Handling anonymous donations
Fundraise Up provides the option for supporters to make their donations anonymously, which means they prefer not to have their contribution acknowledged publicly by the organization. In this article, we'll explain how Fundraise Up handles anonymous donations and how you can control this feature on a per-campaign basis.
Enabling anonymous donations
You can allow or disable anonymous donations for each campaign individually. To configure this setting:
- Open Dashboard → Campaigns.
- Open the campaign, go to Settings, and find the Supporter section.
- Enable Allow to donate anonymously.
- Click Save changes.
When anonymous donations are enabled, supporters will have the option to choose whether they want their donation to be acknowledged publicly or remain anonymous.
How Fundraise Up handles anonymous donations
When a supporter marks a donation as anonymous:
- Public displays: The donation is excluded from public-facing donation feeds such as Social Proof, Recent Donations, and Campaign Page Supporter Impact.
- Internal records: The donation and supporter information remain available to the organization in the Fundraise Up Dashboard. Anonymity does not delete or anonymize the underlying record.
- Integrations and exports: The donation can include an anonymous indicator in exported or integrated data. How that value is mapped or used depends on the specific integration and its configuration.
- Reporting and attribution: The donation still contributes to fundraising totals, campaign reporting, and attribution. Organizations can use the anonymous indicator as a reporting filter when appropriate, but should not normally exclude anonymous gifts from revenue or campaign-performance reporting.
Anonymity in Fundraise Up is an agreement between the supporter and the organization about public acknowledgment. The organization still has access to the supporter’s information for internal record-keeping and communication purposes.
Changing anonymity after a donation
An organization can mark an existing donation as anonymous:
- Open Dashboard → Donations.
- Open the donation and find Personal Information.
- Click Edit, enable Anonymous donation, and save the changes.
The anonymous setting applies to each donation individually, not to the supporter’s entire record. If several donations need to be made anonymous, update each one separately. Supporters cannot currently change this setting themselves through Donor Portal.
Changing a donation to anonymous is not fully retroactive. It prevents the donation from appearing in future public displays and reports, but does not remove information that was already displayed publicly or included in a previously generated report.
For more information, see Making a donation anonymous post-contribution.
Anonymous donations vs. donations without supporter details
An anonymous donation is one where the supporter asks not to be identified publicly. The organization still retains the supporter and transaction information internally.
This is different from a donation made without supporter details, where identifying information such as a name or email address was never collected.