New WordPress Donation Plugin Features

We’re proud to launch our new WordPress Donation Plugin. But why did we decide to launch a new WordPress donation plugin when there are already many options available already online?

As with many problems in life, there are always solutions, and sometimes these solutions are not perfect, so we do workarounds. Our team has been working with charities since 2011, and we’ve been building websites for over 20 years.

When it came to building charity websites, one of the most important things is to be able to have a clean donation function. We’ve used “free” WordPress donation plugins, paid WordPress Plugins and even in some cases, charities that didn’t want to spend the additional cost, we’ve just helped them sign up to the likes of JustGiving or Launch Good and linked their campaigns to these fundraising platforms.

When it came to existing WordPress donation plugins, we’ve always found that when they’re 100% free, they weren’t very user-friendly for us to set up, nor did they look great on the websites we built. Then we have the WordPress donation plugins that claim they are free, but they skim off the top of donations. This, in the long run, meant that charities would pay far more.

For example, the average amount a small UK charity makes is around £100,000 per year. Keep in mind, medium to Large charities make between £100k to £500k per year, so their fees would amount to much more.

If they used the:

Free GiveWP plugin – skim 2% off the top of all donations. This would cost the charities £2,000 per year to use that plugin. Plus, they have the merchant payment processing fees on top.

Paid GiveWP plugin – They don’t skim off the top, but $199 (£147) for basic features without Gift Aid, then $399 (£295) to $599 (£443) per year if you want access to all the features.

FundraiseUp – they skim 4% off the top, which means on £100k per year raised costs the charity £4,000 per year to use their plugin.

Donorbox – they skim 2.95% to 3.95% off the top, that on one year’s average donation of £100k would mean the charity pays them between £2,950 and £3,950 per year. Again this is on top of merchant fees. Donorbox offers a paid plan of $150 per month, which reduces their fee down to 1.75% – 2%. Which would mean on £100k per year donations, you’ll pay $1,800 (£1,332) + £1,750 to £2000 in fees.

Our WordPress Donation Plugin
Donation Positive – We do not skim anything off the top. All features are included at the 1 price. You only pay Stripe their normal merchant fees. If you used us for 1 year and raised the average £100k, you’d pay just £99 if you chose our yearly plan or £180 if you chose our £15per month pay as you go plan.

Merchant fees are what the payment processors, like Stripe, charge for processing a transaction, which is around 1.4% on average, plus they sometimes take £0.20/0.30p per donation as well.

Another huge factor to keep in mind, many of these existing plugins will give you the standard function of collecting donations with their free plan or standard plan. When you need additional features like monthly donations, fee recovery and the big one, Gift Aid, you will to add additional plugins that essentially slow down your WordPress website and it’s one more thing to install yourself and hope it works or pay a web developer to install.

So, when we built the Donate Positive WordPress donation plugin we made sure you got all the features in one lightweight plugin that doesn’t require you to upgrade to pro or add on any extra plugins to make the most essential features work.

Then there is the up sell of features by existing WordPress Donation plugin providers that on the face of it seem like a great idea, for example peer to peer fundraising, which is the ability for fundraisers to create their own fundraising page for one of your campaigns (like JustGiving), but as we discussed on our last blog “Direct Charity Donations vs JustGiving: What’s the difference?”, this kind of feature really isn’t suited for charity websites built on WordPress, as regular websites can’t really take the increased pressure on their servers. Fundraising platforms work well because they are built on robust servers which are expensive and for small to medium charities, such costs are not worth it. They are better off using an online fundraising platform when it comes to peer-to-peer fundraising. Their main website for their charity should be there to take donations based on the campaign.

When we built our WordPress Donation plugin, we used our years of experience working with charities and building their websites to ensure we made the features they needed, like Fee Recovery, Monthly Donations, Email Reminders, Email Receipts, Gift Aid and the ability to download reports for Gift Aid that are ready to submit to HMRC. Even for non-UK charities, the features are perfect to collect donations and be able to download clean reports each month. Another factor was to make it look good, match their charity branding and make the donation flow smooth so donors didn’t get confused.

As well as making our donation form work smoothly, we wanted to go further by adding sticky donation buttons that weren’t just a link to the donation page, but recognise which campaign page they are on so the donor can donate to that campaign without having to browse and find the campaign again. And to keep donors informed, we added the ability to add the donation meter for campaigns to any page with a shortcode. This makes adding the progress of a campaign easy, for example, when a charity wants to highlight how much they’ve raised, not only on the campaign page, but also on their homepage.

We went even further and added shortcodes that allow charities to include Donor Messages and a Donor Leaderboard to their campaign page or any page they wish to help encourage more donors and to keep their donors informed.

Our plan going forward will be to continue taking feedback and add more features to our new WordPress donation plugin. We will stay committed to offering all our new features within the existing plugins, so there will never be a need to upgrade to Pro, and every charity that uses our donation plugin will get the existing benefit and new benefits as we grow.

Here is a list of features our Donate Positive
WordPress Donation plugin comes with:

Donor Friendly Donation Form
Ability to add labels on Donation Amounts
Gift Aid (A must for UK Charities)
Fee Recovery (80% of donors are happy to cover merchant fees)
Email Reminders for failed donations
Emailed Receipts (branded with Charity Logo)
Recurring Monthly donations
Mobile Optimised
0% fees on your donations, we do not skim off the top.
Donor Leaderboards
Shortcodes that allow you to add donation forms to any page or blog post
Animated Donation meter
Designate Donations (For example, Zakat or Sadaqa)
Dedicate Donations (if you are donating on behalf of someone)
Donate as an Organisation
Ability to change donation form button colours, donation meter colour to match your charity’s branding.
Multiple currencies (accept donations from abroad)
Offline and Manual donations (you can add any cash donations towards an existing campaign or amounts raised elsewhere, like on a Fundraising Platform)
Stick Donation Button, which is connected to your campaign
Unlimited Campaign setups
Direct donors to new campaigns when one has expired
Stripe Payment (one of the most popular and best merchants, used by the majority of fundraising platforms and WordPress donation plugins)

To sweeten the deal, we’re offering a 30-day money-back guarantee so you can try out our WordPress Donation Plugin, Donate Positive. Check out the demo for our WordPress donation plugin now!

And as we said, our donation forms can be added anywhere on your website, even on blog posts with a simple shortcode. Below is an example of our demo donation form that we added with a simple copy and paste.

Secure & encrypted donation