Your intent. Structured. Durable. Yours.
The Intent DAF™ is the donor's voice, made to last. A living record of what you care about — guiding your giving today, protecting your legacy tomorrow, and governing the agents who give on your behalf.
Donor intent has always been the most important and least protected thing in philanthropy.
Misread while you're alive
Your intent lives in your head, in scattered conversations, in vague gift agreements. Even the people closest to your giving don't always get it right.
Rewritten after you're gone
Restricted gifts drift. Institutional memory fades. Family members disagree. The donor's voice becomes whatever the room decides it was.
Unprotected as agents arrive
AI agents recommend gifts, draft appeals, and direct giving on donors' behalf. Without structured intent, they're operating on prompts — fragile, unverifiable, prone to drift.
The Solution
One artifact. Three jobs.
Guide
Your giving today.
“Should I support this new ask?”
Your Intent DAF™ reflects your values back to you and helps you decide with clarity.
Protect
Your legacy tomorrow.
“What did Mom actually want?”
Your Intent DAF answers in your own voice, with your own reasoning, decades after the conversation ended.
Govern
The agents acting on your behalf.
“Should this agent send this gift?”
Your Intent DAF is the guardrail every agent must consult before acting.
The Framework
Your intent, captured as a structured artifact.
Most donor intent lives in prose — in gift agreements, advisory letters, conversations remembered differently by everyone in the room. The Intent DAF™ captures it as a structured record: durable, versioned, and built to be read by the people and the agents who will act on it.
What it captures
Your purpose and theory of change. The beneficiaries you serve and the ones you don't. Geographic, ideological, and structural constraints. Decision rules for the cases you can anticipate. The questions you've deliberately left open, and how they should be resolved. Your succession plan. The permissions and prohibitions that govern any agent acting on your behalf.
How it's built
Every clause carries an authorship signature — donor-authored, advisor-drafted-and-donor-approved, or advisor-inferred. Every change is versioned with a justification. Ambiguities are recorded as first-class objects, not glossed over. Conflicts of interest are surfaced, not buried. The artifact you sign in 2026 is the same artifact a successor reads in 2046, with every change between then and now traceable.
How it's read
The canonical form is human-readable prose, in your voice, that any family member, advisor, or trustee can pick up and understand. The same artifact exports as advisory language for your DAF sponsor, as a letter of intent for your family, and as a machine-readable schema for any AI agent authorized to act on your behalf. One source of truth, three forms.
The EIC × 5T framework is how we teach donors to build a Spec that survives. Every clause maps to a mode of giving (Empower, Innovate, Collaborate) and a form of capital (Time, Talent, Treasure, Trust, Thought).
Hover or tap any cell to see what giving looks like at that intersection.
How It Works
From conversation to compounding clarity.
- 01
Begin a conversation.
Answer thoughtful prompts about your purpose, values, and constraints. Takes 15–30 minutes for a first pass.
- 02
Build your graph.
Your responses generate a structured record — Purposes, Values, Commitments, Constraints — that you can review, edit, and confirm.
- 03
Confirm and own it.
Your Intent DAF™ is yours. Portable. Inheritable. Exportable as a Statement document you can share with family, advisors, and the institutions you support.
- 04
Let it work for you.
Use it to guide your own decisions, share it with your successors, and authorize agents to act within its guardrails.
The Stress-Test
Your Spec, tested against reality.
Donor intent has been failing in the same ways for a hundred years — and now in a few new ways. Before your Intent DAF™ is finalized, it runs against twelve scenarios drawn from the cases that have actually broken donor intent in practice. Where the Spec is silent, contradictory, or vulnerable, you'll see it before anyone else does.
The Buck Trust problem
Beryl Buck left $10M for “the needy in Marin County.” The fund grew to $400M; Marin became one of the wealthiest counties in America. The Spec is asked: what does “needy” mean if the geographic beneficiary class effectively disappears? Is need indexed to relative or absolute conditions?
The Stress-Test surfaces every clause where your geographic and beneficiary scope assumes the world stays the same.
Agent during incapacity
Your agent has standing permission to execute grants below a threshold, within a defined category. The donor is incapacitated. The agent encounters a recommendation just outside the category but consistent with the Spec's stated values. The Spec is asked: does the agent escalate, decline, or proceed? Who decides during incapacity? Do prior permissions persist?
The Stress-Test surfaces every clause where agent authority depends on assumptions the Spec hasn't made explicit.
Novel cause areas
A category of need emerges that didn't exist when the Spec was written. The Spec is asked: is there a default rule, an escalation path, or an explicit prohibition on novel categories without donor approval?
The Stress-Test surfaces every clause where the Spec presumes the cause landscape of the year you wrote it.
Twelve scenarios. Drawn from real cases — Buck, Robertson, Olin, Ford — and from the new cases that haven't happened yet but will. Run them on your Spec before history runs them for you.
Who It's For
Three doors into the same house.
Building
For donors building their giving practice.
If you're actively shaping how you give and want clarity that compounds over time, the Intent DAF™ is your durable thinking partner.
Protecting
For donors protecting a legacy.
If you've given for decades and want to ensure your purpose survives the people, institutions, and generations that will steward it after you, the Intent DAF is your voice made permanent.
Preparing
For donors preparing for agentic giving.
As AI agents act on your behalf — recommending, drafting, directing — the Intent DAF is the guardrail that ensures every agent action is checkable against your actual intent.
The Pair
Your financial DAF holds your assets. Your Intent DAF™ holds your purpose.
Use them together. They were always meant to be a pair.
Intent DAF™ is a product of GiveIQ LLC. It is not a 501(c)(3) sponsoring organization, does not custody assets, and does not provide tax-advantaged charitable vehicles. It is a structured intent record designed to complement your existing giving infrastructure.
The Open Standard
Donor intent is too important to be proprietary.
The Intent Spec — the schema underneath every Intent DAF™ — is published openly under an MIT license. Any advisor, family office, foundation, or DAF sponsor may read it, build against it, or contribute to it.
We built the product. We did not enclose the standard. Agentic philanthropy needs a shared schema for donor intent the way the web needed HTML, and a single vendor's proprietary format is not the answer. The schema is on GitHub. Critique, contribute, or simply read it to understand what's under the hood.
For Institutions
For the institutions who serve donors.
If you advise donors, manage family wealth, or steward a foundation, the Intent DAF™ is the deployment layer your AI strategy has been missing.
Every wealth advisor, family office, and foundation is being asked the same question: how do we responsibly use AI in our clients' giving? The default answer today is to hire consultants — to interview principals, document values, build custom guardrails, and monitor for drift. It's slow, expensive, and doesn't scale.
The Intent DAF replaces the consulting engagement with a product. Your principal sits with the tool. Their intent is structured and stored. Every agent — now and in the future — reads from the same durable record. AI-enabled philanthropic services become a product capability, not a project.
Founder's Note
"I've spent thirty years leading nonprofits and watching donors give. The most valuable thing any donor brings isn't their money — it's their intent. And it's the thing we're worst at preserving. Gift agreements fade. Conversations are forgotten. Successors guess. And now, agents are starting to act on donors' behalf without a clear record of what those donors actually want.
The Intent DAF™ is the answer I wish I'd had to give donors twenty years ago. It's the donor's voice, structured, owned, and built to last. I built it because the next era of giving — agentic, intergenerational, compounding — depends on getting this right."
— John Judge, Founder, GiveIQ