We cannot transfer donations made directly to a live project for any reason, including any situation where your project has received funding but it cannot move forward (e.g. it expired with partial funding, you chose to remove it from the site, or you no longer need the materials which were funded).
If a donor you know personally gave to your project via the fundraising links in your account or your teacher page, we’ll send those donations to you automatically as a DonorsChoose gift code for your next project. If you don’t know your donors personally, we leave the funding decision up to those donors. Because we don’t know what made a donor give to a specific project to begin with - they may have identified with a specific book, picked a project that reminded them of a relative, chosen to support a school because they grew up in the same town, or made a choice based on a variety of other factors - we give donors the chance to reallocate funds to a new project based on their own desires (which can include sending it to you for your next project).