Funds and designations

Funds let you categorize donations by purpose or designation. They help you track where money is directed and report on fundraising progress by category.

What funds are

A fund represents a specific purpose or program that donors can contribute to. For example, you might create funds for “General Operations,” “Building Fund,” or “Scholarship Program.”

Funds give your donors a choice about how their donation is used. They also give your finance team a way to track and report on designated giving.

Creating and editing funds

To create a fund, go to Funds in the GiveFlow menu and click New fund. The editor groups the fields as follows:

• Name: The display name donors see on forms. Required.
• Code: A short, stable identifier for the fund, shown under its name in the Funds list. Required, and unique. Lowercase, no spaces, and best left alone once donations exist.
• Description: A brief explanation of the fund’s purpose. It appears under the fund’s name in the fund picker.
• Type: Unrestricted or restricted. Restricted funds are donor-designated and counted separately.
• Parent fund: Lets you nest a fund under a top-level one. Funds nest a single level deep, so a fund that already has sub-funds cannot itself become one.
• Goal amount: An optional fundraising target for the fund.
• Active from and Active until: Optional dates recorded on the fund. They are informational: GiveFlow does not currently use them to decide which funds a donor can pick.
• Accounting code: Records the GL account this fund maps to in your bookkeeping.
• Default fund: Whether this fund is the organization-wide default.
• Active: Whether the fund is currently available for new donations.

You can edit these fields at any time. Deactivating a fund removes it from forms but preserves existing donation records.

Funds also carry a sort order, which sets the order they appear in on forms and in lists. There is no field for it in the fund editor; it is set through the API.

A fund that nothing points to can be deleted outright. Once donations, campaigns, forms or recurring plans reference it, GiveFlow never hard-deletes it: choosing Delete offers to deactivate the fund and keep every record, or to move everything that points at it onto another fund and then remove it. Reassignment runs in the background: the fund is switched off straight away, shows as reassigning in the list, and is removed once the move completes. A fund with sub-funds has to have those dealt with first.

Setting a default fund

One fund can be marked as the organization-wide default. This fund receives donations when no other fund is specified.

To set a default fund, edit the fund and enable the Default fund toggle, or use the Set as default row action on the Funds list. Only one fund can be the default at a time. Setting a new default automatically removes the default status from the previous one.

You cannot clear the default flag directly, and you cannot deactivate or delete the default fund. Promote another fund first, then change the old one.

Fund resolution

When a donation is submitted, GiveFlow determines which fund to assign it to using a priority chain. The first active fund in this list wins:

1. Donor choice: The fund the donor picked on the form.
2. Form default: The default fund set on the donation form.
3. Campaign default: The default fund set on the campaign.
4. Organization default: The fund marked as the organization-wide default.
5. First active fund: If none of the above resolves, the first active fund in sort order.

Inactive funds are skipped at every step, so a donation never lands in a fund that has been switched off. If your organization has no active funds at all, the donation is recorded without one.

Fund-picker form block

GiveFlow includes a fund-picker block that you can add to your donation forms. This block lets donors choose which fund they want to support.

The fund picker lists active funds as radio tiles, each with the fund’s name and, where you wrote one, its description. A parent fund that has active children is shown as a group header rather than a choice, so donors pick a specific child fund.

By default the picker shows every active fund. In the block settings you can rename the label, use Restrict to funds to offer only some of them, set a Preselected fund, and turn on Allow “no specific fund” to add a tile for donors who would rather not designate their donation. If a donor makes no selection, the resolution chain described above determines the fund.

Tracking fund performance

The Funds screen is where you see how designated giving is going. Above the list, four figures summarize your funds:

Each row in the list shows the fund’s name and code, whether it is restricted, a goal progress bar of raised against goal, and whether it is active. Child funds are indented under their parent, and a parent’s bar includes everything its children raised, so a parent that collects nothing directly still reports the true total.

You can search the list and filter it to active, inactive, or restricted funds.