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If you run a non-profit organization or are looking to add a donation feature to your WordPress website, you may be wondering which donation plugin is the best option for you.
One popular choice is GiveWP, a powerful and user-friendly plugin that allows you to accept donations directly on your website.
But is it really the best donation plugin out there?
In this review, we’ll take an in-depth look at GiveWP and explore its features, functionality, ease of use, and more.
By the end of this article, you’ll have a clear understanding of whether GiveWP is the right choice for your donation needs. So let’s dive in and find out.
What is GiveWP?
GiveWP is a popular WordPress plugin that allows website owners to easily integrate a donation system into their site.
There are a ton of fantastic options to help make your donation forms powerful like recurring donations, reporting tools, and more (we’ll cover features in detail later in the post).
If you’ve never installed and activated a WordPress plugin before, let me tell you how to do it with GiveWP.
First, you’ll need to:
Once you do that, you’ll instantly have access to a bunch of the amazing features this plugin offers to help grow your fundraising.
So let’s go ahead and take a look at what features make GiveWP’s new version so popular next.
What Benefits Does GiveWP 3.0 Provide?
Here are the most useful features we’ve discovered when reviewing the GiveWP (updated version 3.0) WordPress donation plugin:
1. Easy to Use (New Form Builder)
GiveWP allows you to create all types of fundraising campaigns without any coding skills. Yup, it’s that simple – just click a button to create a new donation form.
After that, you can choose your favorite form template, and set a primary color that reflects your brand or website colors for best results. Plus, you can add the main heading, and description (purpose of creating a donation form), just like you do when you write on WordPress.
The Donation form editing with the visual donation form builder looks very similar to the regular WordPress editor, so it’s easy to use if you’ve used WordPress before.
On the right side, there are settings you can configure for your campaign. You can set the minimum and maximum amount people can donate, add custom amounts, hide unnecessary fields, and more.
When you finish and publish your campaign, GiveWP makes a new page for your donation form. This page is great for sharing with others. You can put it in a web push notification, share it on social media, or send the link in your email newsletter.
You can also add the donation form on any page, post, or widget area using a shortcode that GiveWP makes for you.
When you make a form for people to donate, you can include a part where they agree to follow some rules. You can change what the agreement box says, write your own rules, and choose how to show them on the form – either right there, in a popup, or by linking to another page.
2. Create Unlimited Campaigns
With GiveWP, you can create many fundraising campaigns at the same time. This way, you can collect money for different reasons or projects all at once.
Sometimes, you might want to set a goal (like how much money you want to collect) or decide when the campaign should finish. This makes people feel like they need to donate quickly.
If you set a goal or end date, the campaign will finish on its own, even if you’re busy with other tasks.
Or, you can choose to have a campaign that doesn’t end and doesn’t have a specific goal. This is good if you just want people to donate anytime, like a general donation form.
3. Multiple Payment Gateways
If you want people to donate, it’s good if they can use the payment method they like. With GiveWP, you can get donations using Stripe or PayPal. But we suggest using PayPal because it has lower fees.
If your charity isn’t registered, PayPal charges 2.9% plus $0.30 for each donation. But if you’re a registered charity, you get a discount: 2.2% plus $0.30.
So, if you’re a registered charity, it’s better to use GiveWP’s PayPal option. This way, you get to keep more of the money people donate.
You can also get donations without paying fees by accepting offline payments. If someone chooses this option, GiveWP will tell them how to send the money. They might visit your office or come to your fundraising event.
When people promise to give you money offline, it can encourage them to actually do it. With GiveWP, you can keep track of all donations in one place, which helps with planning and managing your money.
If you want more payment options, you can add them using add-ons. GiveWP has add-ons for Mollie, Braintree, iATS, and more.
4. Collect Recurring Donations
Some people may want to keep helping your non-profit for a long time by giving money regularly. This is called a recurring donation. It’s great because people who donate regularly usually end up giving more money in a year compared to those who donate only once.
The good news is, that you can use the GiveWP Recurring Donations addon to accept these recurring donations.
With this add-on, you can get money every week, every three months, every six months, or every year from the people who want to support you regularly. You can either decide on a fixed amount for each donation or let the people choose how much they want to donate regularly.
In version 3.0, the recurring donation option will be displayed right at the top of the form. Previously, it was just a checkbox and a dropdown box below the donation amounts. This new setup makes sure everyone sees the choice of recurring donations, and it’s harder to miss.
5. Real-Time Fundraising Reports
GiveWP provides you with a full-featured report right inside your WordPress dashboard that shows everything about your fundraising.
You can easily see how much money you got, the average donation, the number of people who gave, and any refunds, all for a certain time. The report also shows you which payment methods are used most often, top donation forms, top donors, and donation statuses.
6. GiveWP Integrations
The basic GiveWP helps you make donation forms, get money through Stripe and PayPal, and manage donors. But you can make it even better by adding some extra tools.
There are seven free add-ons you can use:
- Donation Widgets for Elementor: This makes GiveWP work better with Elementor, a page builder.
- Form Countdown: It adds a timer to your forms to make things a little urgent.
- Receipt Attachments for GiveWP: This lets you give donors downloadable gifts, like eBooks.
- Simple Social Shout: Adds buttons for sharing on social media.
- Per Form Confirmations for GiveWP: Helps you make special thank-you pages for each form.
- GiveWP Pixel Tracking: Adds a Facebook pixel to forms, so you can remind people who donated.
- Double the Donation: Adds support for a service that matches donations from companies.
These free tools give your GiveWP more features that it doesn’t have on its own. You should try them out.
GiveWP also offers some premium add-ons that give you even more features and better support. There are 38 premium add-ons in total, and they fall into four groups:
- Payment Gateways: Recurring Donations, Stripe, Authorize.net, and more.
- Marketing: ActiveCampaign, MailChimp, AWeber, and more.
- Tools: Form Field Manager, Fee Recovery, Tributes, and more.
- Accounting: Funds and Designations.
For most people, connecting to one email service and a few payment options is enough. But one add-on everyone should think about is Recurring Donations. This lets people donate regularly, like every week or month. You can even send them special emails to build a good relationship.
GiveWP works with five email services, but you can connect it to over a thousand more with Zapier. This includes things like Salesforce, SendGrid, Dropbox, and Google Drive.
The Google Analytics add-on helps you track donations better. You can even get email reports about recent donations. GiveWP also supports the UK Government Gift Aid program and lets you send donors PDF receipts.
This is just the beginning of what you can do with GiveWP. Check out their add-ons page for more.
In GiveWP 3.0, you can decide if you want to turn on or off an add-on for all your donation forms. This choice decides if the special block for that add-on will appear by itself when you make a new form in the Visual Donation Form Builder.
7. Increase Your Mobile Donations with GiveWP
If your organization doesn’t use mobile to raise funds, you might be missing out on a few extra bucks. Currently, over 43% of Americans (and 25% of people worldwide) with smartphones use mobile payment options like Google Pay and Apple Pay.
This number is expected to go even higher by 2025. You can make use of the strength of mobile payments to inspire generosity from anywhere by using GiveWP’s mobile payment choices.
8. Peer-to-Peer Fundraising
If you want more people to know about and support your charity, you can use “Social Proof” or “Word of Mouth.” It’s like when friends tell other friends about good things.
To make this easier, GiveWP offers a peer-to-peer fundraising extension. It lets your supporters start their own individual fundraising pages and raise money on behalf of the main campaign. For example, if someone is going to run a marathon to get money for your charity, they can tell everyone about it and collect donations.
It’s the best way to get more funds without doing anything. Plus, it gives your supporters a place where they can talk about and promote what they’re doing to help your charity. This add-on is available in Pro and Agency plans.
9. Login and Registration
In GiveWP 3.0, when someone donates, they will be assigned a WordPress user account automatically. The site administrators get to choose if donors know about their accounts and if donors must log in when filling out a form.
If you want donors to log in (or you have to make them log in), you just need to add a block and choose if it’s required or not. You can also choose if they go to a login page and change the text they see on the block.
10. Important Data Secure
When your website has important information about your supporters, it can become a target for hackers.
This is even more true for payment details. But here’s the good news: GiveWP doesn’t keep important payment information on your WordPress site. It’s kept safe.
If you want to know more about what’s new in the GiveWP 3.0 version, here’s everything you should know about this update.
Pros: What I Like About GiveWP
GiveWP is great for a few reasons.
First, you can start using it for free. Yup, you don’t have to spend any money to download the plugin and start your fundraising campaign.
If you ever feel like GiveWP isn’t what you hoped for, no worries. They promise to give all your money back within 30 days of buying the plugin. Just talk to their support team.
Plus, you get extra features with add-ons and extensions, so you’re likely to have everything you need.
GiveWP is perfect for beginners because it’s so easy to use. There’s a setup wizard that helps you make your donation form and adjust other settings.
But, if you’re good with coding, GiveWP is also great for you. It’s made to be friendly for developers, so you can customize it however you like.
Cons: What I Don’t Like About GiveWP
The free plan of GiveWP doesn’t offer much. You can only get payments through Stripe and PayPal, and you get some basic features like keeping track of donors and making reports.
If you need help, you might have to wait for 2 business days. That means if something goes wrong, your fundraising might have to stop for a few days.
But, there’s good news. GiveWP has a guide that helps you set things up, from the basics to the advanced customization. So, if you don’t want to spend money, you can use the free plan and find the answers by yourself.
To experience the true potential of GiveWP, you need to upgrade from the free version, and it’s not cheap. Even though it has many extra premium add-ons, you can’t buy them one by one. You have to subscribe to one of their paid plan to get them.
But, is it worth paying for the pro version of GiveWP? Let’s find out more about that in the next section.
How Much Does GiveWP Cost?
GiveWP has a freemium pricing model that helps you raise money online. Here’s how it works:
First, there’s a basic version of the plugin that you can get for free on WordPress.org and, as your website becomes more popular, you can choose to pay for extra features.
Let’s take a look at GiveWP’s premium plans:
- Free: With the free forever plan, you get unlimited forms, Stripe and PayPal payment gateways, donor management, insightful reporting, and some basic features.
- Basic: This plan is priced at $149 per year, and you get access to everything in the free plan plus basic add-ons, a license for 1-site, and priority support (2-hour response time).
- Plus: This one costs $349 per year and includes everything in the basic plan plus premium add-ons. With the Plus plan, you also get a recurring donation add-on and a free 30-minute fundraising website audit. You can use this plan on a single website only.
- Pro: The Pro plan is $499 per year. It gives you a license for just one website, and you get everything the Pro plan offers. Plus, you also get special VIP support and a peer-to-peer fundraising add-on.
Oh, and there’s one more plan called the Agency plan (designed for business owners and agencies). It costs $599 and includes everything in the Pro plan. The best part is you can use it on up to 5 websites instead of just one like the Pro plan.
As I told you earlier, you can try all the premium add-ons of GiveWP without worrying. They promise that if you change your mind or find something better within 30 days, they will give you back all your money.
It’s like a trial period where you can use everything and decide if you like it or not.
If not, you get your money back.
GiveWP Reviews from Around the Web
Want to know what other GiveWP reviews say about the best donation plugins for WordPress? Here’s a sample of GiveWP user reviews from around the web:
“Easy Plugin! Great Results.” – Jennifer M. via G2
“Flexible suite to take nonprofit clients to the next level” – Matt S. via G2
“GiveWP is an easy-to-use and install Fundraising platform. It allows us to set up different types of campaigns which we very much appreciate. We truly benefited from its flexibility and if needed very responsive support. We also see the path to continuous improvement of functionalities, reporting, etc. The integration with Stripe works seamlessly.” – @mw75017 via wordpress.org
“Excellent service and support, and the go-to plugin for donations and fundraising. Keep up the good work.” – @batmanc via wordpress.org
GiveWP Alternatives
If you feel that GiveWP isn’t the best choice for fundraising, or if it costs too much, you might want to check out these other options:
- WP Charitable: It is a WordPress donation plugin that offers similar features to GiveWP. It allows you to create fundraising campaigns, accept donations, and manage donor information. It also integrates with popular payment gateways and provides reporting and analytics tools. Paid plans start at $99 per year.
- WPForms: WPForms is a popular form builder plugin that includes a donation form template. It integrates with payment gateways like PayPal and Stripe, making it easy to collect donations through your website. The free version is available and paid plans start at $39.50 per year.
- PayPal Donations: If you prefer using PayPal as your payment gateway, you can simply add a PayPal Donations button to your website. It’s a simple solution that allows visitors to donate directly through their PayPal accounts. It’s free to use but they charge a transaction fee.
Conclusion – Is GiveWP Worth It?
We looked closely at different options for adding a donation feature to WordPress, and I think GiveWP is the best one. It lets you create unlimited donation forms using popular payment methods.
In short, GiveWP is simple, compatible with all the popular WordPress themes, and follows privacy rules.
If you’re just starting, go with the GiveWP Basic to accept an unlimited number of donations. But if you want to grow fast, GiveWP Plus integrates with some of the best email marketing software which helps you make a list of emails easily and get regular donations for your cause.
If you want to do peer-to-peer fundraising or make your own fundraising site, GiveWP Pro is the one for you, and if you run a WordPress agency or have multiple sites, the Agency plan lets you use it on up to 5 websites and has special features like VIP support and recurring donation.
Congratulations! You now have a better understanding of this amazing WordPress donation plugin. So what are you waiting for? Click here to pick your best plans and get started with GiveWP today.
And that’s it in this review. Have you tried GiveWP as a fundraising solution on your WordPress website? If so, what do you think? Leave a comment below and let me know.
