The community foundations raise funds from individual and corporate donors and apply various approaches for development of long-term relationships with the donors. This ongoing process of fund development leads to the creation and expansion of a donor community, associated with the community foundation.

The community foundations manage various philanthropic funds:

- Field-of-interest funds, used for funding projects from a specific field, and supported by multiple donors;

- Donor-advised (named) funds, individual or corporate, initiated by a single donor and named by the donor;

- General grantmaking fund, which is filled in by all other donations;

- Endowment: the Bulgarian community foundations are familiar with the concept of endowment, and some of them have small endowment funds, but the latter are not yet used as a revenue generating source for grants.