Do you want to create a nonprofit donation form in WordPress? With just a few clicks, you can collect donations for your nonprofit right on your own WordPress website.
In this article, we’ll show you exactly how to use a template to create a donation form in WordPress. This can boost your fundraising strategy by making online fundraising easy and fast.
Create Your Nonprofit Donation Form Now
What Makes a Good Donation Page?
Asking for charitable donations online is easy, but getting them to convert can be challenging. You need a smooth donation process.
Keep the donation page simple. If the page has too much going on, it distracts potential donors. If the page is simple to navigate and the form is clean and easy to use, that’s fewer barriers to donation.
And don’t forget to make it clear to visitors what donations are supporting. Is it a general fundraiser, or are you supporting a specific cause with these funds?
How to Create a Nonprofit Donation Form in WordPress
Here’s a video tutorial showing how you can make a WordPress donation form:
Need more detail? Let’s walk through it together, step by step.
Step 1: Install and Activate WPForms
To get started, install and activate the WPForms plugin, which we’ll be using for this tutorial. WPForms is among the highest-rated form builder plugins and works well for creating online donation pages. Plus, it’s super user-friendly.
Not sure how to install and activate a WordPress plugin? No sweat. See this step-by-step guide on how to install a plugin in WordPress.
Step 2: Activate Your Payment Gateways
Before creating our nonprofit donation form, let’s connect our payment gateways. This will allow donors to pay by credit card. Completing this step now will save you time when you add a payment field to your form in the next step.
To do this, open your WordPress dashboard. In the left sidebar menu, click on WPForms » Addons.
That will show you all of the available addons you can access. WPForms has payment addons for PayPal, Square, Stripe, and Authorize.net.
Locate and activate the payment addon you wish to use. You can activate and use multiple payment gateways.
Next, click on WPForms » Settings in the left sidebar menu.
This will open the general settings for WPForms. Click on the Payments tab.
Now you can connect your accounts for the payment addons you selected.
When you’re finished connecting your payment gateways, don’t forget to save your settings!
Now we’re ready for the fun part: creating your form.
Step 3: Create Your Nonprofit Donation Form
After you’ve activated WPForms on your site and set up your payment methods, go to WPForms » Add New to create a new form.
Enter a name for your form at the top of the setup screen. You can use a generic name or the name of your fundraising campaign.
Just below that, you’ll see 600+ customizable form templates. You can browse these or easily search for the “donation form” template using the search bar.
There are several donation templates available. Choose whichever best meets your needs. For our example, we’ll use the simplest donation form template.
Once you select your template, the form builder opens.
At the bottom of the form builder field options, you’ll see Payment Fields.
For the purposes of a donation form, you’re probably okay with the Donation Amount field that comes with the template. It’s simply a single item field set to let the user determine the donation amount.
If you did want to add some other kind of payment options, you could easily do so with the multiple items, checkbox items, or dropdown items fields. You can also add additional form fields for any other information you want to collect.
With the exception of connecting a payment gateway, though, you can absolutely publish this form as-is on your website.
So let’s take a look at how we add the payment field.
Because you already set up your payment addons in Step 1, adding the payment field now will be a breeze.
First, drag and drop your payment field onto your form. Since we activated PayPal Commerce in Step 1, that’s what we’ll use.
Upon dragging the payment field into the form, you’ll get a modal pop-up letting you know you must enable payments on your form.
Don’t worry! This is super quick and easy. You don’t even need to leave the form builder.
Click the Payments option on the form builder menu on the left.
On that screen, you’ll be able to interact with any of the payment gateways that you previously activated in Step 1. Deactivated gateways will be grayed out.
Click on the payment gateway that matches the payment field you selected on your form. We used a PayPal Commerce field, so that’s what we’ll select.
Use the toggle switch to enable payments. Depending on the payment gateway you use, you might also have the option to enable recurring payments. That’s a great option if you want to allow people to make recurring donations.
There are also some fields you can map to your form.
After that, you can click back on Fields to return to your form.
If you want to do some testing, that’s a great idea. We have a few guides to help you with that process.
- How to Test PayPal Payments
- How to Test Stripe Payments
- How to Test Square Payments
- How to Test Authorize.net Payments
At this point, you’re ready to embed your form if you want. Save your form and click on the Embed button at the top right.
You can choose whether you want to embed your form on a new page or an existing page.
If you choose an existing page, you’ll get a dropdown menu with a list of pages on your site.
If you create a new page, you can set that up right from WPForms.
And that’s it! You’ve built your online nonprofit donation form. Easy peasy, right?
Check out this complete guide to form entries to see how easy it is to view your donations in the WordPress dashboard.
Bonus: Customize Your Nonprofit Donation Form Template Fields
WPForms is a pretty powerful form builder, and the templates are 100% customizable. As a bonus, we’ll show you how to use WPForms’ tools to customize your form.
Conditional Logic
Applying conditional logic to online forms lets you show users only the information that’s relevant to them.
Instead of the single item field that comes with the donation form we used above, maybe you use a multiple items field instead and add suggested donation amounts with an ‘other’ option.
You can then set up a single item field like the one in our example above, allowing donors to enter their own donation amount. Apply conditional logic so the field only appears if ‘Other’ is selected on your form.
Want to add conditional logic to your forms? Check out this guide to using conditional logic in WPForms to learn how.
And if you need some ideas for how to use it in your forms, we have some suggestions for ways to use conditional logic to create killer forms.
Change Form Settings
You can change form settings anytime to rename your form, add tags, and more.
From inside the form builder, look on the left sidebar and navigate to Settings » General.
You’ll notice some other settings options based on your addons, but we’re just looking at the General settings here.
Here you can configure the following:
- Form Name — Rename your form
- Form Description — Add a description under the header
- Tags — Assign a tag to your form to group it with other similar forms
- Submit Button Text — Change the button text
- Submit Button Processing Text — Edit the text that appears after pressing submit button
Configure Your Notifications
Want to receive donation notifications? What about sending confirmation emails to donors?
Easy! From the settings menu, select Notifications.
Here you can determine who will receive a notification email. Maybe you want to send it to the donor and CC yourself so you both receive the donation receipt. Set the subject line, From Name and Email, and write the message you want to send.
Note that From Name will be your organization name and not typically an individual.
To get started with this feature, check out our documentation on how to set up form notifications in WordPress.
This guide to using smart tags will help you personalize your notifications.
If you want to send more than one email to one person, read this article on creating multiple form notifications in WordPress.
You can even use ChatGPT with WPForms to send AI-generated notifications.
Finally, to keep branding across your notification emails consistent, check out this guide on adding a custom header to your email template.
Configure Your Form Confirmations
Form confirmations are messages displayed to site visitors upon form submission. They give you the chance to let people know immediately that their donation was received and to offer them next steps.
WPForms has 3 confirmation types to choose from:
- Message — the default confirmation type in WPForms. When a site visitor makes a donation, a simple message confirmation will appear, letting them know it was received.
- Show Page —will take site visitors to a specific web page on your site, thanking them for their donation. For help doing this, check out our tutorial on redirecting customers to a thank you page.
- Go to URL (Redirect) — used when sending site visitors to a different website, such as your social media page.
To configure these, click on the Confirmation tab in the Form Editor under Settings.
Next, select the type of confirmation type you’d like to create. For this example, we’ll use the default Message.
Then you just customize the text in the box! When you’re done, click Save in the top right corner.
Need some more guidance? See our documentation on setting up form confirmations.
Keep in Touch With Donors
You can combine your donation forms to gather donor information with some popular email marketing services like:
…and more.
This allows you to add donors to your email list and keep them informed about your charitable organization. It’s a good way to get recurring donors by keeping your organization front of mind.
And because your form is already live on your website, it’s easy to use the social sharing features in WordPress to get more traffic. Check out these awesome social media plugins to get some ideas.
Ready to get started? We’ve got you covered with our online donation form template. Click the button to get started now!
Create Your Nonprofit Donation Form Now
WPForms Nonprofit Discount
Are you a nonprofit organization looking to save money while seeing your donations skyrocket?
WPForms Pro is available to qualified nonprofits at a major discount of 75% off.
You can use all of the advanced features in Pro to make sure your donors support your fundraising efforts long-term.
To apply, head to the WPForms Nonprofit Discount page and complete the request form. The team will review your application and be in touch.
Next, Add Optional Payment Fields to Your Forms
And there you have it! You now know how to create a nonprofit donation form in WordPress. If you follow these steps, you’ll create a good donation experience.
You can even include donation requests while users fill out other WordPress forms on your site. That could help you to reach a fundraising goal faster and boost your conversion rate. Read about how to add an optional payment to your WordPress forms.
We also have a guide to super helpful Salesforce integrations that’ll be handy to add automation if you use Salesforce for Nonprofits.
Create Your Nonprofit Donation Form Now
Ready to build your form? Get started today with the easiest WordPress form builder plugin. WPForms Pro includes lots of free templates and offers a 14-day money-back guarantee.
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