Look at the designation report for your online donations. If one fund you never promote is collecting a surprising share of web gifts, check whether it happens to be the first item in the donation form’s designation dropdown. Donors who don’t touch that field send their gift wherever the list starts, and that’s rarely your general operating fund.
This article covers why that happens, what you can realistically control in Altru, and how to clean up gifts that already landed in the wrong place.
The short version
When a web form shows a designation dropdown, the preselected value is whatever appears first. In our experience there isn’t an obvious setting on the donation form that says “preselect this designation,” and if your version has one, it isn’t widely known. Before you build workarounds, confirm it for your own database: open the form in a sandbox or test environment, look through every option on the designation part of the form, and ask Blackbaud support directly whether a default selection is supported. If it is, use it and skip the rest of this.
If it isn’t, you have four practical options.
Option 1: Show only one designation
The cleanest fix is often the simplest. If most online gifts should go to one fund, offer only that designation on your main donation form. With one choice there’s nothing to default to by accident.
Then build separate forms for the campaigns that need their own designation, such as a capital project, an animal care fund, or a memorial gift, and link to each one from the page that talks about it. Donors who arrive from the conservation page land on the conservation form. Donors who click “Donate” in your header land on the general form.
The tradeoff is more forms to maintain. Keep the list short, name them clearly, and review them each year when you update designations.
Option 2: Control what appears first
If you need a dropdown with several choices, work out how your form orders the designations. Depending on setup, the order may follow the order you added them, an alphabetical sort, or something else. Test it: add designations to a test form in a known order and see what the public form shows.
Once you know the rule, you can make sure the fund you want as the de facto default is the one that appears first. If the list sorts by name, be careful about renaming designations just to move them up the list. A designation name shows up on reports, acknowledgments, and in finance’s world, so a change that helps the dropdown can confuse everyone else. Talk to whoever owns your chart of designations before you touch names.
Option 3: Make the field impossible to ignore
Some of the problem is page design. A donor who doesn’t notice the dropdown can’t make a choice. On the page that hosts the form:
- Put a short line of text right above the field, such as “Choose where your gift goes. Not sure? Pick General Support.”
- Use designation names donors understand. Internal fund names rarely mean anything to the public.
- Cut the list to the handful of options a donor would actually pick online. Restricted funds you only use for major gifts don’t need to be there.
None of this changes the default, but it reduces how many gifts fall through to the first item.
Option 4: Script the selection (with caution)
Some organizations add a small piece of JavaScript to the page around the form so the browser selects a particular designation when the page loads. Whether you can do this depends on how your forms are hosted and what your site allows, and it relies on the form’s internal markup staying the same. If Blackbaud changes the form, the script can silently stop working and you’re back to the original problem without knowing it. If you go this route, document it, test after every Altru update, and keep checking the audit query below.
Find and fix gifts that already went to the wrong fund
- Build a revenue query filtered to web form gifts over the last year, output by designation, date, and amount. Compare it against when each designation was added to or removed from the form.
- Look for the pattern. A spike in gifts to whichever designation sits first is the sign. Gifts with a tribute, a note, or a campaign appeal that clearly point elsewhere are easy calls.
- Agree on a policy with finance before you change anything. Redesignating revenue after it’s been posted affects the general ledger, and some organizations require donor consent to move a gift between restricted funds. Decide what you’ll correct and who signs off.
- Make the corrections on the revenue records, add a note explaining why, and make sure any acknowledgment that names the fund is right going forward.
- Save the query and run it monthly so you notice the next drift early.
Where Social Good fits
The steps above work with Altru as it is. If you’d rather control the donation page directly, our Checkouts product replaces Altru webforms with a branded, mobile-friendly checkout for donations, tickets, and memberships, and the gift data writes back to Altru, so the donation page experience is something you set up rather than work around.
Quick answers
Can I hide the designation dropdown entirely?
If the form offers a single designation, donors have nothing to pick and every gift goes to that fund. Check how your form displays a single option before launch.
Why not just put a “Please select” placeholder first?
That only works if the form will accept a blank or placeholder choice and require a real selection. Test it in a sandbox before trying it on a live form, because a placeholder designation that accepts gifts creates a new cleanup problem.
