Whether you’re a nonprofit business or simply a philanthropist at heart, WordPress offers a plethora of options when it comes to donation plugins. Selecting the right donation WordPress plugin depends on your overall campaign goals, your target audience, and how intuitive the interface is for both you and the potential donor.
Charity WordPress plugins can be a great way to raise money for a cause you’re passionate about or to help support the work you do on your website. Adding an indiscreet widget to a high-traffic page can make all the difference in your efforts without having to outwardly beg your audience for money.
Most donation WordPress plugins offer the same thing with slight variations in the interface. Lifeline Donation Pro, however, encompasses all of the nuances of each charity WordPress plugin that we’ll discuss in this article and so much more.
#1: Lifeline Donation Pro
Lifeline Donation Pro takes the guesswork out of setting up a donation campaign. Whether you decide to use their pre-built templates or customize them to suit your goals, this donation WordPress plugin is extremely intuitive to set up.
Knowledge of coding is unnecessary unless you’d like to add your own spin on functionality and design. Lifeline Donation Pro offers these free, stylish Elementor and WPBakery widgets for donation opt-in forms:
- Text Box with Parallax Style and Color Overlay
- Text and Picture Split Style
- Video Background Style
- Full Page Video Background Style
No need to explicitly ask your audience for donations. Lifeline Donation Pro gives you the option of donation pop-ups, donation buttons, or for those that would prefer to dedicate a particular space for donations: three donation page templates. You can utilize each of these options by placing them throughout your website as a means to encourage your audience to donate.
Lifeline Donation Pro campaigns can be easily managed within WordPress in the sidebar “Causes”. This location allows you to add and edit existing campaigns.
You can track what marketing techniques are successful and unsuccessful using the performance dashboard. This tool gives you insight on the progress of each campaign using the following data:
- Campaign revenue
- General donation revenue
- Pending donations
- Canceled donations
- Recurring donations
Like other NGO WordPress plugins, Lifeline Donation Pro also features email customization to meet your email marketing campaign goals. Use email templates to set up automatic emails for donors either by letting them know about your latest campaign or to send a simple “Thank you for your donation.”
You can easily manage the currency option from general settings to set your default currency for potential donors. This donation WordPress plugin also lets you display multiple currency options on donation popups or pages.
On top of allowing multiple currency options, Lifeline Donation Pro has multiple payment gateways, including:
- PayPal
- Stripe — offer Apple Pay and Google Pay to donors!
- Payfact
- 2Checkout
- Braintree
- BluePay
- Paystack
- QuickPay
- CardCom
- Authorize.net
- RazorPay
- AmazonPay
- Yandex
- Conekta
- Paymaster24
- Payu
Having a long list of payment processing options creates an effortless ability to sign up for recurring payments with Lifeline Donation Pro.
Still not convinced? This charity WordPress plugin allows you to demo the product on their website before you buy.
#2: Easy PayPal Button
Setting up a donation platform does not need to come with all the bells and whistles that other charity WordPress plugins advertise. For those looking for a simple solution for their audience to contribute a hassle-free donation, PayPal Donations provides that with their Easy PayPal Button. Nonprofit organizations can add an uncomplicated PayPal button anywhere on their website using a shortcode or widget. Visitors can decide how much they want to contribute and it keeps the entire donation process straightforward for both parties. PayPal donations is one of the best NGO WordPress plugins because it is free.
#3: DonorBox
This donation WordPress plugin lets you create multiple donation forms with an unlimited number of text fields in the form. It also includes a donation matching feature perfect for reaching your campaign goals and encouraging your audience to contribute more to your cause. Users can also enable recurring donations each month.
#4: GiveWP
GiveWP is one of the most popular donation WordPress plugins. This charity WordPress plugin enables you to set up multiple causes anywhere on your website. GiveWP also allows you to do the following:
- Review donations according to payment methods.
- Process offline donations.
- Integrate the plugin with other 3rd party tools.
- Generate tax-deductible receipts for those who need them.
#5: Formidable Forms
Formidable Forms requires a business pricing plan, but their overall price is marketed to take less than 5% of the fees taken from other WordPress forms. The user can generate their own campaign forms using this charity WordPress plugin or utilize the form templates within the plugin. Their forms have the ability to capture one-time donations and add those subscribers to email lists for future donation marketing.
Not only can you use Formidable Forms to optimize your charity campaign, but it allows you to enable autoresponder emails to send a “Thank You” to those who choose to donate. Like most NGO WordPress plugins, payments are processed through PayPal or Stripe.
#6: Charitable
Charitable is another donation WordPress plugin that allows you to create multiple campaigns and share the progress of each campaign with your users. Users can choose how much they want to give instead of predefined amounts. This charity WordPress plugin also gives more options for forms, allowing you to design forms that load in modals, within images or popups.
Other features include:
- Ability to take donations offline.
- Donation forms automatically take on the theme/design of your website.
- Support for recurring donations.
- No platform fees— true NGO WordPress plugin.
#7: Seamless Donations
Seamless Donations enables a single donation form for all of the charities where the user can decide how much to give and where the money should go. Payments are processed through PayPal and Stripe. Similar to the other charity WordPress plugins, Seamless Donations allows you to set up automatic emails to donors. The basic version of this donation WordPress plugin is free, but there are additional premium add-ons available.
#8: Yith Donation for WooCommerce
Yith Donation for WooCommerce is a smart choice for any WooCommerce business owner, because there are different options available for how you can collect donations. This charity WordPress plugin, like most others, allows you to create and add multiple donation campaigns in the form of products to raise money. They have a simple “round up” function that allows customers to round up their final amount to donate the difference towards charity campaigns. Meanwhile, on the backend, you can track your campaigns’ analytics like the number of donations, number of campaigns, etc. as a means to improve your campaign efforts.
#9: Smart Donations
Smart Donations is another interface that allows its users to set up recurring donations. It comes with four different templates that allow you to customize the design of each one. You can display each campaign’s progress on your website to encourage your users to donate more in order to reach the campaign goal. On top of being able to display each campaign’s progress, this interface allows you to show off the top donors for each campaign as a way to encourage a little competitive spirit in others to fill that top seed.
#10: Total Donations for WordPress
Total Donations for WordPress markets itself as an intuitive interface for both parties. It also allows you to custom-create opt-in donation forms with drag-and-drop features for adding text fields and more. PayPal donations can be made or the user can donate using Stripe with major credit cards.
Other features include:
- Ability to export campaign analytic reports.
- Auto-generated “Thank You” emails for donors.
- Ability to add time-stamped PDF receipts for donors.
- Users can set up recurring donations through this interface.
- Multiple currency support.
With all these options for donation WordPress plugins, it can be difficult to decide which one is the right one for your business. Not all of the charity WordPress plugins offer the same features, so it depends on which features appeal to you the most, what you believe will be well received by your target audience, and the ease of setting up and processing transactions.
