Nonprofit organizations rely on fundraisers to support their cause. If you have a nonprofit website built on WordPress, then you need a good WordPress donation plugin.
Choosing a WordPress donation plugin is an important decision, but it is hard to know which one is right for you.
In our article, we will take a look at some of the best donation plugins that are currently available. Once you finish reading, you’ll get a good understanding of the donation plugins that will suit your non-profit organization’s needs.
1. Give
Give is the most popular WordPress donation plugin. It is also one of the highest-rated donation plugins for WordPress. Through the plugin, you can add donation acceptance forms on any sidebar, popup, stand-alone page, or in any page of your website. You can also match the donation forms according to the look of your website through the customization options. Give doesn’t charge a commission on the donations you receive through their plugin.
The plugin has awesome reporting solutions which include reporting of donation form submissions and exporting form submission details by date range (CSV&PDF). You can integrate the plugin with a theme or page builder like Beaver Builder, Avada, Visual Composer, Enfold, X, Divi, and Gutenberg.
Basically, the core plugin is free which can be further extended with paid add-ons.
Some of the features of the free plugin are:
- Generate tax-deductible receipts
- View a complete history of donor activity
- You can either use a fixed donation amount or let donors decide the amount
- Send email notifications to donors
- Supports PayPal Standard, test donations, offline donations, and credit card payment if the user doesn’t have a PayPal account
- Modal popup form that allows a donation process to be completed in a popup window
- Track campaign progress through customizable goals
- Ability to create custom donation levels (eg, $100, $250, $500)
- Flexible widgets and shortcodes to display forms directly on your website
With the premium add-on, you can get features like:
- Accept credit card payments via Stripe, Authorize.net, PayPal Pro, CCAvenue, and more
- Recurring donations (daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly)
- Google analytics donation tracking
- Downloadable PDF receipts
- Intuitive drag-and-drop form field manager
- Currency switcher
- WooCommerce donation upsells
The add-on bundles have three packages and the basic one starts at $187/month. They also have a page that lists the add-ons that are in active development.
We asked the Give team if their plugin offers anonymous donations and they said no. So this may be an issue for NPO’s who are looking for this feature.
Free Give plugin information
- Active installations – 100,000+
- Last updated – March 2021
- Requires WordPress version 4.9
- Requires PHP Version:5.6
- Average ratings – 4.7/5 based on out of 466 reviews
2. Seamless Donations
Seamless Donations is a great WordPress donations plugin that can be set up in five minutes. Upon installation, you can immediately start accepting donations via your PayPal account. If the donors don’t have a PayPal account, they can also contribute via their credit cards. The plugin doesn’t charge a commission on donations received.
The Seamless Donations plugin is free, but if you want to extend its functionalities, you have to buy add-ons.
Some of the features of the free plugin are:
- CSV importer/exporter for posts, pages, and custom post types
- Translation ready
- Worldwide currency support
- Blocks spambots without captcha images
- Keep track of donation contributors
- Anonymous payments
- Recurring donations can be made every month
- Paypal standard can be integrated
- Customers can also pay using a credit card if they don’t have a PayPal account
With the premium add-on, you can get features like:
- Easily create custom donation levels and add labels like Bronze, Silver, and Gold to each one
- Redirects to the page of your choice after donation completion
- Customize ‘Thank you’ emails, and control your outgoing transactional emails
- Send emails via SendGrid
Free Seamless Donations plugin information
- Active installations – 10,000+
- Last updated – March 2021
- Requires WordPress version 3.4
- Average ratings – 4/5 based on 65 reviews
3. Charitable
Charitable is another donation plugin that has no setup costs, monthly charges, and doesn’t charge per donation. The plugin allows you to create fully customizable fundraiser campaigns within five minutes.
The plugin is extremely easy to use and has an intuitive user interface. Those who have advanced developer skills can take full control of the plugins fundraising and donation modules.
The core plugin is free and you can extend its functionalities with premium add-ons. You can either buy extensions individually or in a package format that starts from $103.20/year.
Some of the features of the free plugin are:
- PayPal and offline donations are free
- You can set unlimited fundraising campaigns
- Integrates well with most of the WordPress themes and page builders
- Sort and export donations (donor info, donation info, etc) as a CSV file
- Customizable donation amounts
- Automated donation receipt
With the premium add-on, you can get features like:
- Accept donations via Stripe, Authorize.net, PayFast, and PayUMoney
- Accept recurring donations (one time, monthly)
- Create a crowdfunding platform (A practice of funding a project by raising small amounts of money from a large number of people, usually via the internet)
- Accept donations via EDD gateways
- Boost donations via Gift Aid
- Display campaigns on Google maps
- Accept anonymous donations
Free Charitable plugin information
- Active installations – 10,000+
- Last updated – January 2021
- Requires WordPress version 4.1
- Average ratings – 4.9/5 based on 143 reviews
4. Donorbox
Donorbox is a fundraising software that has a unique donation system. The software can be integrated with WordPress with the help of a plugin. It can also be integrated with Weebly, Wix, Squarespace, Salesforce, and MailChimp. With the plugin, you can create fully functional forms within 15 minutes and brand your donation pages as per your styling preference. To make forms easy to complete, you can create custom fields to collect only the required information. Also, you can set custom donation amounts, and/or you can allow users to specify their own amount.
This donation plugin accepts currencies via Stripe, PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay, and ACH payments. It accepts monthly recurring donations and gives separate login details for recurring donors to manage their accounts. You can also export donation details as a CSV file for any time period you want.
Donorbox is completely free if you get less than $1000 per month in donations. After that, transaction fees of 1% in addition to the payment gateway discount rate will be charged. Take a look at their pricing page to find out the platform fees of the payment gateways.
The Donorbox form integrated into your website displays a “Powered by Donorbox” text that links to the Donorbox website. If you want to remove this text, you have to pay a once-off payment of $120 through PayPal.
Organizations with Donorbox account that are older than 4 months and have collected more than $10,000 donations are only allowed to increase the recurring donations of their donors. Such organizations have to contact Donorbox to request this permission directly. Organizations that do not meet these conditions will not be able to increase the recurring amount. Visit this page to learn more about the steps to change the recurring donation.
Features
- Responsive forms
- One-time, weekly, monthly or annual recurring payment options
- Accept donations via Facebook
- Secured donation software which is SSL/TLS, and PCI compliant
- Does not store any card or bank data
- Anonymous payments
- Stripe and Paypal offer their credit card processing services at 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction but they do offer reduced prices of 2.2% + $0.30 for registered not for profits NPO’s.
- Localized forms in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Danish, and Swedish
- Compatible with CMS systems such as Weebly, and Squarespace.
- Accepts multiple currencies
Free Donorbox plugin information
- Active installations – 8,000+
- Last updated on – 2020
- Requires WordPress Version – 3.0
- Average ratings – 4.9/5 based on 26 reviews
Comparison Chart of the Top Donation Plugins
| Plugin information as of March 26th, 2021 | Give | Seamless Donations | Charitable | Donorbox |
| Active installations | 100,000+ | 10,000+ | 10,000+ | 8,000+ |
| Last updated | March 2021 | March 2021 | January 2021 | 2020 |
| Requires WordPress Version | 4.9 | 3.4 | 4.1 | 3.0 |
| Average ratings | 4.7/5 based on out of 466 reviews | 4/5 based on 65 reviews | 4.9/5 based on 143 reviews | 4.9/5 based on 26 reviews |
Note – All the plugin information mentioned in our blog was collected at the time of writing.
Final Thoughts on Our Donation Plugins List
If you’re looking for an all-inclusive donation plugin, in our opinion Donorbox is the best option. If you need a simple and pain-free donation option, Give is your best bet, but you have to invest in add-ons to get additional features. If you’re looking for features like monthly recurring payments and anonymous payments in the free version of a plugin, you should choose the Seamless donation plugin.
You can choose Charitable if you need advanced donation solutions, unlimited campaigns, and offline payment options. Funderdog will be useful if you’re looking to accept donations via social media.
All in all, by using any of the above WordPress donation plugins, you can reach a global audience quickly.
If you have any other donation plugin suggestions, please share them in the comments section below.
We would love to know which features are the most important for your NPO when it comes to accepting donations, which donation plugins you use, and if there are any shortcomings that you experienced?
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