Allocations

Hello! In this lesson we’ll learn about Allocations. If you’re like most organizations, you have programs and initiatives that contribute towards your mission. When donations come in, you allocate funds towards these specific programs. Funraise makes it easy to automatically allocate individual transactions towards your program funding goals.

In this quick lesson we’ll cover…

• Creating Allocations
• Editing a Transaction’s Allocation, and
• Adding Allocations to a Giving Form

If it’s not clicking yet… let’s create a few Allocations to start—it’ll all make sense soon.

Creating Allocations

Let’s say our organization focuses on education and has two main programs: Scholarships and Advocacy.

We’ll create an allocation for Scholarships and set a goal—this can be an annual goal or, if it’s tied to a particular campaign, a short term goal—it’s up to you... Next, let’s create an Allocation for Advocacy...

Now that we’ve got our two main programs, let’s address the Operations Tip allocation. This is a default allocation that cannot be removed. This allocation is a helpful tracker for the sum of operation tips your donors have opted into. If you don’t know what an operations tip is, don’t worry, we’ll cover this in detail during the Giving Forms course.‍

Editing a Transaction’s Allocation

Now that we have created a few allocations, let’s jump over to the transaction section to see how to edit the allocation of a single transaction.

If you open a transaction profile and scroll down, you’ll see an option to assign an allocation to this transaction. Click Add Allocation, then search, and select Scholarships.

Click Save.

Transactions can only have one allocation.

You can also filter your transaction lists by Allocation to see all the transactions for a particular fund. In this case, if we filter by Allocation = Scholarship, we’ll see the transaction we just edited.

And, jumping back over to Allocations, look! The Scholarships allocation now shows one transaction, and we’re a bit closer to our goal.

So, now that we’ve covered manually editing a single transaction’s allocation… Let's get into the fun stuff.

Adding Allocations to Giving Forms

It’s obviously not very efficient to set an allocation manually for each transaction, so you’ll need a method that automatically does this for you... Adding Allocations to a Giving Form is your solution.

Let’s jump over to our Giving Forms...

In the settings tab of the giving form editor, click payments and scroll to allocations. Now, add one or more allocations to the Giving Form.

If you only add one allocation, this allocation will be assigned to all transactions that are created through this Giving Form, but the allocation will not be shown to the donor.

If you add multiple allocations to the giving form, the donor will be able to determine how they’d like their donation allocated using a dropdown selector on the Giving Form.

So, if we add both Scholarships and Advocacy, our donors will be able to select the program they would like to support when making a donation.

Allocations are a helpful tool to keep track of program funding and assign transactions to funds automatically—put them to good use!