Supporters can now split a donation across multiple designations

Supporters can now donate to multiple funds in one transaction, and every campaign includes at least one designation by default. This gives your team clearer reporting and supporters more choice — especially valuable for education, faith-based, and disaster relief organizations.

To make this possible, we’ve reworked how designations function across the platform. Here’s what’s new:

Every donation in Fundraise Up now has a specific designation. This creates a clear structure for reporting, accounting, and integrations. Whether a supporter gives to a named fund or makes a general donation, your team sees exactly where the money goes.

If your organization didn’t use designations before, we’ve added one for you — “General Designation” — to keep donations flowing without interruption. In existing campaigns, this default designation stays hidden from supporters. In new campaigns, it appears by default, but you can change or rename it in the campaign settings.

You can update your account-wide default designation in Settings > Campaigns > Default Designation.

Supporters can now include up to 5 designations in a single donation on Campaign Pages.

For example, someone giving to a disaster relief organization could donate $50 to emergency shelter, $30 to medical supplies, and $20 to clean water access — all in one $100 transaction.

Each designation creates a separate donation or recurring plan in your Dashboard, and supporters receive a separate receipt for each one.

To let supporters give to multiple funds in one transaction, open a campaign’s settings and check Allow multiple designations.

We’ve introduced the Designations manager — a new section in your Dashboard that stores all your designations data. It also includes a Groups tab, where you can organize designations into a structure similar to folders, with up to three levels of depth.

For example, a university might use this structure:

• Scholarships
  • STEM
    • Women in Engineering Fund
    • Data Science Fellowship

Groups appear as expandable categories during checkout, making it easier for supporters to find what they care about.

Campaigns now have two ways to handle designations:

• Assigned Designation: Lock in one specific designation, with the option to hide or show it to supporters.
• Selectable Designation: Build a list of several designations (or groups), optionally requiring the supporter to choose one during checkout.

You can also:

• Set different designations for one-time and recurring donations.
• Choose a default designation, or leave the designation field empty and required.

To support the new system, we’ve updated all existing campaigns:

• Campaigns without designations were assigned a default one (hidden from supporters).
• Past donations without designations were backfilled with the default.
• Existing campaigns with designations kept their settings.

You don’t need to do anything, but we recommend reviewing your account-wide default designation and checking your campaign settings.

We've created comprehensive guides to help you get the most out of these updates:

• Overview of designations explains how designations work in Fundraise Up and when to use them.
• Designations manager covers creating, organizing, and managing your designation library.
• Designations in campaigns walks through all the campaign editor options and strategies.
• Multiple designations shows how supporters can split donations and how to enable this feature.

You can also watch a walkthrough of the new designation features and setup process: