WordPress websites can easily be used by nonprofit organizations and charitable organizations. However, they also require specific tools that make it easy for people to donate on their respective websites.
There are plenty of WP themes to help you create a skin for your nonprofit, but there aren't as many options when it comes to adding an effective mechanism that would allow for people to easily give your organization money.
Enter Give – A handy WordPress Donation plugin
Here's what you can do with Give.
Under Plugins from your WP dash, click on “Add New”. Search for “Give – WordPress Donation Plugin”. Once you find it, install and activate the plugin.
Once the plugin is active, you are met with a very user friendly introductory guide to help you learn to use the plugin effectively.
1. Creating a donation form is very simple, especially if you are familiar with plugins like Gravity Forms or Contact Form 7. Under Donations, select Add Form.
2. You can then proceed to make changes to the default donation form setup. You can set up a multiple level form or set a specific donation amount or you could create a form that permits the user to set the donation amount.
Generally on crowdfunding websites, you tend to see xx$ more required to meet certain specific goals. It gives the person who is donating a sense that his money is actually contributing to something tangible. You can recreate that same effect by setting a goal for your donation form.
3. You can choose where you'd like to display the content either below or above form fields.
As for the actual payment fields, they can be displayed via three options. One which displays them outright, another that displays them when invoked and finally one more which opens up a modal window upon invoking.
You can do a lot of other stuff too:
- You can add an offline donation procedure
- Allow donor to request billing info
- Add register buttons if you'd like to
- Make it such that only registered members can donate
Another thing that Give handles well is the ability to add Terms & Conditions for any donations.
Monitoring Transactions, gathering data and using reports to make better decisions.
You can go through your transactions to find how many people initiated the process and stopped halfway through or how many of them had the transaction portal fail on them.
The data gathered can easily be exported and you can use third party tools or a statistical programming language like R to delve through the data and find new ways to meet higher donation income goals.
And you shouldn't overlook the reports that the plugin generates, which give you a pretty good idea of where you stand and what income you are likely to see in the near future.
Other Important Stuff
You can use a ready made success page and failed transaction page to handle a donor's post transaction or post failed transaction. The currencies people donate varies depending on the donor countries and you can modify your donor currency accordingly.
There is PayPal support for the payment gateway. Display options provided in the plugin allow the admin to disallow a lot of content which may otherwise distract the prospective donor or slow down the website.
You can also disable the form from various parts of your website, so that the form doesn't annoy readers by popping up all over the place.
You should also probably write your own email thanking people for their donations from the plugin settings. A nice personal message can go a long way in keeping a donor coming back to give more.
Any good form based plugin, including this one also, generates a shortcode, which makes it easy to add the form pretty much anywhere you want on your website with great ease.
A great number of options and new functionality can be added to the plugin via add-ons, far too many for me for me to cover here. But just to give you a glimpse, here's a preview.
This plugin is pretty awesome, but I think the real value is to be found by adding the right combination of add-ons like recurring payment and other payment gateways.
[icon link] Demo & Download: WordPress.org/plugins/give/