What is the difference between restricted and unrestricted donations?

A restricted donation comes with a donor-imposed condition on how it can be spent — for a specific program, capital project, or building campaign. The nonprofit is legally and ethically obligated to honor the restriction. An unrestricted donation comes with no such condition; the nonprofit can apply it to operations, programs, or anything else within its mission.

Unrestricted gifts are typically more valuable to nonprofits than restricted ones because they cover the unglamorous costs — rent, salaries, overhead — that restricted gifts often won't. A program that raises only restricted dollars can find itself unable to keep the lights on.

CrowdCreate is a donation widget without categorization fields — every pledge is collected the same way and lands in your Stripe account undifferentiated. If you need to track restricted vs unrestricted, you'd capture that intent elsewhere (a separate campaign, a message field) and reconcile it in your own records.