Online Donations with GiveWP: How to Get Started

Giving is expected to increase by as much as 5% in 2021. Are you ready? The GiveWP platform provides the tools you need to build a successful online donation website with WordPress. In this post, we walk through how to get started with GiveWP.

In a recent webinar on iThemes Training, Ben Meredith shared the power of GiveWP out of the gate.

“You’ve got a full-featured donation platform with the free core plugin.” He also focused on how organizations can set up a giving program even if money was an issue. “In 10 minutes, you can be raising funds with your WordPress site.”

In addition, GiveWP will work well with a wide variety of themes. If you haven’t settled on a theme yet, Kadence Theme is simple to use and compatible with the GiveWP platform.

Installing and Activating Give WP

Once you’ve downloaded the GiveWP plugin and then added it to your WordPress site, you will need to activate the plugin. 

A welcome will pop up when your activation is successful and GiveWP will walk you through the setup process. 

The choices you make will build a form for you.

Walking through the process from activation to giving form for your website takes only a couple of minutes. Yes, it was that quick and that simple!

Next, you’ll connect payment gateways. Just note there are a few suggestions for the best way to make those connections.

When going through the general settings of your gateways, be careful with the statement descriptor. This is the information your donors will see on their bank or credit card statements. Your donors need to know it is YOU that charged their accounts. 

After taking a few minutes to show the Wizard-built form, Meredith walked through the process for a uniquely designed form. “Everything is customizable – content, images, and even color. The colors carry over from the front form to the payment buttons.”

The Importance of Webhooks for Online Donations

During the setup process, as you are working with your payment gateways, you will be reminded to set up your webhooks. 

Webhooks are the way your applications talk to each other. If your payment gateway can’t talk to GiveWP (and back) then it will cause issues with your donations and ultimately may end up in refund requests that will hurt your organization’s standing with your givers and with your payment gateways. 

One-time donations and recurring donations will require your webhook to be set up.

A Different Form for Different Accounts

If you have an organization that offers different donations pools – such at the Major League Fishing Foundation which has general donations, Lake First Initiative (for each lake fished), and Cast 4 Gifts – then you can have different payment accounts for each donation form.

You will simply need to customize the payment account for each form to make your online donations easier to manage and direct.

Donor Form Grid

Once you have all of your donation forms created, you can build a donor form grid so all donation options are available on one page. Meredith showed the “Modal” option that allows users to click donation options and open those forms as a popup on the page so that they don’t have to leave the donation page to donate.

Donation Reports

GiveWP is not a plugin that simply allows you to get donations, it also has a way for you to track your donations. 

The Premium Add-ons will allow you to do recurring donations, email registration through most of the major providers, multi-level donations, and more to upscale your giving opportunities.

Each individual add-on will be a different license, but with your purchase of the premium subscription, you will get access to all of the plugins at that level. 

The premium add-on (available in the Pro or Plus plans), Annual Receipts, will let you set up an option for the Donor Dashboard that will make it easy for donors to get year-end receipts of their donations. It is auto-generated in the user’s browser when the user clicks “view the receipt.” Only authenticated users can access their receipts. This adds an additional level of security to your site and for your users.

For the Donors: Donor Dashboard

Within GiveWP, there is a way for donors to manage their accounts – to see their donation history and to manage recurring donations. Donors can use their email addresses to get access to the donor dashboard so you don’t have to have set up WordPress users – although Meredith recommends it because it adds an extra level of authentication. 

Donation History 

Manage Donations

The donor dashboard management allows you to send out an email blast challenging your donors to increase their giving and each donor will be able to log in and make the changes.

Donor Wall

You can set up a new page utilizing blocks to create a page that highlights your donors. Donors can choose to be anonymous and their information will not go on the wall. If someone is anonymous the donation amount will still show on the wall but it will show as anonymous.

In the Donor Wall settings, you can choose specific donation amounts, dates, or forms to highlight. 

“If you want to create a campaign for someone or something specific, you can only show the donors with comments,” Meredith recommends it as a nice way to be able to spotlight notes that donors leave for a specific person, situation, or event.

Get Donations Started with GiveWP

Giving is expected to increase by as much as 5% in 2021. Be sure to have your organization positioned to be a part of the increase. With GiveWP setting up online donations is simple and inexpensive – the perfect combination for your non-profit group.

Watch the Webinar: Online Donations with WordPress – A Give WP Primer

In this webinar with Ben Meredith, you’ll learn some pointers for getting started with GiveWP.