With the use of the internet, organizations and people are now efficiently receiving donations to campaign a cause or to promote a service. Placing a donation button on your site has now become standard practice. You can also follow this practice by using WordPress donation plugins. These donation plugins will help you accept funds on your place in the most straightforward manner possible.
Donations are one of the best ways to reward a person for their excellent work. It’s a generous way to show respect to a person’s efforts in making a difference in the society. Many people depend on their reader’s generosity as a means to pay off the cost of their running website. Also, people are belonging to various non-profit organizations who take these funds and depend on fundraisers to continue working for a good cause.
So have you ever considered relying on donations for your work? Or have you ever thought about generating money for your business?
If the answer is yes, you must know how significant these donations are to run a website. Without contributions, there would be many professionals who couldn’t create happiness, art, or prosperity while making money from their business.
So if you want to get donations for your website, to pay the upkeep cost of running a site, then you don’t need to go out and ask money from rich people. You can do it quickly through various WordPress donation plugins along with some other elements.
In this guide, we will discuss the top ten WordPress donation plugins that will help you collect funds most effectively. But first, let us have a look at some essential elements that you need to receive donations on your website.
Important elements for receive donations
Just like you need some factors or elements on your site to sell a product and to receive payment for it, similarly, you also need some factors that will allow you to accept donations through your WordPress site.
Following are some of these significant factors:
- 1WordPress – This works as a platform to run your website. You can get it by downloading a popular CMS.
- 2Domain name – This indicates the name of your site that will work as a non-profit website. Often, the name is the same as that of a non-profit or charity.
- 3Quality Hosting– Every website needs hosting in helping in running your website by managing and storing site files.
- 4A consistent WordPress theme – WordPress offers numerous topics to meet your website or business particulars. You can use any WordPress NGO or charity theme. When you get a charity theme, it comes with a donation button, information sections and scheduling systems for fundraising.
- 5Donation plugin – This is what you will learn in detail in this post as we discuss the top donation plugins for WordPress.
- 6A payment gateway – This is needed to process and accept different payments by using your donation plugin.
All of these are essential factors that will assist in keeping your website up and running. The only factor that would require scheduled maintenance is your WordPress donation theme. The support is regarding collecting more money and incorporating better options for successful fundraising through the site.
WordPress Top Ten Donation Plugins
Following are the best WordPress donation plugins that you can use on your WordPress site for fundraising.
1. Give – Fundraising Platform and Donation Plugin
Give is the latest contender in the list of WordPress donation plugins. The plugin is another impressive work by Devin Walker and Matt Cromwell, designers of many great WordPress plugins. It is known as the most flexible and robust plugin to receive donations on your website. The plugin doesn’t need several active installs, unlike other donation plugins. It comes with many distinguishing features such as exporting of forms, reporting of ways, etc.
With this plugin, you can easily have an intuitive solution to raise money and without paying off any amount of the borrowed money. It offers clean and simple design. The plugin can be used to accept several types of payments, and it works excellently with almost all the payment gateways.
Other significant benefits of using Give donation plugin are professional looking forms that include donor management and reporting, absolutely free of cost. You can have some great add-ons as per your needs. It offers recurring donation functionality for first donation forms, and you can add several custom goals and fields to persuade more people for donations.
You can view a complete demo of this plugin before you choose to incorporate this. There is no transaction fee, and it is one of the best WordPress donation plugins so far.
2. PayPal Donation Plugin
PayPal is one of the most downloaded WordPress themes. It is a gem for your non-profit website. If you love simplicity, sturdy and sleek functionality, and appearance on your site, then this plugin is a must-have. As the name suggests, PayPal plugins are built explicitly for accepting payments via PayPal, one of the most popular online money transfer solution.
You can add the donation button anywhere on the website including page, header, sidebar, posts, a simple shortcode, and footer. The thing that still needs improvement is the feature to thank the donor. However, you can again appreciate your donor by redirecting them to a thank you page.
One of the most distinguishable features of PayPal donation plugin is that it is the easiest and fastest way to collect funds through the site. When you install PayPal plugin, you get almost fifteen built-, and you don’t need additional plugins to get more translations. The plugin offers a donation button that cut down the time regarding development. The most obvious reason to incorporate this plugin is that people recognize and trust the brand PayPal, so they are more likely to donate. Lastly, the widget and shortcode are way easy to not only find but also to add to a sidebar, page or post.
3. Donation Thermometer
Donation thermometer is a WordPress donation plugin which offers a more dramatic design for your site. As the name indicates, when you incorporate this plugin, it adds an image of custom thermometer that charts the amount of the raised donations. The plugin includes a simple shortcode, which displays a classic-style thermometer on the site for the fundraising activities.
The plugin is straightforward to customize, and with that, you can quickly change the image text as well as the color. However, you may not find a lot of features in Donation Thermometer, unlike giving or Charitable plugin. But if you are a beginner or have a first website, then this is a suitable plugin to work with
The custom thermometer offered in this plugin is excellent to persuade donors to contribute to your non-profit website and to help them reach their set fundraising goals. This is especially true when they can monitor the progress as it builds excitement. The plugin is the best way to track success rate right on the donation page of your website.
4. Charitable Donation
Charitable is known as one of the most extendable and powerful donation plugins. This plugin provides users excellent and full control over their site’s donation. It is a developer friendly plugin. It offers excellent support for simple updates, geolocation, user avatars, videos, anonymous contributions, and annual premium support.
The plugin is free to use, but if you want a premium membership, you can get it at $99/year which goes up to $250/year. This is a very favorable price if we consider gaining access to gift aids, newsletter integration, premium payment gateways, and secure digital downloads.
The best features of the Charitable plugin include no transaction fee, donation based on location, peer to peer donation extension, popular payment solutions such as PayUMoney, Authorize.net, and PayFast. The campaign updates can be shared with contributors, and all the pricing plans offer a year of customer support and one site license.
The charitable plugin was developed to support the non-profit website free of cost and without the need to pay hefty fees which takes away the ability to control or brand donation pages. It is an affordable alternative to other hosted fundraising platforms. The development of Charitable is not carried out with the idea of charging a transaction fee or taking some amount from the raised fund. All of this is done by offering additional extensions, which also adds extra features to your website.
If you need online support for your website and to keep it happening, then Charitable plugin offers the online support as FAQ, ticketing system, blog, and documentation.
5. WooCommerce Donation Plugin
The best use of WooCommerce donation plugin is for the people who run an online store and want one part of their online store as a charity site to receive donations. The significant features of this plugin include redirecting the customer to a checkout page after the gift is added to the cart. The customers can quickly select the payment gateway they want to use. With that, there is a custom email template for all the donations that are in process or completed.
The basic functionality of this plugin adds a donation as one of the regular product. This means that a customer can add a contribution to the cart as a product and pay the amount without getting anything in return. Similarly, the customer can also include the field of donation in their cart itself, and this will prompt the customer to pay a little extra as a donation, on top of their actual payment.
The most standout features of WooCommerce donation plugin is that your online store remains the same and at the same time you also receive donations. A simple report helps you decide whether you should continue the donation program, as you can see the source of contributions. The donation field may have a drop-down list carrying pre-defined values, or it may remain blank so that the customer can fill in the amount they want to donate. The plugin is easily accessible for a one-time fee of $18.
6. Custom Post Donation
This donation plugin is a little bit different than other available plugins. The plugin can be used to make three different types of widgets. These include Additional donation, Standard donation and Per item + Additional donation. However, you can have two more widgets, but these widgets are offered in the pro version only.
Custom post donation plugin is more of a choice when we talk about plugins. The plugin lacks the intuitive aspect, but you get the ability to select among various donation options. To choose the donation type, you can go to CP donation setting page. Here you can create the widget of your own choice and the one that best suits your purpose. As soon as you fill the required details, you get a shortcode which you can paste into the new post or page that you create.
With Custom Post donation you can create unique and customized PayPal donation forms that can be inserted into the WordPress pages or posts to receive gifts. The paid version of Custom Post plugin includes multiple widgets, donation type, and two languages translations.
7. Smart Donation
This is all in one WordPress donation plugin that lets you create various types of donations. It allows you monitor your results, set goals, set thank you emails, and generate donation forms. The plugin offers support for Stripe, PayPal, and different donation styles, which include classic donation, slider donation, textbox donation, three buttons donation, and forms.
In this plugin, you also get IPN notification support that lets you keep track of donations made. This will help you know how well you are performing in a period and set a goal accordingly. The plugin offers simple donation buttons that can be placed anywhere on the site.
However, the fee for this plugin is not of much help, and you would need to go with the membership plan that would cost you a maximum of $50. But this payment is one time, and you no more need to pay any fee later on.
With this plugin, you can quickly set goals that will reflect the progress of the campaign. This will show your customer the progress in achieving the set goal. The plugin majorly runs using buttons, and in case you need more information from the contributors, you may create various forms. Moreover, you can make the most of donation wall which displays the top contributors.
8. Donation Content Locker
Donation Content Locker plugin works uniquely. It lets your users read the content on your website but only if they donate. A part of the material is readable by the visitors but to read the complete content, they must contribute in the form of donation. While this may not sound like a persuading way to receive the gift, this way you are indirectly asking your visitors to pay a premium fee. One way to work around this is to turn your website into a membership area.
With this plugin, you lock the content using the shortcode. However, the content gets displayed even if the visitor is making just a small contribution. But again you get the option to set the minimum amount to be donated.
With this plugin, you get access to five major payment gateways, which include Payza, AlertPay, PayPal, Authorize.Net, and InterKassa.
When a customer donates to view the complete content, the donor receives an activation link through which the locked content can be seen. The plugin improves not only the functionality of the site but also a different way to collect funds. However, you may face some opposition or slow response since people may not like this different approach to soliciting donations.
9. Donation Manager for WordPress
This is another reliable solution to handle donations on your site. You can quickly create a donation campaign using this plugin. This will assist you in placing shortcode on your page and start getting funds. When a visitor donates the plugin include them in the list of donators.
The plugin receives payments through six different payment gateways including PayPal, AlertPay/Payza, Authorize.Net, Skrill/Moneybookers, EgoPay, and InterKassa. Not to mention, this is the only plugin which is offering more than five payment gateways to support donations on your site.
The plugin is a paid one and includes no support for any 2 Checkout. The plugin offers regular support and updates and is easy to set up.
10. Donorbox
Donorbox donation plugin offers excellent integration with WordPress. The superb combination of Donor box is not limited to the WordPress, but it also provides excellent support for other CMSs and website builders. The best part about Donor box is that it is smoothly embedded in your site in just a matter of seconds. Once done, you get a beautiful display of a recurring donation system.
Donorbox offers a strong focus regarding recurring payments. It takes away the need for paying for an add-on and guide the business model which is most profitable. If the monthly donation on your site is below $1000 mark, you are not required to pay even a single dollar. The plugin lets you accept payments through ACH bank transfers, cards, Stripe and PayPal. The donors get full control over the donation plans and make the changes to the monthly payments as they prefer. The plugin shows support for dozens of languages and currencies that expand the reach all over the world.
The customer gets the option to select the campaign they prefer to spend money on. They also get to choose how often they want to make the payment. On the backend of the website, all of these features or settings are customizable. As you offer Stripe and PayPal as the payment options, it helps you ascertain the amount that your organization should expect in the current year.
Conclusion
Once you get hold of these fantastic donation plugins, raising funds through your website becomes an easy job. You can do it by using combinations of donation plugins. But what usually creates difficulty is to maintain a proper record of this payment. This is something that people do manually, but it needs a lot of work and time to be done accurately.
However, the above-discussed donation plugins make it easier for any blogger, site owner or any other person raising money for the business or non-profit organization. Every plugin offers distinctive features and is best for different purposes.
For instance, if you want the best value then donate plugin your best bet. If you need simple setup, then go with PayPal donations. For video support and geolocation, charitable donation plugin is a preferred choice. To avail less popular payment gateways, DonationManager for WordPress is a better choice. To ask donations by locking content, to receive gifts through WooCommerce and for a better and focused recurring payment, go with Donation Content Locker, WooCommerce Donation, and Donor box plugin, respectively.
This is all that you need to set up a perfect non-profit website. Use the plugin that offers the best features for your purpose, and this is precisely why we have discussed these plugins in detail. It will help you in understanding the situations in which each of these plugins will work correctly on your site. However, if none of the discussed plugins seems fruitful, then you can also take the assistance of CiviCRM that is an open source CRM for NGOs as well as non-profits. This also offers WordPress integration.
So which WordPress donation plugin are you choosing for your non-profit site? Tell us by commenting below. Also if you have had a good or bad experience with any of these plugins or you want to ask any query, drop a line in the comments section below.
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