Soapbox Engage Blog

Donors give more confidently when they know exactly where their gift is going. But most nonprofits run more than one program, fund, or initiative, and listing all of them on a donation form without any structure turns a simple decision into a scavenger hunt.

A donation designation lets a donor choose the specific program, fund, or campaign their gift supports, right on the donation form. Done well, it gives donors a clearer connection to the work they care about, and it gives your team better data on what programs are actually resonating.

Below, we'll walk through how Soapbox Engage Designations works for donors, show a full setup demo, and cover best practices for organizing restricted giving options, whether or not you're using our tools.

Why Designations Matter for Donor Experience and Reporting

Donors don't give to an organization in the abstract. They give because a specific mission, program, or story moved them, and the more clearly a donation form reflects that, the easier it is for a donor to feel confident about their gift. A generic "Donate Now" button asks for trust. A form that lets a donor direct their gift to youth programs, a scholarship fund, or disaster relief gives them a reason.

Designations also solve a reporting problem. Without them, a nonprofit's only record of donor intent is whatever appeal or campaign a gift happened to come through, which is a poor substitute for knowing what a donor actually cares about. Attaching a designation to each transaction gives your team a clearer picture of donor intent:

• Shows which programs and funds are actually resonating with supporters
• Feeds grant reporting with real, donor-attributed program data
• Surfaces giving patterns useful for identifying major gift prospects
• Reduces reliance on appeal or campaign source as a proxy for donor interest

The challenge most nonprofits run into is scale. A handful of designations is easy to present cleanly. Fifteen or twenty, spread across multiple programs and campaigns, is not, unless there's a way to organize them.

How Soapbox Engage Designations Works

Soapbox Engage Designations is a feature built into the Soapbox Engage Donations app that lets donors select the specific program, fund, or initiative their gift supports, while giving your team tools to keep a growing list of options organized on both ends.

Here's how it comes together:

Watch: Feature Focus Demo

This short walkthrough from our team shows the donor-facing designation picker and the full Administrator setup, from creating designations and categories to enabling groups on a donation page.

Soapbox Engage Feature Focus: Designations

How to Set Up Designations

Configuring designations takes place in two areas of the Soapbox Engage Administrator: managing your designations and categories, and enabling them on the Donation page where you want them to appear.

Step 1: Manage your designations and categories

In the Soapbox Engage Administrator, open the Donations app and select Designations. Here you can see each available designation along with its category and any internal or Salesforce values connected to it.

The name is what donors see on the form, while the category helps your team organize related designations in the Administrator. For example, several individual program designations, like a summer camp fund or a mentorship fund, could all be assigned to one Youth Programs category.

Designation	Category
Summer Camp Fund	Youth Programs
Mentorship Fund	Youth Programs
Emergency Shelter	Housing Services

Designation categories are primarily an administrative tool. They help you organize and manage a larger list of giving options behind the scenes, and they're separate from how donors will actually browse those options on the form.

Step 2: Enable designations and build groups on your Donation page

To make designations available to donors, open the Donation page where you want to use them, go to the Payment tab, and enable designations. You can also customize the field label so the question feels natural on your form, using language like "Direct my gift to" or "Choose a program."

From here, you can create groups for the donor-facing form and choose which designations should appear in each one. Because this is configured by page, you can preset different options for different campaigns or fundraising needs, so a capital campaign page and a general giving page can each surface only the designations that make sense in context.

You can also set one designation as the default. This works well when a page mainly supports one program but you still want donors to have choices available.

Step 3: Review results on the transaction

After a donation is completed, the selected designation is recorded on the transaction, giving your team a clear view of where the donor directed their support.

Best Practices for Organizing Giving Options

Whether or not you're using Soapbox Engage, these principles apply broadly to presenting restricted giving options on a donation form.

If you're thinking about how designated giving fits into a broader fundraising strategy, our guide on fundraising strategies working in 2026 covers where restricted and designated gifts fit alongside recurring giving, events, and major gifts. And if you're working to convert more designated one-time gifts into ongoing support, our post on recurring upsells covers how to prompt donors toward monthly giving right after checkout.

Donors don't need dozens of unsorted options to feel like they have a choice. They need a clear, well-organized way to direct their gift to what matters most to them, and a system on the backend that turns those choices into usable data. For most nonprofits juggling more than one program, that's a small addition with an outsized impact on both donor experience and reporting.

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