For directors and chief executives of charitable and non-profit organizations, increasing online donations presents real challenges. As part of our daily work at LBDesign, we regularly help such organizations implement and market new or updated WordPress-driven online donation functionality.
With WordPress, Many Options
While accepting money online can be intimidating for the uninitiated, the power and popularity of WordPress has produced a range of plugins and services capable of filling the need of collecting donations in a cost-effective way.
Why Collect Online Donations?
Accepting donations online empowers a charity to connect with and receive support from a wider audience, and particularly from new supporters. With a donation form available all day and night, every day and night, anyone in any city can hop online and provide support.
The presence of an on-site donation mechanism (through a non-profit’s site) enables stronger, more cohesive social media campaigns. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and more can all be used to push potential donors to a single page – a page with engaging messaging and an easy-to-use donation form.
Additionally, donation functionality can be an efficient method for collecting contact details such as email addresses for newsletters and e-marketing campaigns. Given the digital nature of how the donations are processed, all the donor information can be seamlessly passed into donor relations management systems, reducing workloads and the risks of clerical errors.
Gravity Forms and Online Donations
At LBDesign, we have two preferred approaches to enable our clients to collect donations through their websites; both methods harness the power of the Gravity Forms plugin. Gravity Forms takes the pain out of adding forms to WordPress websites. Combined with Gravity Forms’ easy-to-use interface, the are many add-on plugins for connecting a WordPress website to other third party services. The two Gravity Forms add-ons that we regularly use for donation projects are PayPal Payments Pro and Stripe.
A key benefit of accepting online donations is the capacity for receiving recurring donations. With a single donor interaction, a charity can set up a regular donation stream that can be worth hundreds or thousands of dollars. Payment gateways (like PayPal and Stripe) often charge additional fees for processing recurring donations. In our experience, we’ve found that fees for accepting recurring payments are worth the convenience in the long run. For example, if the payment gateway charges a $10 monthly fee to accept a recurring donation, but a $20 a month donation comes in, the charity will cover its costs with an extra $10 a month to put towards projects.
Using Gravity Forms add-on plugins enables us to connect to payment gateways for our clients in hugely efficient and cost-effective ways.
Read more about taking donations with your WordPress website
- How Your Nonprofit Can Take Donations With WordPress from iThemes
- Give Stories: Real causes using Give to fundraise from Give
