Fundraising and Processing Donations with GiveWP

If you’re involved in fundraising for a non-profit, looking to crowdsource funds, are trying to gain sponsorships for a project, or need to collect donations for any purpose, GiveWP is a great tool for all the above!

Even if you’ve missed your chance to take advantage of Giving Tuesday, there’s plenty of opportunity to make an appeal for some year-end giving from your supporters, fans, and friends. Whether you’re raising funds for a non-profit organization or a personal venture, this plugin is perfect for adding a donation form with a payment gateway to your WordPress site.

Overview of the GiveWP Plugin

The core of GiveWP can be downloaded for free from WordPress.org or from within the WP admin dashboard area where you typically add Plugins. This basic free version helps you create professional donation forms and accept payments via Stripe and PayPal Standard. You can also manage donors and view detailed reports regarding recent donations.

There’s a plethora of add-ons that can greatly extend the functionality of GiveWP, seven of which can be downloaded free of charge. Among the many premium add-on extensions, you can gain support for various other payment gateways, recurring donations, fee recovery, currency switching, custom fields and integrations for email marketing services.

Premium add-ons can be purchased on an individual basis, but you’ll want to familiarize yourself with the basics before buying any, as GiveWP offers several plans that include many of these features. The highest tier plan includes them all, plus VIP support!

Setting Up GiveWP

Once installed on your site, you’ll be taken through a step-by-step setup guide that will help you determine your cause, set your location, and choose features for your first donation form. When that is complete, the next step will be connecting your payment gateways.

On the free version, just PayPal and Stripe are the default options for receiving payments, which you can start setting up through the setup guide interface. This can also be configured in Donations>Settings within the WordPress admin dashboard.

The set up guide provides the option of checking out the available add-ons, but we recommend you familiarize yourself with the other aspects of GiveWP before considering those.

Creating Donation Forms

In the process of configuring GiveWP, you’ll be prompted to establish your first donation form. The guided setup interface walks you through the options, and helps you publish an initial form with a donation button and even gives you a preview of how it will appear on the frontend.

To utilize donation forms, you simply copy and paste a shortcode into the Page or Post where you’d like it displayed. GiveWP automatically generates a shortcode for every form created, and displays a handy “Copy Shortcode” button in the Donations>All Forms dashboard settings.

There’s also two types of form designs you can choose from: Legacy and Multi-step. The Legacy form is more basic and easier to create, as you just select your donation button text and then confirm the style and options to be displayed. The Multi-Step form is the best option for those who want more control over their forms. For each step of the donation process, you can delineate the headline, description, color scheme, and buttons, among other things.

Every aspect of the donation process can be changed to suit your needs. Define minimum and maximum donation amounts, make various suggested donation levels, and set a donation goal, so site visitors can see the current status of your fundraising initiative. The Form Fields category is where you set the default payment gateway, enable test donations, allow anonymous donations, and define registration requirements, if you’d like.

Donations, Donors, and Data

One of the more powerful aspects of the GiveWP plugin are the data collection and analyzation tools built in. Some fundraising solutions merely offer a payment processing gateway, leaving your donor information available only through their website or other application.

By contrast, GiveWP builds a profile of all donors and donations processed on your site. The information is then stored in the database, using WordPress post types, and GiveWP simply refers to this as the donor database.

This information is made available on the backend of your site, and for each donation, you can see who donated, how much they gave, the status of their payment, the date that the transaction occurred, and much more.

This feature is quite useful, for various reasons. First of all, having a database of your donors not only helps you better understand who is contributing donations and why, but also provides many marketing opportunities.

GiveWP integrates with popular email marketing services and can be connected to CRMs such as SalesForce, by using the Zapier add-on. This can help you continue building relationships with your donors, keeping them updated with the latest news and encouraging them to donate again.

Further Customizations, Settings, and Tools

As was mentioned previously, GiveWP has quite a variety of both free and premium add-ons that can be used for extending functionality. We won’t go into great detail about those here, but GiveWP has categorized them on their Add-ons page as Payment Gateways, Marketing, Tools, Accounting, and Must Have plugins, and you can find more information there.

Give WP Settings

Aside from the many add-ons that are available, the GiveWP plugin settings area has lots of configuration settings for forms, payments, emails, and other things, which you’ll want to get acquainted with first and foremost. Here, you can define your base country and state, select WordPress pages for the success, failed payment, and history pages, define currency settings, configure access control, enable reCAPTCHA and set the order sequence for donation IDs.

In the next settings page, under the Payment Gateways tab, payment processors can be configured, enabled, or disabled and test donations can also be enabled to help you ensure everything gets set up correctly.

Under the Default Options tab, you can enable and disable form fields, post types, taxonomies, and terms and conditions.

Emails

The Emails tab is where you can customize the email messages that GiveWP sends out to donors and administrators whenever a donation is submitted, and here you can amend the subject, header and message for each of these. There are template tags available to help you personalise each one, and you can also add your name, logo and address information to every email that goes out, if you’d like.

License

The License tab is where licensing information for premium add-ons can be entered, which is necessary for receiving automatic plugin updates for those extensions.

Advanced

On the Advanced tab, various other settings are configured, like changing the default GiveWP style, removing all plugin data when you uninstall GiveWP, and changing the default user role for donors. In this area you can also clear the cache, disable scripts, disable the setup guide and define the form slug or page URL prefix.

Tools

Finally, we have the Tools area, where you can export a CSV file of your project’s donation history or a PDF of donations and revenue. There you can also export a CSV of all donors or even export a JSON file of your GiveWP settings for importing into another WordPress installation. This is also where donation and settings can be imported, and you can generate new API keys, recalculate statistics and see error logs, system information and API requests, as well.

Overall, GiveWP is a powerful fundraising and donation processing tool. For more potential use case scenarios, we encourage you to browse the GiveWP blog for various marketing and fundraising ideas!