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Non-profit organizations and individuals often participate in fundraising, welfare, or donation activities because they deeply feel for society’s particular issues. This doesn’t need to be necessarily confined to world problems like poverty, education, healthcare, or nursing homes. While many noble initiatives and individuals are working towards solving these issues, some businesses manage to support their local artisans by selling their products. For instance, if an online marketplace is selling handmade products from a particular brand, they could include additional fees for all their products that would directly go to that particular item’s maker charity of choice. These fees can be optional or required based on the company’s model.
Hence donations are not only about asking people for their money with no value in return. There are many sentimental, emotional, and monetary rewards that are associated with the process. If you are someone who wishes to include an option for donation on your WordPress website, you could make use of these 10 best donation plugins for WordPress websites:
1. WPForms:
This is an ideal donation plugin for any beginner user who has just started using WordPress. It uses an easy drag and drop form builder that allows the user to create an aesthetic and relevant form in no time. If you need more assistance, they also have a pre-built form template that can help you make the online donation form by changing the title tags to suit your cause. Many non-profits or small charities don’t necessarily require a heavily featured giveaway platform. Their requirements can be matched with a simple donation form that has the capability of accepting one time as well as recurring donations.
This plugin is ideal for that. It is integrated with Stripe and PayPal. This allows you to collect donations through credit cards on your website securely. It also makes the user trust you for providing such authentic payment methods. WPForms is a very all-inclusive form builder. Hence it can be used for survey forms, email newsletter sign-up forms, polls, and volunteer sign-up forms.
This plugin supports all the important CRM platforms and email marketing services like SendinBlue, MailChimp, AWeber, and Constant Contact. However, you would need to invest in payment add-ons for accepting online donations.
2. GiveWP:
GiveWP is a widely recognized WordPress plugin that helps non-profits receive donations and raise funds for their cause. It is one of the few wholesome donation plugins that have many donation-related features. You can easily create a tailored donation form on WordPress that would enable you to set up one-time and recurring donations. There are many payment getaways that you can use with this donation plugin – 2Checkout, Mollie, PayFast, Paymill, Stripe, PayPal, and many more.
You can take it even further and have donation processes customized with donation tributes like “in honor of,” campaign level donation goals, currency switcher options, donation receipts, multi-level donations, and more. This plugin also provides the user with a donor management area that has full-featured reporting. This helps you manage all the online and offline donations with ease. You also don’t need to worry about integration issues with any major email marketing services, as GiveWP has an integration option for most of them.
Suppose you have WooCommerce enabled on your website, and you run an online store. Then you can add a GiveWP donation plugin that would enable you to add a donation upsell when you reach the checkout screen. It also comes with a seamless Google Analytics integration support that has enhanced eCommerce tracking.
3. WP Crowdfunding:
It is one of the most powerful donation plugins for a WordPress website. It helps you start a fundraising site like Kickstarter or GoFundMe. This campaign style can be used either for your charity or to provide a collective fundraising platform for all charities in your network.
The plugin smoothly functions with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and all WooCommerce gateways. They also have a native wallet system that lets the user track pledges for all campaigns and distribute the funds to all individual stakeholders accordingly. Suppose your goal is to create a collective crowdfunding website like GoFundMe. In that case, you can also charge some commission fees for helping other campaigns collect donations.
4. Seamless Donations:
This is not one of the most feature-packed donation plugins, and it is not even trying to be. This donation plugin gives the user full control to gather and manage donations all within the WordPress dashboard. This plugin works very smoothly with PayPal, enabling your users to make contributions using their PayPal accounts or credit cards.
You can accept one time as well as recurring donation payments. Moreover, you can give the users the choice of the campaign they want to allocate their funds. It charges no transaction fees on your donors’ amount or from you. You can give your donors an option to make their donations automatically repeating. You can also do tributes using seamless donations where you can add ‘in memory of’ or even ‘in honor of’ so that the honoree and the person notified when the donation gets done. Other than this, you can also gift aid if you are from the UK. Once you select your country like the UK, Gift Aid gets automatically enabled.
5. Donorbox:
This is another capable donation plugin for any WordPress website. It can also work on standalone websites. This plugin allows you to set up one-time, weekly, monthly, and annual recurring contributions. The user can also use the option for company gift matching and accepting company donations. Your users would be able to donate using any payment form – Apple Pay, PayPal Express, ACH bank payments, One-Touch, and more.
It has many additional powerful features that enhance the plugins’ capabilities. You get a powerful goal meter, donation popup forms, donor wall, donor management, multi-currency support, and more. You can collect free donations up to $1000 per month. However, any contributions above that would require the user to pay a platform fee of 1.5%. Now you can choose to defer this fee to your users or pay it yourself. They do have to incur charges that might be missing on other plugins mentioned here. However, they are also good at taking all the technical headaches away from you and the payment infrastructure’s security.
6. Donation Thermometer:
This is an exciting WordPress donation plugin. As the name suggests, it uses a thermometer style illustration that displays the collected funds and your target amount. This is a visual reference to how close or far you are from your target. As they visit your site and see your campaign, the users could be urged to donate to the cause to see that the covered amount goes up. As it would increase with their contribution, they would feel good about it.
The thermometer itself is entirely customizable. You can change the fonts, the colors, meter size, and also the currency. You can also add a shortcode to display this donation thermometer on your pages and individual posts. It is fairly easily manageable for any user to understand and make the most out of.
You should know that this plugin is not going to enable you to accept any donations. It is to be used with any other WordPress donation plugin. It would just help you enhance the visuals and motivate your visitors to donate more.
7. Formidable Forms:
This plugin can be considered to be one of the most promising WordPress forms plugins. You can create intrinsic forms with the ease of drag and drop builder. There are many form templates with one pre-built donation collection template. It lets you to see the donation statistics in graphs within your WordPress dashboard.
You can also export the form data anywhere outside WordPress using this plugin. Suppose you have a third party donation entries service. In that case, you can import data from there to your WordPress website using this plugin too. It is also compatible with the WPML translation plugin that helps translate the form to any language.
8. Charitable:
Charitable is also one of the most straightforward donation plugins for your WordPress website. You can create unlimited fundraising campaigns and also set milestones for any cause. You get to set a fixed donation amount or allow the visitor to enter a custom donation amount or have both the options. The donations can be embedded into your pages, modal popups, sidebars, and posts as well. It has support for payment gateways like Authorize.net, Stripe, and newsletter sing up forms as well.
You can also set up recurring donations, peer to peer fundraising, crowdfunding, and donor fee relief, to name a few of the powerful features. This plugin never charges transaction fees. You can also create time-sensitive campaigns that would end automatically once they’re over. This plugin adapts to your theme’s aesthetics to look aesthetically pleasing. Charitable has support for various powerful email marketing and news integration platforms such as MailChimp, Mailerlite, MailPoet, Campaign Monitor, and more.
9. Easy PayPal Donation:
It is as easy as it sounds. This plugin allows the users to add a PayPal donate button on your WordPress website. The visitors can click the button and send in the donations using their credit cards or PayPal accounts. It is a straightforward plugin that comes with 7 button templates. Suppose you are not satisfied with their 7 predesigned buttons. In that case, you can also create a custom button style to match your website’s aesthetics.
This plugin works to ease linking PayPal with your WordPress website and enable you to receive the donations. The users can also set up monthly recurring donations using this plugin. This plugin is ideal for anyone who wants a direct donation button with a few features rather than wholesome donation plugins with campaigns and other features that, at times, might not be needed.
10. FundPress:
FundPress is an amazing donation plugin that can work as an effective solution for your fundraising campaigns. It has many useful features that are needed for a fundraiser website. It has support for many popular payment gateways like AuthorizeNet, PayPal, and Stripe. You can also use this plugin to set up a donation site.
You can add a custom donate button widget and set an automated thank you message that would go to your donors as a token of appreciation. This would be done using an email marketing software integration. You can also add an all campaign page with all the ongoing crowdfunding campaigns and charity campaigns with more information. Details like Goals, Raised, Percentage, and Estimated Days Left can all be inputted. It looks aesthetically pleasing in its grid layout. There is also an option to have single campaign pages that would have all details regarding one particular campaign in detail. You can add the description, the reason, and the benefits of this campaign that the visitors can read and connect to, motivating them to donate.
These are the 10 best donation plugins that work greatly for WordPress websites. If you have a noble cause or any project where you need to run campaigns to take support from your visitors, these plugins can ease your process to a great extent. Having such useful plugins saves you time dealing with technicalities and focus on your mission and purpose. It also safeguards the donors’ contributions as all of them use secure payment gateways. You also get to keep track of all donors and other important data regarding donations. Most of these plugins use powerful email marketing services and analytical tools. You remain in control of all operations and are empowered to run successful donation campaigns for all your causes.
