NEW YORK — Tim Sanders started his company, Silent Donor, based on his own experience giving money to charities.
“I was happy to give a financial gift to a nonprofit, but then afterwards I was kind of put off with the amount of mail that was sent to my house,” he said. “And 10 years later, I was still on their email list and others were coming out of the woodwork — even from institutions that I hadn’t donated to.”
Sanders wanted to find an easy way to give anonymously. And he knew from his experience as a philanthropy management consultant that there were plenty of people who felt the same way.
“There was no platform built for this experience for donors,” Sanders said. “So I decided to change that and build it myself.”
Silent Donor — which allows people to give anonymously by routing donations through The AnonDo Fund, a donor-advised fund approved as a nonprofit by the Internal Revenue Service in 2022 – has grown quickly. It currently has partnerships with numerous nonprofits, including United24, the Ukrainian government’s fundraising campaign, and The Malala Fund, the nonprofit formed by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai to promote the education of girls.
Silent Donor is flourishing as the privacy debate for contributors heats up, especially for those using donor-advised funds to give anonymously to their favorite, and sometimes controversial, causes while also getting a tax break.
In November, the IRS proposed new regulations to govern donor-advised funds, including changing what services can be considered tax-exempt and imposing a 20% excise tax on donations that provide a significant to the donor. Public comment on the new regulations will end on Feb. 15.
That follows a request for information from the Republican-led House Ways and Means Committee in August about whether the IRS needs to collect more data from donors to nonprofits involved in political activities.
Christie Herrera, president and CEO of the conservative advocacy nonprofit Philanthropy Roundtable, has said the fight for donor privacy is the biggest challenge her organization currently faces, “I think it’s time for philanthropy to step up and start talking about these donor privacy issues,” she said. “We saw the Supreme Court rule on this in their last term and really this freedom to give to the causes you care about without harassment or intimidation is important on the right and the left.”
Chuck Collins, director of the Program on Inequality and…
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