How to Accept Donation Payments Online with WordPress

Do you have a cause that’s important to you? A way that you are adding to the good in the world?

Perhaps you have a nonprofit like an animal sanctuary, a passion for creating sustainable communities where they’re lacking, a church camp, or an event worth supporting. Or does your heartbeat strongly for orphans or foster kids?

Doing big, beautiful things takes time and money to keep things going. So, it’s likely that if you are doing something big and beautiful, you probably need funding for it.

In this article, we’ll show you how to easily accept online donation payments with WordPress. 

If you’d rather cut straight to the chase and read the step-by-step guide, go for it by clicking here.

Table of Contents

• The Best Solution for Accepting Donations
• 3 Donation Form Examples From Our Customers
  • 1. Donations of Monthly Recurring Payments
  • 2. Custom Donations with Drop Downs, Radio Buttons, and Text Fields
  • 3. Customizing Donation Payment Form for Your Brand
• How to Create a Donation Form (Step by Step)

The Best Solution for Accepting Online Donations

If you need to accept donations easily and securely online with credit cards the best solution is WP Simple Pay, the #1 Stripe payments plugin for WordPress. The plugin allows you to accept one-time or recurring donation payments directly on your site without having to write a single line of code or set up a shopping cart.

You can also let your donors choose or enter the amount they want to give. In addition, the plugin offers several pre-built payment form templates and a drag and drop form builder that allows you to get a donation payment form up and running on your site in just minutes.

Additional features of WP Simple Pay include:

• Custom Form Fields: Collect additional information along with the donation from your donors.
• Form Scheduling: Control when donation payments are accepted by setting up a start and end date.
• Weekly Summary Reports: Keep track of how your payment forms are performing with weekly summary reports sent straight to your inbox.
• Multiple Payment Methods: Collect more donations by offering 10+ payment methods including Cash App, Apple Pay / Google Pay, ACH Direct Debit, Alipay, and more.

3 Donation Payment Form Examples

Before we dive in and start creating a donation form with WordPress, it’s worth taking a moment to examine the different types of forms you can create.

Let’s take a look at some real-life donation forms our customers have set up on their sites.

#1. Donations of Monthly Recurring Payments

A non-profit organization called Bring Me Hope uses WP Simple Pay to accept donations for orphans and at-risk youth. They have two different payment forms that you can see in action in the screenshots below.

The first form below uses the custom amount field, the monthly recurring donation checkbox, and an additional open custom field that can be used for notes.

#2. Custom Donations with Drop Downs, and Text Fields

This same non-profit uses a second payment form to collect funds for Bring Me Hope School sponsorship donations. This form was set up with the option to sponsor multiple orphans and it sums up the total for you.

Additionally, Bring Me Hope uses custom text fields to collect more information from their sponsors.

Similar to Bring Me Hope, you can very easily customize the information you want to gather from your customers/sponsors using WP Simple Pay.

#3. Customizing Donation Payment Forms for Your Brand

The non-profit, Forever Amber Acres, is an Animal Sanctuary that is using WP Simple Pay to accept a variety of donations from their interested sponsors.

By using this simple payment form, they have offered their sponsors many different levels of sponsorship. The non-profit offers a one-time payment form that allows donors to checkout using Stripe Checkout, while its second payment form caters to those who want to subscribe to recurring monthly donations.

All donors have to do is click on the Donate $10 button and they’re redirected to a secure Stripe Checkout page to complete their payment.

One of the advantages to allowing donors to donate on a Stripe-hosted page is that it accepts several different payment methods like Apple Pay / Google Pay, and traditional cards. Additionally, donors can complete their payment in one-click if they choose to use Stripe Link.

As you can see below, they have used the dropdown custom field feature to add creative custom choices such as “Bridle Party” for a $75 donation or the “Big Muckity-Mucks” for a $200 donation.

These are just a few examples of ways you can add your own spin and stay true to your brand by making this simple payment form meet your needs. You can see their payment form in action on their donation page.

Creating a Donation Form (Step by Step)

For the sake of this tutorial, we’re going to create a donation form that offers donors choices for custom amounts and a custom dropdown menu with different mission trip options using WP Simple Pay.

Because WP Simple Pay offers several pre-made donation payment forms to help you create a form in minutes with little effort, we’ll be using the default settings offered by the Mission Trip Fundraising form. We’ll also see different customization options for advanced use cases.

Here’s a donation form we created by following the below step-by-step guide:

Let’s get started!

Step 1: Install and Activate WP Simple Pay

First things first. To create a donation form, you’ll need to install and activate the WP Simple Pay plugin. For more details, check out this step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

After installing the plugin, go ahead and activate it and you’ll be directed to the setup wizard.

With the setup wizard, anyone who can point and click can connect their Stripe account with their site quickly and easily. In the setup wizard, click Let’s Get Started.

2: Connect WordPress to Stripe  

To connect your WordPress site to Stripe, click Connect with Stripe.

Next up, enter the email address you use for your Stripe account and connect it with your site. If you don’t have a Stripe account, you can easily create one by entering your email address and completing registration.

Upon completing this process, you’ll be shown a success page that says Setup Complete. Next, to create a payment form, click on the Create a Payment Form button.

Step 3: Accepting Donations Online with WordPress

So far, you’ve installed WP Simple Pay and connected your site to your Stripe account. The next thing you’ll need to do is to create a payment form, so you can start accepting donations on your WordPress site.

Once you complete the onboarding, you’ll be prompted to choose a payment form template. If you’re not on this page yet, you can navigate to WP Simple Pay » Add New to start creating a payment form.

For the sake of this tutorial, we’re looking to create a donation form with custom amounts and different trip options. Go ahead and click on Mission Trip Fundraising Form.

Alternatively, if you need a donation button, click on Donate Button instead. The configuration would be pretty much the same for both the form and button.

Upon choosing the template Mission Trip Fundraising Form, you’ll be prompted to configure your form. Feel free to change the title and description of your form.

In the Type field, you’ll find a few different options. You can use either off-site payment type or on-site payment type.

When on-site payment form is chosen, you can even configure the plugin to open the form in an overlay method. You can leave the field as it is to go ahead with the default option.

For more details, check out 3 different types of payment forms.

If you want to customize the Payment Success Page, you can either choose a Specific Page from your site, or if you want to redirect users to a third-party site, choose Redirect URL.

Now, let’s choose the Payment option on the left.

By default, you can see that a few different payment amounts have been added. Feel free to change the currency and the amount. In addition, you can even choose between a one-time and subscription payment.

There are a few more things you can do on this page like allowing users to determine the amount while making the donation. To do this, click one of the listed amounts and select the checkbox Allow amount to be determined by user.

Next, click on the Form Fields option on the left. Here, you can add or customize any existing form fields.

You can also choose from different display styles. By default, Buttons are chosen, but you can change the style to radio select, dropdown, or list.

Once you’re all set, you can go ahead and preview the form to figure out if it’s working as it should. After double-checking all the configurations and making a test payment, you can change the mode from test to Live when you’re ready to accept donations.

If you want to schedule when your form starts and stops accepting donation payments, all you need to do is navigate to the Purchase Restrictions option on the left and enter your desired dates and times.

Step 4: Publish Your Donation Form

Now that your donation form is ready, it’s time to embed / publish it on your site.

To embed the form, navigate to the post or page where you want to publish it. Next, add the WP Simple Pay block by clicking on the + icon and selecting the WP Simple Pay block. Then choose the donation form you just created. And then, publish or update the form.

That’s it!

We hope this article helped you learn how to accept donations on a WordPress site.

If you liked this article, you might also want to check out our article on how to increase donations with targeted popups.

Ready to get started? No need to wait. Get the best Stripe payments plugin for WordPress now and start accepting donations for your big, beautiful cause today!

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