How to Accept Donation Payments Online With WordPress
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Do you have a cause that’s important to you? A way that you are adding to the good in the world?
Do you have a non-profit 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 heart beat strongly for orphans or foster kids?
Doing big, beautiful things takes time and money in order 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 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 Simplest Solution for Accepting Donations
- 4 Donation Form Examples From Our Customers
- How to Create a Donation Form (Step by Step)
The Simplest Solution for Accepting Online Donations With WordPress
If you need to accept donations easily and securely online with credit cards, then the best solution is WP Simple Pay linked with Stripe.
WP Simple Pay can easily accept one-time or monthly recurring donations so that your supporters can give to your cause and keep giving. You can also let your donors choose or enter the amount they want to give. You can get WP Simple Pay’s payment form up and running in less than five minutes and customize it to your specific business or non-profit.
Remove the additional 3% fee!
Most Stripe plugins charge an additional 3% fee for EVERY transaction
…not WP Simple Pay Pro!
4 Donation Form Examples From Our Customers
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.
Take a look at some real-life donation forms our customers have set up on their sites.
#1. Donations With Custom Amount Fields
If you have a foundation or a cause, such as a Cancer Foundation, that needs to accept donations you can create a simple payment form with a custom amount field. Your customer can then enter the amount they choose to donate one time and even click the box below if they would like to make it into a recurring monthly payment. Here is an example of the user-entered custom amount form.
After they enter their desired amount and click the box to make it a monthly payment, then they will click on the “Pay with Card” button and the payment window will pop up. Simple, clean, and impressive. Our documentation has detailed information on how you can easily set up these payment forms.
#2. Donations of Monthly Recurring Payments
A non-profit organization called Bring Me Hope uses WP Simple Pay to accept donations for Chinese orphans and at-risk youth. They have two different payment forms that you can see in action in the screenshots below. This first form below uses the custom amount field, the monthly donation checkbox, radio buttons, and an additional open field for more information.
Then, you click through to the payment form where you input your information and credit card.
#3. Custom Donations with Drop Downs, Radio Buttons, and Text Fields
This same non-profit uses a second payment form to collect funds for camp sponsorship donations. This form was set up with the option to sponsor multiple orphans and it sums up the total for you. They used radio buttons and text fields to collect more information from their sponsors. You can very easily customize the information you want to gather from your customers/sponsors.
#4. Customizing Donation Payment Form 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. They have an open custom field where a contributor can simply enter an amount and click the button “Donate Today”. But they have continued on to allow the sponsor to choose a subscription.
As you can see below, they have used the drop down forms option to add creative custom choices such as “Bridle Party” for a $75 donation or the “Big Muckity-Mucks” for a $200 donation. These are some 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 simple donation form with WP Simple Pay. We’ll be using the default settings that plugin offers and 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.
Remove the additional 3% fee!
Most Stripe plugins charge an additional 3% fee for EVERY transaction
…not WP Simple Pay Pro!
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.
In case you didn’t see the setup wizard, you can go to WP Simple Pay » Settings and then click on the Stripe tab where you can find the Connect with Stripe button. Just click on it to connect your Stripe account to your site.
Step 2: Connect WordPress to Stripe
Upon clicking the button Let’s get started, you’ll be prompted to set up a new Stripe account or connect an existing account to start accepting payments. Click Connect with Stripe.
Bear in mind that selecting the “Skip this form” option will create a temporary Stripe account that cannot be recovered or moved to Live Mode. Let’s not select that option.
To create a Stripe account, enter your email address and proceed. If you already have a Stripe account, you’ll be prompted to connect it to your site.
Once you complete this process, you’ll see a success page that says Setup Complete. Next, it’s your turn to create a payment form. Click on the button Create a Payment Form.
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.
Since we’re looking to create a donation form, click on Donation Form with Recurring Option.
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 Donation Form with Recurring Options, 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.
For now, let’s NOT change the payment mode to Live Mode
By default, you can see that a few different payment amounts are being added. Feel free to change the currency, and amount and even choose between 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 even 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.
Step 4: Publish Your Donation Form
Now that your donation form is ready, it’s time to embed / publish it on your website.
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 choosing between different donation form types: hosted vs. embedded vs. overlay.
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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