DAFs: 2026 Benchmark Report & Dashboards As Functional Powerhouses

Tony Martignetti
Hello and welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio, big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I'm your aptly named host and the podfather of your favorite hebdomadal podcast. I'm back in my office studio, so the audio should sound much, much better. I'm glad you're with us. I'd suffer with exotropia if I saw that you missed this week's show. Here's our associate producer Kate to introduce it.

Kate Martignetti
Hey Tony, introducing DAFFS 2026 Benchmark Report. We return to our 2026 Nonprofit Technology Conference coverage with a discussion of the 3rd Annual Report on Donor Advised Fund fundraising. Our panel shares DAF giving results, changed donor behaviors, illiquid assets, best practices, and much more. They are Karin Kirchoff at K2D Strategies, And Mitch Stein from Chariot. Then, Dashboards as Functional Powerhouses. Kelenda Allen-James reveals lots of info on dashboards, including what's their value, free entry-level tools, user training, timestamps, a warning on use of public data, paid apps, and more. She is with Commonpoint. On Tony's Take 2,

Tony Martignetti
career broadening.

Kate Martignetti
Here is DAF's 2026 Benchmark Report.

Tony Martignetti
Welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio coverage of the 2026 Nonprofit Technology Conference. We are wrapping up today. It's, it's, this is the first interview of our final day, Friday. With me now are Karin Kirchoff and Mitch Stein. Karin is president at K2D, that would be Kilo 2 Delta Strategies, K2D Strategies for those who use the, uh, the, uh, military, uh, alphabet. And Mitch Stein. Mitch is head of strategy at Chariot. Karin, Mitch, welcome to our 2026 Nonprofit Technology Conference coverage.

Karin Kirchoff
Thanks so much for having us.

Mitch Stein
Yeah, we're happy to be here.

Tony Martignetti
All right, I'm glad you are. Karin, I'd like you to just do like a 30,000-foot view of the topic, which is unlocking the power of donor-advised funds, the 2026— why'd I say 2026? The 2026 Benchmark Report. Just give us a high-level view, please. Start us off.

Karin Kirchoff
Yeah, I sort of became obsessed with donor-advised funds back during COVID and a byproduct of that obsession was a secret shopper study that K2D participated in, made a bunch of DAF gifts to different nonprofits, and then sort of watched the donor experience. And spoiler alert, the donor experience was not very good, which led to a whole series of questions and how we met the folks over at Chariot with an interest in trying to get behind the scenes on why the donor experience was so poor. And that ultimately led to this donor-advised fund fundraising report that we're now in the 3rd year of. digging into billions of dollars worth of donor data shared without donor information by nonprofits. We have 53 participating nonprofits this year to give us insight into the donor behavior and how data is captured and really what it means for donor value and the overall contribution to nonprofits and their mission work.

Tony Martignetti
Okay, cool. Thank you. Mitch, what is your role in the 2026 Benchmark Report?

Mitch Stein
Yeah, so Karin and I have been co-authors of this— Come a little closer. Karin and I have been co-authors of the study since we started, and we collect from a group of nonprofits. We have them submit their historical fundraising data, and we work with an outside data scientist and analyze that. And we've just continued to build on number of participants, amount of data, and depth of analysis. Together and then put that report out, which has now been, you know, read by thousands and thousands of folks. Karin and I have gotten to present on this research at probably a dozen different conferences and workshops, and it's really opened up a whole new conversation for fundraisers where they have data and research specifically on their historical giving information, because before that there was a real gap in the market. The only research we had was produced by the donor-advised funds with their, like, outbound grant data, but no one really knew what was the nonprofit experience. How is this changing the makeup of their overall fundraising? How do the donor behavior differ for someone using a DAF, or when someone changes to start using a DAF? Those are all questions that you can't answer from the donor-advised funds perspective. So it's opened up a whole new field of research really in the fastest-growing segment of philanthropy.

Tony Martignetti
Okay. Stay with you, Mitch. What are some takeaways from the 2026 report? And then we can go into detail.

Mitch Stein
Yeah, I think the 2 most important ones that I saw were just the rate of growth of DAF giving at nonprofits. In 2024, the median across all participant organizations was 30% year-over-year change in the DAF revenue they saw from donors, and the median change in non-DAF giving— so all the other ways that individual supporters donate— was actually slightly down. So it is a drastic difference in the dynamics of DAF giving versus overall individual fundraising. And the other insight is related to how donors change their behavior When they start using a DAF to support that organization. So what I mean by that is if Karin gives to the American Cancer Society in 2022 and used a credit card, and then the next year used her DAF for the first time with that organization, that's an insight we have in this study and had over 40,000 examples of that. And what we found was that the average change in that support from one year to the next was a 10x increase in giving, and the median was 2x. So, yes, there are some large outliers. Those are still very valuable to the organizations that got much larger gifts, but over half of your supporters that changed their way of giving to using a DAF are at least doubling their support.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah. Okay. Karin, so let's, let's look into these These 2 takeaways Mitch just identified. So do I understand it correctly? The rate of DAF giving is down slightly?

Karin Kirchoff
The rate of DAF giving is up exponentially.

Tony Martignetti
What's down slightly?

Mitch Stein
Non-DAF giving.

Tony Martignetti
Oh, non-DAF giving is down slightly. Yeah. Oh, okay.

Karin Kirchoff
Which tracks with other industry benchmarking reports. That's been a longstanding trend. DAF giving is really bucking that trend exponentially.

Tony Martignetti
Okay. And why are we seeing that?

Karin Kirchoff
I think there's a lot of reasons for it. I think that the tax law changes in 2017 inspired a lot of people to fund DAFs. The DAFs themselves, the number of people who have DAFs has been growing exponentially. The change in the minimum required to open a donor advised fund has democratized DAF giving. Donors are becoming increasingly strategic about their giving and more intentional about their giving by using DAFs. And so all of that, and frankly, nonprofits are becoming increasingly strategic about how they ask for donors to use their DAFs. And so the combination of all those factors, I think, really influences that rate of growth in this particular form of giving.

Tony Martignetti
And how can nonprofits be more strategic about encouraging, promoting DAF giving?

Karin Kirchoff
Yeah, I mean, you got to talk about it, right? You have to encourage donors to use DAFs in every circumstance possible, and that includes all of those mass market vehicles like direct mail and email and other digital forms of giving, but it also includes things like peer-to-peer fundraising. It includes things like events. It includes obviously major gifts, leadership giving, those really large gifts. But the number of DAF gifts that are coming in below what is often considered a mid-level or a major gift threshold, meaning below $1,000, is almost 70%. So I'll say that in a different way. 70% of DAF gifts come in under $1,000. So there's a bit of a perception that DAF giving is only for the wealthy. It's very, you know, the sort of really high-end gifts, and it's just not. And I think the more that nonprofits lean into using mass-market vehicles to solicit DAFs and to remind donors that they can use their DAF is driving a lot of that giving as well.

Tony Martignetti
You mentioned the democratization of DAFs so that The minimum gift, what's a more typical, not gift, what's a more typical donor advised fund opening requirement?

Karin Kirchoff
So Fidelity, a couple of years ago, changed their minimum requirement to $0. You can now open a DAF at Fidelity without putting a single dollar into your account. Fidelity's minimum distribution is $50. And so there's, you know, this sort of very different world.

Tony Martignetti
Now, are those numbers common? Typical, or are they a bit of an outlier?

Karin Kirchoff
It's becoming increasingly— I mean, Mitch can certainly speak to this as well. Vanguard still has higher thresholds.

Tony Martignetti
$10,000 or what?

Karin Kirchoff
Yeah, I think Schwab's $5,000 to open.

Mitch Stein
No, Schwab is also $0 minimum. Sorry, not Schwab, Vanguard. And $50 minimum gift size, same as Celly. And those are the 2 largest, and they're drastically larger than any other DAF. So that's like a really large segment of the market, and Vanguard is the next largest, and their minimum account size is $25,000, and their minimum grant size is around $500. So they're catering to a different audience. They are. But it is certainly becoming common that community foundations around the country are lowering their minimums, both account size and minimum grant size, and just thinking about how can we be a part of this trend. This is becoming popular. for so many different demographics of donors, and how can we make sure we're not missing the chance to build those relationships?

Tony Martignetti
Okay. And again, the 2 largest commercial DAF providers, Schwab and Fidelity, are zero minimum and $50 distribution minimum, gift minimum.

Mitch Stein
Combined, the 2 of them in 2025 donated $28 billion to charities.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah. All right. So we need to dispel the myth That your donor advised fund gifts are only going to come from wealthy folks. So that's in the past.

Karin Kirchoff
Yep. Absolutely.

Tony Martignetti
Very clear. Okay. What about the— how common are the website widgets, you know, DAF, click here and connect to your DAF? It's easier now to give than it was just a few years ago, isn't it, through a donor advised fund? You used to have to go back to the fund site. Aren't there widgets that appear on nonprofit websites?

Karin Kirchoff
Right. And a lot of those widgets send you back to your fund to log in and set up the distribution.

Tony Martignetti
So you don't have to remember to do it.

Karin Kirchoff
Right. I will say, I'm going to pass it to Mitch because Chariot has a product that really streamlines— and I am not evangelizing the product necessarily— but it has a really great product that helps nonprofits capture a lot more of the data associated with DAF giving.

Mitch Stein
Yeah, Tony, what you mentioned is been around for a while are these widgets, which is, like, to your point, reminds people and then sends them back to their fund. Okay. Um, what we introduced 3 years ago is a payment option. So it's called DAF Pay. That can be on the donation form at checkout next to Google Pay, credit card, all those ways you pay. It's like express checkout, and you can finish your grant recommendation right there. So especially for what we kind of call inspiration-based giving, A giving day, peer-to-peer fundraising, a match campaign, anything where someone is trying to respond and make a gift and be part of something in the moment, that often they'll just make a credit card gift. And when you can intercept them and say, no, no, no, make that DAF gift right here, then that's a huge opportunity for nonprofits. Yep. And to Karin's point, that also comes in your marketing language, What you're saying at events, how you're communicating with peer-to-peer participants. It's both and the technology, how can we make the user experience prompt them and use dApps more readily, but also educating your entire staff to know that they should be talking about it, communicating with donors about it. Someone just came up to our booth yesterday and said they were at a protest in Boston last weekend, and someone was going around handing out some flyers to donate to their nonprofit that, you know, was helping with the cause. And we're like, and remember, you can use your donor advised funds.

Karin Kirchoff
That is awesome.

Mitch Stein
This person was like, Mitch's influence is everywhere.

Karin Kirchoff
That's amazing.

Tony Martignetti
Walking through the crowd at a grassroots protest. All right.

Mitch Stein
For like a mutual aid society for their neighborhood. It was incredible.

Karin Kirchoff
I love it. I love it.

Tony Martignetti
Karin, I'm sorry if I missed it. Did you say what the average DAF distribution is or was in 2025? Do we know that?

Karin Kirchoff
It's $1,200, I think, in the— is that right, Mitch? Am I remembering that right?

Mitch Stein
The average through DAFPay is around $1,200, which is— that tends to be a little small. Yes, because that's when people are supporting these events and causes. And the median for us was around $300. It's spotty from what the DAF providers disclose, but Fidelity's average I think is around $4,500. And then Schwab did actually disclose, or DAF Giving 360 is their new name, but they did disclose a $500 median grant size in 2025.

Tony Martignetti
Okay.

Karin Kirchoff
And in this study, the average is about $1,200.

Tony Martignetti
Okay. Among those 53 nonprofits that participated. Okay. All right. But Still, all right, but that's not a huge gift. It may be a major gift at a lot of small and mid-sized nonprofits, but there's still a lot of— and again, that's an average, and there's a lot of potential for smaller gifts because of the democratization we've been talking about.

Karin Kirchoff
Right, there's potential for smaller gifts, and there's the potential for larger gifts. Fidelity reports that the average size of a DAF in their— the DAFs that they hold is just under $20,000. So if somebody's making a $1,000 or even a $100 gift out of their DAF, odds are good there's a lot more money in their DAF, and with a strong case for giving, this is where a nexus between mass marketing and major gifts I think is really important, because with a solid case for giving, I think you can go back to anybody who's made a DAF gift that maybe is not at a major gift level and ask them to make a distribution that is at a major gift level because of the likelihood that there's a lot more money that's sitting in their DAF.

Mitch Stein
I

Tony Martignetti
was

Mitch Stein
just going to add, Tony, that the Yes, DAFs are being democratized, and they're using them at all different levels, but like what Karin's mentioning is it's also still a really promising sign that that person likely has a lot of capacity. And so even if it is a smaller gift, I know a lot of folks that want to dedicate their prospect research, for example, to anytime someone makes a DAF gift, try to learn more.

Karin Kirchoff
Yep.

Mitch Stein
And see if there's a chance that they actually have a lot more capacity. And to Karin's point, Fidelity, it's the median account size is over $20,000.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah.

Mitch Stein
So that means over half of, of their fundholders have more than $20K that they've irrevocably committed to giving. It's the only thing it can be used for. Those are relationships you want to build.

Tony Martignetti
What about the concern— maybe this is in the past, so you can allay this maybe misconception as well. I'm happy to be contradicted. That a lot of DAF gifts come without donor information. We don't know, you know, it comes from the DAF provider, whether it's a community foundation or a commercial institution, and we don't know who the donor is. Is that still an issue?

Karin Kirchoff
It does remain a problem. It does? Okay. The DAFs themselves are getting better at asking donors if they want their information shared. Fidelity now defaults to donors sharing information. If the donor wants to opt out and become anonymous, obviously they can. And Fidelity reports that more than 90% of their DAF gifts come with at least the name of the fund, if not also the address of that donor. This is another place, frankly, where the DAF Pay tool is really effective because it captures all that information on the front end, including an email address, which you don't get from any of the DAF providers. All right. That's good to know.

Tony Martignetti
If we're not using Mitch's Chariot product, what do we do if we get a gift from any DAF provider that doesn't have donor info? What's your advice?

Karin Kirchoff
Yeah, I mean, it's—

Tony Martignetti
And we do, we'd like to have the info too.

Karin Kirchoff
Yeah, of course we want to have that info. What's your advice? I mean, I think there's a lot of value in having those internal conversations, you know, because a lot of times those DAF gifts are coming across, you know, over the transom through a caging operation or through the internal gift processing, and if those gifts aren't flagged for, say, a major gift officer, even if they're not at a major gift level, the major gift officer may know that they've been talking with somebody who has a DAF and can reach back out to that person and confirm, was this your DAF gift? Is this not your DAF gift? I mean, so it is additional legwork that is often required, additional research. If a DAF comes over with just the name of the fund and it's the Puppies and Kittens fund, a major gift officer may know, oh yeah, that's Jane Smith. Let me— I'm going to reach out to her.

Tony Martignetti
Okay, that's the internal. What about going back to the DAF provider and asking, can we get this information?

Karin Kirchoff
Yeah, most of the big DAFs will not share it. Community foundations often will relay messages back to donors, and so if a DAF is coming in from a community foundation without a name or an associated address, Reaching back out to that community foundation is a really valuable step because they often have those donor relationships and will, at a minimum, relay a message, if not share additional information.

Tony Martignetti
Relay a message, okay. You might write something and ask them to forward it. The commercial one, you're making the point that that's on the community foundation side. Commercial ones, they won't forward a letter?

Karin Kirchoff
They won't. I had a client literally last month who, I'm not kidding, got a $400,000 DAF that came in through through their caging operation, and they reached out— it was a Fidelity gift— they reached out to Fidelity multiple times to try to get some information and got nothing. The donor wanted to remain anonymous, and that's the donor's right to do so.

Tony Martignetti
But Fidelity wouldn't even forward a message? Nope. Forward this letter?

Karin Kirchoff
Nope.

Tony Martignetti
They will not.

Mitch Stein
Yeah, Tony, just one thing I want to add there is it's very important for nonprofits to know there's a difference between being anonymous and only sharing fund name. So I think a lot of people historically have said, if I don't have full information, I just dump all of this into anonymous gifts. And that's really not a best practice when it comes to tracking your DAF giving. Number one, because you're not going to be able to track it very well, like when you want to participate in analysis like what Karin and I do. If you just have a big dump into it, an anonymous donor record, that's not helpful. Right. But also, you likely get more information over time. So if you're tracking this account under a fund name, then in the future—

Tony Martignetti
Like the Puppies and Kids Fund.

Karin Kirchoff
Yeah.

Tony Martignetti
All right. So if it comes back, right, you get another one.

Mitch Stein
There might be more information. I might get an address. So it's good to start tracking those donor records on the fund name, even if you don't have a donor name on it, or it's not fully clear. And also, if they're disclosing something and not fully anonymous, there's a much better chance that the DAF provider will engage with you on it to say, hey, actually, I don't know who this person is. Can you share this letter with them? And you're likely to have a better chance building that relationship.

Tony Martignetti
What would the something be that would get shared, but it's not full— it's not a name, but you said if something is shared, what would that something be that you might— what data point might you get that's not the donor's name?

Mitch Stein
So often you're getting a fund name. So when you— Yeah, and, or you might get a donor name, but you— it's John Smith, and so you don't have enough information to identify them. Yeah, so that's often worth following up on.

Tony Martignetti
Okay.

Mitch Stein
But, and I've just heard from many providers that as long as it's a personalized letter, like a personalized follow-up, that they will get it to them. And oftentimes then they do engage and you're able to build that relationship. So particularly for larger gifts, that's definitely worthwhile.

Tony Martignetti
Okay. All right. So So you're saying it is worthwhile, but Karin had the example of the $400,000 gift that—

Mitch Stein
Well, that was fully anonymous, was one thing. And also, it's from the data

Tony Martignetti
at all

Mitch Stein
and from the large commercial DAF, which is going to be hard to engage with.

Tony Martignetti
Okay, okay, good. All right, thank you. Making the distinction between community foundation ones and the large providers. Yeah, but you're— but Mitch, your point is if there's some data, then you have a better chance of being able to engage At least get something forwarded

Karin Kirchoff
than

Tony Martignetti
if there's nothing. Correct. It's just a fidelity check and that's it.

Mitch Stein
Correct.

Tony Martignetti
Okay, okay. You guys work with this day in and day out for years. I'm not newly initiated, but my work is in planned giving. I mean, there is some donor advised fund crossover, but you all are thinking about this day in and day out. So another takeaway, aside from the rate of giving and the methods of giving, was that people who give through DAFs, once they give through DAFs, their behavior changes toward the nonprofit versus, I guess, a control group that never gave a DAF, donor advised fund gift?

Karin Kirchoff
Yeah, one of the—

Tony Martignetti
What's that? What's those behavior changes?

Karin Kirchoff
One of the data points that we looked at, in part because there are some, we thought, myths out there around DAF giving, and once somebody gives from a DAF, it's in part because data collection can be difficult, then they lose value over time, or it doesn't— it's not worth soliciting DAF gifts. And what we learned in the study, and this has been repeated in each year of the study, was that once somebody converts to using a DAF, let's say the example Mitch was using a couple of minutes ago, I made a credit card gift in 2022 to the American Cancer Society. It was $100. In the next year, if I used my DAF, more than 50% of the time that value was gonna now be $1,000. So 10x increase in value. And so that donor behavior really changes very dramatically from purely from a value perspective. The other variable is around, or there are several variables, but a big one is around retention. And donor retention among DAF donors is exponentially higher, 13 percentage points higher, not 13%. Wow. 13 percentage points higher for donors who are using a DAF versus donors who are not using a DAF to make a gift. And so there's a case for encouraging DAF giving and developing those relationships to build longer-term DAF giving because of the value associated with donors who are making investments with that giving vehicle.

Mitch Stein
And 20% of DAF donors make more than one gift a year to the same organization.

Karin Kirchoff
Yeah, a lot of repeat giving. Same organization.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah. Okay. Okay. Any other interesting behaviors in this giving community?

Mitch Stein
Yeah, I, I think to Karin's point—

Tony Martignetti
Giving cohort.

Mitch Stein
Giving cohort, yeah. Um, I just think what's behind the data points we're flagging, like higher retention, um, multiple gifts a year, giving more, supporting more organizations, is something we definitely see from the DAF data. Um, is the reasons why is there's really a psychological change when you're using a DAF for giving. And I find this is something that a lot of fundraisers don't fully appreciate, and I always encourage them to open their own DAF account, see it for themselves. They're very accessible. You've got the big commercial ones.

Tony Martignetti
You could do it for $0 at the top 2 commercial ones.

Mitch Stein
And even at like, Daffy is a mobile-first DAF provider where The minimum gift size is $18. GoFundMe has a DAF product now where the minimum gift size, I think, is $5 or $10. So it's really become accessible, and then you can see for yourself what happens when you make a proactive decision to set aside money for giving that can't be revoked for something else. So now you have these committed funds, and it kind of forces you to think, well, what do I want to give? Like, where do I want to support? And whenever you do get get, you know, asked by a friend who's doing a fundraiser or some crisis happens, you've got this ready store of funds. It's like having a gift card at the ready. And so you are way more— you give much more liberally because you're not weighing it against your other budget items that month. It's already accounted for.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah. I'm gonna give a shout out to a friend of mine, Rudy Flesher, who's at National Philanthropic Trust, NPT. He has opened my eyes to This is something I'd like to explore with you. At the higher level, major donors, donor-advised funds are valuable because of the type of assets they can accept that are unusual, like closely held corporate stock or LLC interests or something like that, more esoteric gifts.

Mitch Stein
Wine collections.

Tony Martignetti
Wine collections, art collections. That are not— the average nonprofit, well, probably 95% of nonprofits are not equipped to take these types of assets. So there's value there too. I guess we're talking about the commercial DAF providers are set up to accept different types of gifts that others aren't?

Mitch Stein
Any DAF. Any DAF.

Tony Martignetti
Even the community foundations, you think?

Mitch Stein
Yeah, they specialize in this. I mean, a lot of them use the same partners to help if you're doing something that's really illiquid or complex to help, you know, value it, get the appraisal, do the sale, etc. But yeah, that's—

Tony Martignetti
Thank you for using the word illiquid. You just condensed 600 of my words into one. I could have just said illiquid assets.

Mitch Stein
Yeah, but illiquid and/or, you know, public securities are not always the easiest thing to divvy up and donate to a bunch of different organizations, get their information. Do they know how to handle that and sell it? Like, there's a lot involved. So, if you've got $100,000 worth of stock that you want to donate in a year, you can do one transaction into your DAF, a place that is set up to do that day in and day out, and then make cash grants out to 100 different nonprofits. Right. And so, it's really efficient for people who like to donate these more tax-advantaged avenues. So, that's certainly once you're on the higher end of donors. The DAF benefit is, you know, that you have all this flexibility. It's easier to manage. You can do all this more complex giving in one place. And the nonprofit experience is that they just receive cash.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah, so much easier, right? Okay, thank you. Thank you, Rudy Flesher, for— Thank you, Rudy. Making me aware of that. Thank you, Rudy. Do you know National Philanthropic Trust? Yeah. NPT? Yeah.

Karin Kirchoff
Okay. I don't know Rudy, but I know—

Tony Martignetti
That's okay. I know Rudy. You're only a second away. There we go. You're only 2 levels of bacon away from— 2 levels of Kevin Bacon away from Rudy Flesher. Love it. Everybody should know Rudy. All right. So Mitch, why don't you take us out with some inspiration about DAF giving since Karin did the intro? Please leave us with inspiring words around DAFs.

Mitch Stein
Yeah, I mean, I'd just say there's a lot of focus as we're doing research on past giving trends, and so I think it's worth ending thinking about the future, especially after a 2025 where every DAF provider I know has told me that their December and Q4 was like multiples of prior years in terms of contributions into those accounts. So with the tax changes, the markets are really hot, people were flooding their accounts with money. So that means that the opportunity in 2026 is enormous. Like no nonprofit can be ignored. this, you really should have a plan for how you are engaging with DAF giving to make sure that you don't get left behind from the fastest-growing cohort of donors out there.

Tony Martignetti
Thank you very much. That's Mitch Stein. He's head of strategy at Chariot. With Mitch is Karin Kirchoff. Is it Kirchoff or Kirchoff?

Karin Kirchoff
Kirchoff.

Tony Martignetti
Kirchoff. But I'll— With a CH.

Karin Kirchoff
Yeah.

Tony Martignetti
No, I don't accept Kirchoff. No, it's fine. No, it's Kirchoff. Yeah. It's Karin Kirchoff. She's president at K2D Strategies. Thank you, Mitch. Karin, thanks very much.

Karin Kirchoff
Thanks so much for having us.

Tony Martignetti
Thank you. And thank you for being with Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio coverage of the 2026 Nonprofit Technology Conference.

Kate Martignetti
It's time for Tony's Take Two.

Tony Martignetti
Thank you, Kate. Career broadening. Last week I took a course, just 2 days. And it had nothing at all to do with what I do— planned giving, fundraising, consulting— nothing. It was about organization design, how lots of organizations don't do as well as they could— nonprofits we're talking about, of course— because they're not organized correctly. The structure and the processes and the And the metrics and the people are not all aligned around a strategy. Strategy. So a lot of times this is why strategic plans may not be so easy to implement because your organization is designed for the pre-strategic plan time. And so that, I mean, that's the basics of it. But the point is, It's totally unrelated to what I do. I'm not adding this to my practice, certainly, and just on the strength of a 2-day course, I'm not authorized. I'm not qualified to do this with any nonprofit, but it's just something different. You know, I saw it on LinkedIn. Someone posted about the course. I was able to make the time, and it's just totally non nonprofit related. Certainly, it was all about. Social Impact Organization Design. That was the name of the course, but just very different from anything I do in nonprofits. And it became stimulating to think about nonprofits from a different perspective with a totally different purpose. So I would encourage you to step outside comfort zone, You know, there was no test at the end. I mean, it cost me some money to go to the course, but, you know, there's not like there's that much at risk. And, um, I would encourage you to step outside and just learn something different, even if it's not something you're going to apply. It's just a different perspective on nonprofits, or maybe not even— maybe it doesn't even have anything to do with nonprofits. Broadening, broadening. I just— it was very uplifting for me, and I hope it would be for you too if you did something like that. And that is Tony's Take 2. Kate?

Kate Martignetti
One of my favorite university professors of all time taught me characteristics of knowledge acquisition, and one of like his big, you know, overall— on our last day, he said, never stop learning something new. And so, like, a part of the course, we had to go take some— anything we could choose. It could have been like an art class, gym class, but like learning something that we never like would push ourselves to go do. And that like still sticks with me today is like, what can I learn today?

Tony Martignetti
What did you choose for the— what did you choose for yours?

Kate Martignetti
So long story, cutting it down, I wanted to do like a glass mosaic class. So the, I guess, sea glass, and we were supposed to make like a lamp, but it actually got canceled. So I ended up following a Bob Ross tutorial because I wanted to do something artsy. So I was learning from Bob Ross.

Tony Martignetti
Bob Ross, the classic. There are no accidents, just happy mistakes.

Kate Martignetti
Yes.

Tony Martignetti
Or there are no— there are no mistakes, just happy accidents. Something like that. I think that's what it is. There are no mistakes, just happy accidents.

Kate Martignetti
Yes. All right.

Tony Martignetti
Did you paint something? Did you paint a seascape or a tree?

Kate Martignetti
I painted a landscape. Yes, it's hanging up in our dining room.

Tony Martignetti
Outstanding. Bob Ross is, uh, Bob Ross from the grave is, uh, is very pleased that you, you chose him for your characteristics of knowledge acquisition outside the box course. Excellent.

Kate Martignetti
We've got beaucoup buttloads more time. Here is Dashboards as Functional Powerhouses.

Tony Martignetti
Welcome back to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio coverage of the 2026 Nonprofit Technology Conference. My guest now is Kelenda Allen-James, assistant or associate vice president—

Karin Kirchoff
Assistant.

Tony Martignetti
Assistant vice president of information technology at Commonpoint New York. Kelenda, welcome back to Nonprofit Radio. It was about 2 years ago you were with us.

Kelenda Allen-James
Yes, it's great to be here.

Tony Martignetti
Thank you. Your topic this year is Dashboards: Moving Beyond Pretty Charts to Functional Powerhouses. Could you give us like a 30,000-foot view to kick us off?

Kelenda Allen-James
Yes. So building dashboards is going to allow people to have a quick view of their data. And create narratives to help them make decisions.

Tony Martignetti
That's pretty quick. Yes. Okay, okay, thank you for that. How should we best approach the topic? Can we look at what, I don't know, what the potential is or how to go about building your dashboards? What's the best way to go into the topic?

Kelenda Allen-James
It's like we have different entry points. So the first entry point is I just have raw data. I've still got 15 Excel sheets, and there's a manual process for every question that is asked.

Tony Martignetti
Okay, and it's like the first time— every time is like the first time, we've never heard this question before.

Kelenda Allen-James
Correct.

Tony Martignetti
Okay, that's one. Okay, what else you got?

Kelenda Allen-James
Okay, and the next is we have this expensive software, and it comes with dashboards, so how do we leverage them now that we have our data in this expensive system? Okay. And then it's like, we've been doing dashboards, they're starting to make sense, what's the best way to present these dashboards to our forward-facing public?

Tony Martignetti
Okay, those are our 3 entry points?

Kelenda Allen-James
Yes.

Tony Martignetti
I love how concise you are. It's like boom, boom, boom. Okay, okay, excellent. All right, so let's start with like, we don't even have dashboards.

Kelenda Allen-James
Yes. So if you're still—

Tony Martignetti
The sun just got in my eyes. The sun just came out of a cloud. I'm sorry, go ahead.

Kelenda Allen-James
Yes. So if you are still at the spreadsheet way, there are some entry-level tools. Like if you're in like Google Sheets, there's like Google Looker Studio, which is a free tool from Google that can already access your Google Sheets to help you start building an entry-level dashboard.

Tony Martignetti
Okay.

Kelenda Allen-James
And you do have similar capabilities in Office 365 with Power BI. I'm sorry,

Tony Martignetti
it's called Power BI?

Kelenda Allen-James
Yes.

Tony Martignetti
Okay.

Kelenda Allen-James
And both of these are included with the software you're already using.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah, you've got them.

Kelenda Allen-James
But when you want to start sharing with the public, this is when you get into possibly licensing. This is when the prices start to go up. But this is a good part to start to see what you want your dashboards to look like.

Tony Martignetti
Okay.

Kelenda Allen-James
What questions are you trying to answer? And does a graph, a bar chart, really help your story? Or is it muddying the waters?

Tony Martignetti
Are those the, uh, those are the, the, the free resources that—

Kelenda Allen-James
Yes.

Tony Martignetti
Google Power— sorry, Google Looker Studio and Power BI? Yes, through Microsoft. In Microsoft 365? Yes. Okay, okay.

Kelenda Allen-James
And, um, also a lot of our CMRs, um, customer relation management tools, are offering a dashboard section in our products. And we could start looking there. They have a lot of out-of-the-box widgets. The how many in the past 3 months, how many in the past 2 months to start. And then you can start to look at your data. Interesting. I'm working with Salesforce at my company. And we are currently pushing our limits to the internal dashboards. From the water cooler standpoint, we want dashboards but better.

Tony Martignetti
Okay.

Kelenda Allen-James
But when you look at the analytics from the dashboard you already have, we see through adoption, 18% of the people haven't logged into the system to look at the existing dashboard yet. So maybe they would have more enjoyment if they actually looked at the dashboard.

Tony Martignetti
All right. So you have a recalcitrant 18%? Yes. Yeah.

Kelenda Allen-James
And then when you look at the changes to the dashboard, there was only 3 requests for changes. So maybe taking your complaint from the water cooler directly to the dashboard designer will move the needle for you. So a lot of times we get the tool included, our power users do our best to try to make it work, but sometimes Sometimes pausing and investing in some training can help you leverage what you have so much better and so much faster before you go to the next new product.

Tony Martignetti
Okay, right. Training what you already have.

Kelenda Allen-James
Yes.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah, okay.

Kelenda Allen-James
And then using all the samples that you have. A lot of them become lots of templates. We think we know what we want, but sometimes just experimenting with one of the built-in templates To be like, oh, this is a really good way to look at our data. This totally changes the question and how we're presenting it. So I feel a lot of us, for the time pressure to get our questions answered, we move away from native stuff too quickly. And another thing is when you start looking at the native, you might see that there's cracks in your data. And we'll need to pause. I know in like one of our charts, I didn't know the primary language of 26% of my clients. But when you deep dive into the data, this occurred because a data merge between our case management systems and our fee-for-service systems. I'm not asking anybody about their language when they're booking a tennis court, but this is the type of information I need to provide wraparound services at the food pantry.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah, I see.

Kelenda Allen-James
And so we have to remember, we cannot report on data we did not collect. So this is the type of question where Hey, do I leverage AI to review all my correspondence with the client to check which language I sent their correspondence in to update this field? Is this a time for us to pause and look into a universal intake form to get the base language so we can wrap data apples to apples when we are merging it? Or is this a question that we stopped asking because that was for a project grant from 8 years ago? And maybe we just need to clean up our question sets.

Tony Martignetti
Okay.

Kelenda Allen-James
So once we start looking at the dashboards, if they start to look wonky, it's a great time to pause and reevaluate your data. We're pulling data from a single source of truth, but sometimes the data will show us that we still have some side quest spreadsheets in some departments, and it's not making it to the single source of truth. And this is where we could do some retraining, some evangelism around the agency of why the single source of truth is the way to go.

Tony Martignetti
Evangelism around abandon your spreadsheets. Yeah.

Kelenda Allen-James
You know, and come to the new new, and how is it going to help us? Yes. Another thing is, as my co-presenter Ash Shepherd gave us, was when we're using dashboards internally for our current employees, making them fun and interactive so they can really relate to the work they're doing in the data. So designing dashboards for people, not just for information. Make sure you have the company logo on it. Make sure that you have the company branding colors so you can really feel connected that this is our data, this is our company, I stand behind this data, this data is showing the work I do person to person.

Tony Martignetti
Okay, and also Involving the users of the dashboards in the development of the dashboards. Yes. So, I mean, this is— I'm kind of amplifying what you've already said. So it reveals what the people actually want to know.

Kelenda Allen-James
Yes.

Tony Martignetti
Okay.

Kelenda Allen-James
And also adding a good old-fashioned instruction. This is how you should be looking at this data. Having good indexes. Like, does pink always mean the same thing across every graph? Is red a bad color? Is green a good color? You know, so really just adding some depth and context to your dashboard will help people approach it in the appropriate way.

Tony Martignetti
Can these be personalized to the users? Like, so I don't I don't use any dashboard tools. I'm a one-person business. So I don't use these. But can individual users within the nonprofit customize a dashboard for what they want to know, or does it need to be more centralized and everybody's looking at the same dashboards?

Kelenda Allen-James
No, that's a great question. You can generally have more than one dashboard, and you should, so you can really have targeted audiences. So there is going to be an executive team who's going to want to see the 30,000-foot of the whole agency at all times, and they will have a distinct dashboard. But then there's going to be a dedicated department who's going to want a more nuanced and detailed dashboard for just their part of the business. And so this is where you do get to individualization of the dashboards. Okay.

Tony Martignetti
Okay.

Kelenda Allen-James
And, you know, so what the executive team needs versus what the directors need versus what district managers need versus the individual contributor. You know, an individual contributor just might need a simple 2-graph dashboard with how many case notes I'm supposed to do this month and how far have I gone. You know, just like nice little tick A ticker tape gauge system. And the executive team might want a more nuanced, how many clients year over year.

Tony Martignetti
Okay. All right. So very personalized. Yeah. Personalizable. Customizable. That's what I want to say. Very customizable. Okay. Please. You know, you were on a roll. I made you digress with a question. Yeah, go ahead.

Kelenda Allen-James
Other things to think about with the dashboard is how long are you going to use it? Are you looking for something dynamic that's updating every month? And if that's the case, you want to add some automation. So maybe have the first of the month pull the data, update the dashboard. If you're doing a community survey and you want real-time data, you might link your dashboard to like a Google Form, and every time somebody answers the survey, the dashboard updates. Depending on the type of data? Depending on how people access the survey. You might want to put some distance between survey and live update. If there's a chance that your data could be usurped by bad actors, you might want to put a human set of eyes before publishing and creating a delay before public consumption. All technology is a tool, and these tools Tools can definitely help us make our jobs easier, give us the capacity to help more. But tools are only as good as their instructions. And when you're new to dashboarding, it can seem confusing and overwhelming. So putting some more pauses between creation and public consumption is the best thing you can do for yourself. Because sometimes you only get one chance to make a first impression.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah, protect yourself and your reputation. Okay, organization and personal.

Kelenda Allen-James
Yes.

Tony Martignetti
You told everybody you did the work and now it's embarrassing to the organization. That's a bad look for you. Okay. Yeah.

Kelenda Allen-James
Yes. And also, when you're doing your dashboards, the curious minds want to know, what is the underlying data that got you here? What was the timeframe? 2020 looked very different for a lot of organizations than 2019.

Tony Martignetti
Yes.

Kelenda Allen-James
And so not putting some timestamps to the data can create the wrong narrative. So definitely index your dashboards. Be prepared to share how we got here. Because the inquiring minds will want to know.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah, that context. You're right. People are going to forget what happened in 2020 and they'll be questioning, well, why was 2020 so bad? And what's this big rise since, since 2021? Yeah. Yeah. All

Kelenda Allen-James
right. So definitely making sure that you're putting correct context, you know, advertising the data that created the dashboard. Explaining the methodology will make the dashboard more believable, trustworthy, and people want to relate to it more.

Tony Martignetti
Okay. These are great tips. What else? What else do you have? I mean, I'm just like letting you— quarter in the slot. Go.

Kelenda Allen-James
And back to the data piece. Everybody likes a compelling graph. graph, but there's no data fairies. It is real people collecting data, analyzing data, entering data way before a dashboard occurs. And we always have to circle back and double-check our data is coming from the correct place. And even if we are automating our dashboards convenience, we need to always keep double-checking to make sure the data is still good. Okay. We have 70 different business models at our nonprofit. I'm collecting data from internal sources, third-party government sources, individual contributor family surveys, and if our third-party party chooses to change how they do data, the sync that has been working for me for 18 months will immediately break. And if I don't have eyes on my data and I just rely on my automation, I'm going to start missing chunks of clients month after month until I fix that sync. Mm-hmm. And so, even with the automation, We must always have the human eyes on the dashboard and the data. Because if you're doing the work on the ground every day, you can spot immediately why 41,000 people without a primary language looks weird. But if you are a casual observer of the company, first-time seen the corporation and you see this on a public dashboard, well, maybe that makes sense. And so this is why the person should never get separated from the data, so you can continue to make sure that your data is reliable.

Tony Martignetti
Okay, you got to keep the human touch.

Kelenda Allen-James
Yes.

Tony Martignetti
All right, right, right. Yep, that applies to a lot of artificial intelligence— well, all uses of AI. We haven't specifically talked AI, but there may very well be— you may have one of the tools involved in your data synthesis process.

Kelenda Allen-James
Yes.

Tony Martignetti
There has to be human oversight.

Kelenda Allen-James
And what will happen is the AI tracks learned behavior. So the AI will just assume what the numbers were last month, disregarding that the sink has broke.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah, yeah.

Kelenda Allen-James
You know, and so we don't want any hallucinations. And that's just with a constant check because AI is always changing. The business is always changing. So change has to be monitored.

Tony Martignetti
Okay.

Kelenda Allen-James
Also with the human touch, data and numbers can be very frightening to some. A lot of people who go into the social services might have started off in the 3rd grade with, I'm not a math person. So to now come into a data spreadsheet and to see graphs and numbers and percentages and pie charts, that can feel overwhelming and disconnected to the human connection of a caseworker working with a client. Right. So by making your dashboards with a human touch, with the logos, with the funny GIFs, really, you know, disarms the person who might have had a previous math aversion from earlier schooling.

Tony Martignetti
Okay.

Kelenda Allen-James
And so that's one of the great ways about making the personal touch, creating dashboards for the non-technical. Okay.

Tony Martignetti
Build some humanity in. Yeah, I like the idea of the, like, GIFs and whatever. Yeah, emojis. Yes.

Kelenda Allen-James
And also providing detailed instructions, even adding like a video instruction of where the data comes from, why we use this dashboard, helps with onboarding. So as you bring on new employees to your team, they will have a much faster uptick of the information if we build it correctly the first time.

Tony Martignetti
Okay.

Kelenda Allen-James
And the other thing to look at is there's a lot of free tools, but free generally means open to everybody. Visible to everybody. Depending on your clientele of the customers you work with in your nonprofit sector, public data might not be the best kind of data. You know, some of us are working with vulnerable communities. We are working in hot-button topics of service. So just having all your data on the free platform to get a dashboard might not be a good look. So sometimes you have to look at how can you sanitize your data before you share it with the public good? What is the privacy policies of your free software? Are they going to be like next week, oh, I got a subpoena, I'm just sharing this information? Or is this like, hey, it's a free website, I just downloaded it, used it for my personal use to sell people Beachbody? Right. Therefore, really reading the terms and conditions of the software you enter, free and paid, will help you make sure that you don't let the convenience of a dashboard put your company, your reputation, and your clients Are

Tony Martignetti
there some paid apps that you like beyond the 2 that we mentioned, the free resources? Are there some paid apps that you all talked about in the session that

Kelenda Allen-James
are

Tony Martignetti
valuable for dashboarding?

Kelenda Allen-James
Yeah, so things like Tableau, they really specialize in creating data collection from multiple sources and creating great dashboarding. Salesforce Native behind the paywall. And even in the free services, they usually have a paywall version where you can enter a business agreement about how you're both going to protect your data. So depending on what type of data you have and who you're working with, you can always have the conversations and get the safeguards you need for your particular data.

Tony Martignetti
Okay.

Kelenda Allen-James
But some, you know, some of our conservation nonprofits working with water counts, working with tree counts, that is the type of data that might be easily public without safety concerns. But some of our housing clients, You don't want to have a spatial diagram with a Google Map directly to a client's house show up on a graph.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah, yeah. Be cautious.

Kelenda Allen-James
Yes, and so this is why, you know, really working with your internal dashboards, really testing it for the questions you want to be answered internally is the way to go at the beginning of your journey before you make everything Okay.

Tony Martignetti
You want to leave us with one final, I don't know, overarching idea or—

Kelenda Allen-James
The overarching idea is dashboards is an elevated tool to help you tell your story, to convey the message that you're trying to communicate about the people you serve. But not let the convenience of the dashboard prevent you from being the best actor of the data that you collect.

Tony Martignetti
All right, we'll leave it there. Thank you very much.

Kelenda Allen-James
Thank you.

Tony Martignetti
Kelenda Allen-James, Assistant Vice President of Information Technology at Commonpoint New York. Thanks very much, Kelenda. And thank you for being with Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio coverage of 26NTC, the 2026 Nonprofit Technology Conference.

Kate Martignetti
Next week, our 26NTC coverage continues with Brand Your Giving Programs and Donor Retention. If you missed any part of this week's show,

Tony Martignetti
I beseech you, find it at tonymartignetti.com.

Kate Martignetti
Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I'm your associate producer, Kate Martignetti. The show's social media is by Susan Chavez. Marc Silverman is our web guy, and this music is by Scott Stein.

Tony Martignetti
Thank you for that affirmation, Scotty. Be with us next week for Nonprofit Radio, Big Nonprofit Ideas for the Other 95%. Go out and be great. Thank you.