Designation groups are a great way to organize your funds into categories for your Giving Forms or Campaign Forms. This article walks you through how to create Designation Groups “by hand”. If you’d like to upload your designations group via a CSV file, click here.
Creating Designation Groups at the School Level
Getting Started
Head to your Administrator Dashboard > Content and Settings > Designations > Existing Designations section, and click the link asking if you would like to organize them into groups. Once redirected, you will start by clicking the Create New Group button at the top of your screen.
Creating a Group
Let’s build a designation group around Athletics.
We’ll start by naming the group. This group name determines the label administrators see on the backend, and what donors see when designating their gift. If a donor clicked into the "Athletics" group within the donation form, they would then be presented with a list of individual sports to choose from.
If you choose to provide a Program Priority field, donors will be given the option to designate their gift to the group itself.
While picking an individual sport would still be an option, donors could choose to support Athletics as a whole, and your team would have more flexibility when allocating their gift across the institution. Program Priority is not required and if not present, the donor will have to pick a designation within the group if designation if required on the form.
Now we need to add specific designations to your Athletics group.
When a donor clicks into the Athletics designation group within a donation form, they will be presented with the individual sports you selected in the following interface.
In this example, donors would visit a donation form, choose Athletics as their initial designation selection, and then be prompted to choose one of the 4 individual sports we added to the group.
Organizing designations within groups is easier than ever with clear add and delete options, along with search.
Nested Groups
When grouping designations, you can take this one step further and nest additional groups inside of a group. For an optimal donor experience, we do not recommend creating more than 3 levels of grouping.
A Group nested in another group is great for areas of support that have more funding opportunities than most and need a little extra organization. Let’s continue with the Athletics example and build an additional Winter Sports group within it.
Instead of clicking the Add Designations button, let's click on AddGroup.
Our new Winter Sports group will only be shown to donors once they click into the top-level Athletics group.
You can add designations within this nested group, in this case WinterSports, the exact same way you added designations to Athletics to start.
Continuing this grouping idea, you could create two other groups to align with other seasonal sports.
Note how the Add Designations and Add Group buttons can work in tandem.
In this example, a donor could select Athletics > Area of Greatest Needand be done with their designation selection. Alternatively, they could drill down further into the nested groups to find a specific sport they want to support.
Now that we've created an Athletics designation group at the institution-level, you can drop them into any new Giving Forms or campaign forms moving forward.
Learn more about adding Designation Groups to your Giving Forms or Campaign Forms here.
Maintaining Designation Groups at the School-Level If you’re leveraging our Designation Group sync functionality, making most changes to your Designation Group will happen at the school-level. If the Designation Group is being leveraged as a synced group on any Giving Form or Campaign Form you can control at the school-level:
- What designations are added to the designation group
- What designations are removed from the designation group
- The name of the designation group
- What designations within the group are hidden but searchable
- The order which the designations appear in the group
- Edit the program priority of the designation group
Other Designation Group Ideas:
This functionality is not limited to Athletics; this is just one of several instances where grouping designations would allow for a more donor centric-experience. Other use cases to get your creative juices flowing could be:
- Academics: Create an academic group that breaks out areas of study. For example: Academics (group) > Sciences (group) > Biology (designation), Chemistry (designation), Psychology (designation).
- Schools: Are you a large institution with several colleges? Build a group for each school to highlight unique funds. For example: Business School (group) > Area of Greatest Need (designation), Scholarships (Designation).