Have you ever wondered if there was an easy way to collect donations for non-profits and fundraisers?
While there are several donation platforms on the market, most of them charge a heavy transaction / platform fee or come with limited functionalities, restricting your fundraising abilities.
Today, I am excited to announce that we’ve completely revamped WP Charitable from the ground up. Now, it’s easier than ever to launch a fundraising campaign, even if you’re absolutely new to WordPress.
About WP Charitable
WP Charitable is the best WordPress donation plugin for non-profits. Over the last 9 years, Charitable has been helping over 10,000+ non-profits raise funds for their cause without having to pay an additional transaction fee.
I acquired the plugin in 2022 with the goal to make it easy for anyone to volunteer with fundraising and help their favorite non-profit organizations on the technical side. But most importantly, I wanted a solution that I can have my wife use for our Balkhi Foundation without needing any technical help from me.
With the newest update to Charitable, we’ve completely reimagined how Charitable works, so you can raise more funds for your cause with less effort.
Let’s take a look at them below:
Create Stunning Fundraising Campaigns Without a Designer
Looking to build a professional fundraising campaign that encourages donors to support your cause?
Charitable’s drag-and-drop campaign builder makes it easy to build a fundraising campaign even if you’re not tech savvy.
Unlike a typical donation form plugin, Charitable offers 3 different column layouts from which to choose.
- Simple 1 column template
- Simple 2 column template
- Simple 2 column with header template
These column layouts help you build a stunning fundraising campaign on your own without having to hire a designer or developer.
Take a look at a few customizable fields you can add to your campaign.
- Campaign title
- Campaign description
- Customizable Donate Button
- Progress bar: Show how much has been donated and your campaign goals
- HTML: Add an area of customizable HTML
- Social sharing: Add social sharing links right on your campaign page
- Social links: Add links to your social media accounts
The best part is that you can build a campaign like this in less than 5 minutes!
If you’ve always wanted to build campaigns to collect donations for your cause, then look no further than Charitable.
Get Insights Into Your Campaigns at a Glance
It’s important to know how each of your fundraising campaigns is doing and which campaign contributes the most.
With the latest version of Charitable, you’ll get an improved admin dashboard that gives you a bird’s eye view of how your campaigns are performing at a glance.
Here are a few items you can see from the dashboard.
Quick top overview – At a glance, see how much money your donations have brought in, the average donation amount, the number of donors, and the amount of refunds within a time frame.
Interactive graph – With an easy-to-view timeline, you can see how many donations you got represented.
Recent donations – View recent donations and a brief summary of each one.
Top campaigns – See which campaigns are outperforming in terms of total donations, total donors, and more.
Detailed Reports That Matter to Your Organization
I believe that your campaign data is only as good as the actionable insights you can get from it.
This is why we added several detailed reports that matter to your organization.
Donations breakdown – It gives you a better idea of how your campaigns are doing overall on a daily basis, with the ability to download the data into a CSV file.
Campaign activity – This report gives you a heads-up in chronological order of what is happening on your site right now. It lets you quickly see if a particular campaign is suddenly receiving donations or is getting popular so you can act accordingly.
Top donors – Understand who your top donors so you can reach out to them to thank them or further communicate.
Payment methods – Get an idea of your most popular payment methods, including manual or offline donations.
Pay $0 Transaction Fee
The harsh reality of most online donation platforms is that they charge transaction fees, also known as platform fees. This fee can be typically as high as 4% of the total donation amount.
Keep in mind that transaction fees are charged on top of the processing fees, which are usually charged by payment processors like Stripe or PayPal (around 3%).
Charitable doesn’t charge transaction fees with any of its premium plans. The only fee you’ll be paying is the processing fee, which is paid directly to the payment gateway you choose, such as Stripe.
Peer-to-Peer Fundraising or Crowdfunding
Peer-to-peer fundraising is a popular strategy for large fundraising campaigns where passionate individuals organize their personal fundraising campaigns on behalf of a nonprofit organization.
With the Charitable Ambassadors addon, you can instantly transform your website into a peer-to-peer fundraising or your own crowdfunding platform, like GoFundMe or Indiegogo. It also lets you offer your most passionate advocates the tools they need to support your cause.
For example, you can let your advocates create fundraising pages of their own and even require users to have an account and be logged in before they can submit a campaign.
If you enable the Personal cause campaigns option, you can turn your site into a crowdfunding site and let individuals raise money for their own cause.
Recurring Donations Is Easier Than Ever
Accepting recurring donations allows you to maintain a reliable and predictable donation stream.
With Charitable, you can easily add the option of recurring donations to online forms with suggested amounts.
When recurring donations is enabled, your donors get the flexibility to donate smaller amounts, monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, or annually instead of sending a large one-time donation. They also have the flexibility to cancel as needed right inside their account.
Connect Donors With Your Email List
Charitable lets you easily add a newsletter checkbox to your campaign. When it’s enabled, you can automatically add your donors to your email list and turn them into ongoing supporters.
Currently, the plugin seamlessly integrates with email marketing software like MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, MailerLite, ActiveCampaign, Mailster and MailPoet.
Easily Add Campaigns Anywhere in WordPress
Charitable makes it easy to add your campaigns across your WordPress website.
It comes with the Charitable block.
Simply edit any post or page in WordPress and add the Charitable block where you want to display your campaign. Done!
Now, you can save or publish your changes and preview the post or page. You will see your campaign added to the page.
If you have multiple campaigns, you may want to display them as a collection within your posts or pages.
Multiple Payment Options
Need multiple payment options to accept donations?
Charitable got you covered there as well. It supports all the top payment service providers including Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net, Square, Braintree, and more.
Even the free version of Charitable comes with both Stripe and PayPal.
This makes it easier for free version users to accept donations via credit card.
More Features That Make Charitable Standout
There are several more features that make Charitable standout from its competitors. Here are some of them.
Gift Aid for UK Based Non-Profit
If you are a registered UK charity or non-profit, you can boost your donations by 25% with Gift Aid, a tax incentive for charities in the United Kingdom. When Gift Aid is enabled on your Charity plugin, the Gift Aid declaration will be added to all your campaigns.
Seamless Easy Digital Downloads Integration
Charitable seamlessly integrates with Easy Digital Downloads. This allows you to accept donations with any of the Easy Digital Downloads gateways.
On top of that, you can sell digital merchandise to raise fund for your organization.
Accept Anonymous Donations
Allow donors to support your cause without having their name publicly displayed. As the website administrator, you can view anonymous donor’s details, but their name and photo will be hidden when displayed in the Donors widget.
Cover the Processing Fees
Bump up your donations by giving your donors the option to cover the processing fees on their donations.
Try Charitable Today
I am quite excited about the progress we have made so far with Charitable.
I’m also extremely pleased with the community response so far, as everyone is loving the new features.
I invite you to try Charitable. If you want, you can even install the free Charitable plugin from WordPress.org that offers basic fundraising features.
We’re truly building something special here. If you have ideas on how we can make the plugin more helpful to you, suggest your ideas here.
As always, I am thankful for your continued support and look forward to hearing from you.
Yours Truly,
Syed Balkhi
Founder of WPBeginner