Last week we talked about selecting a Payment Gateway. Now that you have selected a gateway, you now need to select one of the many giving plugins you want to use. There are several options available and they all work a little differently. If you haven’t read last week’s post, please go back and read it first as you need to select a gateway so you can make sure your plugin will work with that gateway.
Different types of Giving Plugins
- Give
- Form builder
- Online store
- EDD
Give
One of the most popular options is the plug in Give WP. Give WP is designed specifically for taking donations for organizations. You can create forms to put on your website to take donations. You can also view reports that show donation statistics and various reports. You can also manage donors and will integrate with several payment gateways. There are also several add-ins that will increase the functionality of the plugin including taking Recurring Donations, creating text to give functionality and being able to provide annual receipts to your donors. Give is probably the most popular plug in right now for WordPress as it is designed just for this.
Form builders
You can also use one of the various form builder plugins to take donations. You can design the form to actually want it to look and feel. Using a form builder you can design it to get the information you want. You can create a section of the form to ask for the amount and then the form will process the amount through the payment gateway. You can even use a form builder to setup fund raising events. You can collect the information you need for the fundraiser and then pass the user over to your payment gateway to collect the money.
Online store
You can also use a plugin like WooCommerce to set up an online store and create a product to take donations. You will need to add extensions to make it work but you can also create and sell other products and services if you offer them. You can add the subscriptions extension to set up a recurring payment if you wanted. Again this option gives you more flexibility and options but can be a little more complicated to set up.
Easy Digital Downloads
This one is similar to the online store option like WooCommerce. This plugin allows you to create products to sell and you can configure a product to do this. They also offer an extension to set up recurring payments. Easy Digital Downloads is probably not the best option but can still be set up for this purpose.
There are several giving plugins that you can select from and these options are just a sample of what is available to set up taking donations on your WordPress website. The options here are the ones that are most popular and can be setup quickly to take donations. If you need help in configuring any of these options, feel free to to set up an appointment with us
