75%+ as "efficient." Its mirror — the cost to raise a dollar — plus donor retention (sector-wide just 42.9% in 2024, so acquisition is a costly treadmill) are the real unit economics [15].
  3. Fee-on-assets (the investable through-line). Whether it is a foundation's OCIO or a DAF sponsor's asset manager, the money for investors is the fee skimmed off charitable capital under management — and that fee pool scales with the ~$1.5 trillion asset base, which in turn tracks equity markets. That is the transmission line from this nonprofit industry to public and private portfolios. DAFs, notably, have no minimum payout (aggregate payout ran ~25% in 2024), versus the foundation 5% floor — so DAF assets, and the fees on them, tend to compound longer [11][14].

The "product" the whole level ships is grants and program spending — the $110-billion-plus that flows out of foundations plus the health and federated giving on top [5][6]. The ~$182 billion of federal "receipts" is mostly investment income and fresh contributions, not earned revenue — do not read it as an operating income statement.

6. What drives demand

Demand here means money flowing in (to be given) and grants flowing out. Across all three children the drivers rhyme:

  • Wealth creation and equity markets. Foundation assets and DAF balances are largely stock-linked, so bull markets swell them and bear markets shrink them. New foundations are typically born from a liquidity event — an initial public offering (IPO), a company sale, or big stock appreciation [7].
  • The great wealth transfer. Tens of trillions of dollars changing hands is a durable tailwind for foundation, DAF, and charitable-trust formation.
  • Disease burden and personal connection (813212). Heart disease and cancer remained the two leading U.S. causes of death in 2024; aging and chronic disease enlarge the communities that donate, and a donor's own family experience is the strongest single fundraising driver [15].
  • The 5% mandate (813211). Legally required payout puts a floor under grant volume — a defensive, non-cyclical feature rare among industries [9].
  • Tax policy. The charitable deduction and estate tax shape the size and timing of gifts. The 2025 reconciliation law (P.L. 119-21 / the One Big Beautiful Bill Act) adds a 0.5%-of-AGI floor on itemized individual charitable deductions from 2026 and a 1% corporate floor from 2028, plus a new small non-itemizer deduction that excludes gifts to DAFs — a mixed signal that raises the bar for large itemized and DAF-routed gifts while giving everyday donors a modest new incentive [17].
  • Channel shift toward DAFs and LLCs. Donor-advised funds held $300+ billion and granted $60–65 billion in 2024, and philanthropic LLCs (like the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative) trade tax benefits for freedom from payout and disclosure — both pulling dollars that once founded a private foundation or flowed through a federation [11][14].
  • Crises. Disasters, pandemics, and emergencies spike giving (foundations pushed out extra money during COVID-19; Jewish Federations raised ~$1B above normal in 2024 on an Israel emergency campaign) [16].

7. Regulation

The whole level is regulated as tax-exempt charity, not as business, and enforced by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and state attorneys general (AGs). The intensity differs by child:

  • Private foundations (813211) are the most tightly regulated. A cluster of Internal Revenue Code (IRC) excise-tax rules governs them: §4940 (1.39% tax on net investment income), §4942 (5% minimum payout), §4941 (self-dealing ban), §4943 (excess business holdings), §4944 (jeopardizing investments), and §4945 (taxable expenditures, lobbying limits, absolute bar on political-campaign intervention). Each files a public Form 990-PF exposing finances, trustee pay, and every grant [9].
  • Public charities (813212 and 813219) file the standard Form 990, must pass a public-support test, lose exemption automatically after three years of non-filing, and — like all 501(c)(3)s — face a campaign-politicking ban and lobbying limits (hence paired 501(c)(4) advocacy arms in the health segment) [4].
  • State charitable-solicitation registration. About 41 states plus D.C. require registration before soliciting residents; multi-state compliance can run $3,000–$10,000 a year for a smaller group, and state AGs are the front line against charity fraud [4].
  • Payments and data (the software seam). Vendors must meet card-security standards (PCI DSS) and manage fraud, sanctions screening, and nonprofit verification; donor and health data raise privacy exposure (HIPAA binds only covered entities and their business associates, but contractual duties still apply) [13].
  • Private watchdogs — Charity Navigator, CharityWatch, BBB Wise Giving Alliance, Candid/GuideStar — act as a quasi-rating layer; a downgrade or a high-overhead label can cut donations fast.

Policy is a live risk surface. Recurring proposals would raise the mandated payout above 5%, tighten the foundation/DAF interaction (prior "ACE Act" efforts), or broaden investment-income taxes — the university-endowment excise tax is a precedent some fear could extend to large foundations [9][17].

8. Consolidation

Charities rarely "merge" the way companies do, and there is no equity to take over, so consolidation shows up in three characteristic forms — and, as with everything here, it differs by child:

  • Within the charities: affiliation and chapter restructuring. The American Cancer Society folded regional divisions into one national entity; Susan G. Komen absorbed affiliates; many local United Ways have combined to cut overhead; small foundations wind down and transfer assets to community foundations [15][16]. Rebrands are common (JDRF → Breakthrough T1D; Leukemia & Lymphoma Society → Blood Cancer United) [15].
  • In the servicing layer: real M&A, fast. OCIO adoption has surged (foundation assets run by OCIOs up an estimated 211% over five years), and Mercer's 2024 purchase of Vanguard's nonprofit OCIO book is the marquee scale-building deal [10]. The nonprofit-software stack is a private-equity roll-up: Bonterra (Apax), Benevity (Hg), GoFundMe/Classy, Bloomerang/Qgiv [13].
  • In the vehicles: DAFs and LLCs absorbing share. The defining structural move is the migration of pooled giving from traditional federations and new-foundation formation toward commercial DAF sponsors and philanthropic LLCs [11][14][16].

The federal file carries no merger, closure, or transfer statistics, so the precise scale of this reshuffling cannot be stated from official data.

9. Risks

  • Market risk. Assets and DAF balances are largely equity-linked, so a sustained bear market shrinks the corpus and — with a lag — the 5% grant floor and the fee pool [7].
  • Concentration / donor risk. With ~$536 billion of foundation assets in the top 50 and a shrinking, top-heavy donor base in health charities (U.S. donor count fell 4.5% in 2024, small donors 8.8%), the priorities or missteps of a few large donors move the whole level [8][15].
  • Structural decline of workplace giving (813219). Payroll-deduction federated giving erodes with gig, remote, and non-union work and falling employer sponsorship — a slow secular headwind on the core of the federated segment [16].
  • Vehicle competition and disintermediation. DAFs and LLCs offer more flexibility and less regulation and are winning share of new philanthropic capital; direct online giving bypasses federations entirely [11][14][16].
  • Policy and tax risk. A higher mandated payout, a broadened excise tax, DAF reform, or the new charitable-deduction floors could reduce the appeal of the vehicles or the money available to grant [9][17].
  • Reputation and fraud. Trust is the entire product across all three children; one scandal, overhead exposé, registration lapse, or data breach can collapse giving faster than it would dent a consumer brand.
  • Cybersecurity (software seam). Donor, payment, and health records are attractive targets; Blackbaud's 2020 breach is the cautionary tale [13].
  • Federal research-funding volatility (813212). Cuts to the National Institutes of Health raise pressure on private disease funders to fill gaps just as their own revenue is strained.
  • Measurement / structural investability risk. Receipts are not charitable flows and mix earned revenue with investment income; no child is an equity security valuable through earnings or multiples; and service-provider exposure, while real, is often small and poorly disclosed as a share of any one firm's revenue.

10. How to invest and the outlook

There is nothing in NAICS 81321 to buy directly — its operators are nonprofits with no equity. Exposure runs through the three seams in Section 4, and the underwriting should center on company-wide recurring revenue, retention, fee/payment economics, margins, and cybersecurity — not on the amount of money granted to charities (a charity's funds flow is never the vendor's or manager's revenue).

Public-market routes (all indirect):

  • Asset management & trust banks that earn fees on the $1.5T foundation/DAF base — BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, Northern Trust, BNY, State Street, Marsh McLennan/Mercer, Charles Schwab. Treat foundation exposure as a screen, not a sector: check whether it is material, recurring, profitable, and diversified across clients [10][14].
  • Fundraising software & payments — Blackbaud (the one listed name touching all three children, and a repeat take-private target), plus diversified PayPal/Salesforce/Visa/Mastercard [13].
  • Venture-philanthropy beneficiaries (813212 only) — Vertex Pharmaceuticals and Royalty Pharma, the clearest listed links to the cystic-fibrosis royalty windfall and the model others now chase [12].

Private-market routes (the more direct ones):

  • As a source of capital: foundations are sophisticated, long-horizon limited partners (LPs) for private equity, venture, hedge, and real-asset funds.
  • As a client: OCIO firms, advisors, custodians, and specialized software vendors can win large, sticky, fee-generating foundation and DAF mandates.
  • As a counterparty for impact capital: program-related investments (PRIs, below-market loans/equity that count toward the 5% payout and recycle as repaid) and mission-related investments (MRIs, market-rate endowment investments aligned to mission) [9]; and, in health, co-investing alongside venture-philanthropy funds and buying the drug royalties they generate [12].
  • As a vehicle to create: a high-net-worth family can establish a private foundation for multi-generational giving, or choose a DAF as a simpler, cheaper alternative that avoids the 5% payout and public 990-PF disclosure [11].

For any private route, diligence should cover legal classification, Form 990/990-PF filings, donor concentration, grant commitments, investment allocation and liquidity, external-manager fees, related-party transactions, and reputational exposure.

Outlook (forward-looking judgment). The three children point in different directions, and the rollup is their weighted sum. Foundations (72% of the level) enter the second half of the 2020s from record strength — ~$1.5 trillion in assets, giving past $110 billion a year, and a 5% floor that keeps grants defensive through downturns [7][9]. Health charities (16%) face a top-line squeeze against a maturing venture-philanthropy playbook. Federated fundraisers (12%) are in slow secular decline as workplace giving erodes and DAFs pull share. The common thread for investors is that the money in all three keeps growing with markets and the wealth transfer, but it flows through nonprofits — so the durable winners are the diversified fee-earning asset managers, the recurring-revenue software vendors (Blackbaud above all), and, uniquely, the biopharma/royalty names attached to health-charity science. Treat 81321 less as a charity sector you can buy into and more as an asset-management and fintech-infrastructure theme wearing charitable clothing — where the winning businesses convert trust, compliance, and specialized workflow into recurring revenue without ever confusing charitable funds flow with company revenue. The swing factors to watch: the direction of equity markets (which set both asset values and the lagged payout floor), the 2026 tax-law changes, and the pace at which new donors choose DAFs and LLCs over the traditional foundation and federation forms.


Sources

  1. U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns, 2023 — NAICS 81321 and children 813211/813212/813219 (establishments, paid employees, annual and Q1 payroll). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html
  2. U.S. Census Bureau, Economic Census 2022 — Concentration of Largest Firms, NAICS 81321 (firms, receipts, CR4/CR8/CR20/CR50, HHI). https://api.census.gov/data/2022/ecnsize/groups/EC2200SIZECONCEN.html
  3. U.S. Census Bureau, Economic Census 2022 — Concentration of Largest Firms, child NAICS 813211, 813212, 813219 (receipts, firm counts, concentration ratios, HHI 202 / 447.9 / 128.7). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/economic-census.html
  4. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 NAICS Manual — definitions of 813211, 813212, 813219 and adjacent codes (561499, 561422, 81331, 813940, 8131, 622, 611310, 54171). https://www.census.gov/naics/reference_files_tools/2022_NAICS_Manual.pdf
  5. Giving USA / Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, Giving USA 2025 (2024: total giving $592.50B; foundations ~$109.8B; health subsector $60.51B). https://givingusa.org/giving-usa-2025-u-s-charitable-giving-grew-to-592-50-billion-in-2024-lifted-by-stock-market-gains/
  6. Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, Giving USA 2026 (2025: total giving ~$617.2B, first year above $600B). https://philanthropy.indianapolis.iu.edu/news-events/news/_news/2026/giving-usa-report-2026.html
  7. Inside Philanthropy / The NonProfit Times, "Foundation Assets Reach a Record $1.5 Trillion" and 2024 asset growth; Candid & Cause IQ foundation counts and asset distribution (120,000+ foundations; ~43% under $250K; ~166 over $1B). https://www.insidephilanthropy.com/home/2024-1-29-foundation-assets-reach-a-record
  8. RoundPaper / Chronicle of Philanthropy, "Largest Private Foundations" (Lilly ~$79.9B, Gates ~$77.2B, Ford ~$17.5B, Hewlett ~$14.2B, RWJF ~$13.4B, Getty ~$13.0B; top 50 ~$535.9B). https://www.roundpaper.com/nonprofits/lists/largest-private-foundations
  9. Internal Revenue Service, private-foundation excise-tax rules (IRC §4940 1.39%, §4942 5% payout, §4941/4943/4944/4945) and Instructions for Form 990-PF; PRIs/MRIs (Mission Investors Exchange). https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/private-foundations
  10. Commonfund / InvestmentNews / NEPC, outsourced-CIO (OCIO) market coverage (Mercer ~$670B; Morgan Stanley #1 U.S.; Mercer–Vanguard nonprofit OCIO deal 2024; ~211% five-year growth in foundation OCIO assets). https://www.commonfund.org/outsourced-cio
  11. National Philanthropic Trust, The 2024 DAF Report, and Donor Advised Fund Research Collaborative Annual DAF Report (DAF assets ~$300B+; contributions ~$90B; grants ~$65B; ~3.6M accounts; ~25% payout; no minimum payout). https://www.nptrust.org/reports/the-2024-daf-report/
  12. Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, Our Venture Philanthropy Model; Chemical & Engineering News, "Cystic Fibrosis Foundation Gets $3.3 Billion For Royalties" (Vertex; Royalty Pharma, 2014). https://cen.acs.org/articles/92/i47/Cystic-Fibrosis-Foundation-33-Billion.html
  13. Blackbaud, Inc. 2025 Form 10-K and The NonProfit Times, "Investor Makes $4.3 Billion Bid To Take Blackbaud Private" (Nasdaq: BLKB; ~$1.1B recurring revenue; Clearlake ~$80/share; PCI DSS; 2020 breach); PayPal Giving Fund; nonprofit-software PE roll-ups (Bonterra/Apax, Benevity/Hg, GoFundMe-Classy, Bloomerang). https://thenonprofittimes.com/npt_articles/investor-makes-4-3-billion-bid-to-take-blackbaud-private/
  14. Fidelity Charitable 2024 Giving Report ($14.9B grants) and DAFgiving360 ($7.7B grants, 2024) — commercial DAF sponsors as independent public charities affiliated with Charles Schwab (NYSE: SCHW) / privately held Fidelity and Vanguard. https://www.fidelitycharitable.org/insights/2025-giving-report.html
  15. Association of Fundraising Professionals / Fundraising Effectiveness Project, Q4 2024 Benchmark (donor count −4.5%; small donors −8.8%; retention 42.9%); ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer and org filings for voluntary-health-organization revenues and rebrands (Breakthrough T1D, Blood Cancer United). https://afpglobal.org/news/fep-data-q4-2024-highlights-growing-role-high-dollar-donors-driving-fundraising-performance
  16. Wikipedia / United Way Worldwide (~1,800 U.S. affiliates; ~$5.2B network revenue; share decline from ~3.2% to under 2%); Nonprofit Quarterly, "The Changing Face of Workplace Giving"; The Jewish Federations of North America (~141 federations; ~$3B raised in 2024). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Way
  17. Congressional Research Service / Tax Foundation, tax provisions in P.L. 119-21 (One Big Beautiful Bill Act): 0.5%-of-AGI individual charitable-deduction floor (2026), 1% corporate floor (2028), non-itemizer deduction excluding DAFs. https://taxfoundation.org/blog/charitable-deduction-big-beautiful-bill/
  18. U.S. Small Business Administration, Table of Size Standards, effective March 2023 (813211 = $40M; 813212 = $34M; 813219 = $47M average annual receipts). https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards