Donor Accounts
Audience
This guide is for Donor Advised Fund (DAF) providers integrating with DAFpay. If you are a nonprofit or fundraising platform looking to accept DAFpay donations, see Integrating DAFpay instead.
Overview
As a DAF provider, you control which donors can use DAFpay and which grant requests get approved. The Donor Accounts API gives you a clean, well-defined interface to verify donors, manage access, and decision grant requests.
Primary Resources
Donor Accounts — A Donor Account represents a DAFpay donor identity linked to your organization. It holds an optional external_id — your internal identifier for the user’s account. A Donor Account must be approved before its Grant Requests can be processed. A Donor Account can be associated with multiple Giving Pools; a Giving Pool represents a specific set of funds within a donor’s DAF account.
Grant Requests — Submitted when a donor uses DAFpay on a nonprofit’s donation form. Grant Requests are tied to a specific Donor Account and can only be approved or rejected once the Donor Account is approved.
Verification Flows
Accounts reach approved status by verifying an Authorization Token — a one-time code. There are two flows that differ in who initiates the process:
- Donor-Initiated Verification — The donor submits a grant first; DAFpay emails them a code which they pass to the DAF.
- DAF-Initiated Setup — The DAF creates a Donor Account and token in advance and gives the code to the donor via their portal.
