GiveWP – Donation Plugin and Fundraising Platform

July 24, 2024

GiveWP – Donation Plugin and Fundraising Platform Plugin

Accept donations and begin fundraising with GiveWP, the highest rated WordPress donation plugin for online giving.

GiveWP is the highest rated, most downloaded, and best supported donation plugin for WordPress. Whether you need a simple donate button or a powerful donation platform optimized for online giving, GiveWP is right for you.

Transform the way you accept online donations, starting for free. With GiveWP you can accept gifts for charity or for other purposes, through customizable donation forms. Our donation plugin also allows you to view donor data and fundraising reports, manage donors, and integrate with a wide variety of third-party gateways and services.

✨ GiveWP Features

GiveWP is free and full of many advanced features to suit your needs. Start by choosing one of our donation form templates to create your first fundraising campaign. Then, take advantage of full-featured fundraising reports and donor management tools to increase your overall fundraising revenue by learning what makes donors donate.

Free donor tools also help keep your donors happy. The donor dashboard helps your donor base easily manage their accounts and access their donation history. With our premium add-ons, you can add additional donor tools, like annual receipts.

Powerful Donation Forms

GiveWP has taken inspiration from Gutenberg blocks to create an even better form-building experience. The Visual Donation Form Builder uses sections and blocks to provide a more intuitive way to build and configure your donation forms.

In this builder, you’ll see your design in real time. Watch as your form takes shape as you select custom colors, fields, elements, and more. For those with a flair for customization, you can add Custom CSS directly into the builder.

Build custom donation forms in your WordPress admin
Customize donation form templates without any code
Add goals, multiple giving amounts, custom amounts, terms and conditions and more with just a couple clicks

Never used blocks before? No worries – we’ve got you covered with our guide.

Actionable Fundraising Reporting

Get a detailed breakdown of your donation activity
Control your fundraising data with exports and reports
Filter reports by date, form, and payment method
Measure performance across multiple campaigns

Complete Donor Management

View a complete history of your donor activity
Generate tax-deductible receipts
Allow donors to view their donation history, update their profile, manage their recurring donations, and download PDF receipts through their own donor dashboard

Find out more:

🧑🏿‍🤝‍🧑🏿 Who Uses GiveWP?

With more than 100,000+ active installs of GiveWP, we hear more and more success stories from nonprofit organizations. Causes are using GiveWP to raise millions of dollars per year. Check out some of our GiveWP Stories and Case Studies for details about their success.

The City Mission used GiveWP for Giving Tuesday and a competition fundraiser with a neighboring organization, where they raised $45K in 16 hours.
A local neighborhood watch program switched from using GoFundMe to GiveWP and raised $40,000 in five days for a memorial fundraiser.
Fans of Ivan the Gorilla have kept his memory alive by fundraising for a conservancy program in his name.
A hospital raised money through a community-wide virtual dance party during the pandemic.
Quiltlove, which provides personalized quilts for different life events (like new babies, extended hospital stays, and more), uses GiveWP to create a sustainable business model.
Niels Vink, a Dutch wheelchair tennis player, uses GiveWP to raise money to train, travel, and participate in competitions. At the 2021 Tokyo Paralympics, Vink earned a gold medal in doubles and a bronze medal in singles.

In addition to nonprofit organizations, GiveWP is widely used for individual or creative purposes. We’ve seen tip jars for blogs or musicians, live streams, and more. Our Donation Upsells for WooCommerce Add-on is even used in some eCommerce stores to collect donations for a cause, or ask for tips in the cart or checkout.

We’ve even seen GiveWP used to collect gifts for birthdays and weddings!

💝 Simple and Pain-Free Giving

We built GiveWP to be the best WordPress donation plugin from day one. Simply install and activate the plugin to get started.

The strength of GiveWP lies within its optimized donation forms. When creating a form, you can start with a template and customize the donation levels, including allowing donors to give a custom amount. The donation forms can then be displayed anywhere on your website using a block, shortcode, widget, or the single donation form page.
You can also integrate your forms with a wide variety of payment processors, including PayPal and Stripe within the free plugin. You can also purchase add-ons to use Authorize,net, Bitpay, Square, and more.

🌱 First Time Users

For new users, we suggest reviewing our Getting Started Guide to get an understanding of how the plugin works. If you run into any trouble, we offer free support to help you with your issues, questions, and concerns.

If you are a GiveWP customer with an active license of any of our popular add-ons, we’d love to hear from you and support you via our Priority Support channel.

💳 Accept Credit Card Donations and More

GiveWP comes with several payment gateway options:

Stripe Donations — Accept donations through any payment method (like Apple Pay, Google Pay, or ACH) activated in your Stripe accounts. Upgrade to the Premium Stripe add-on to remove the 2% fee for one-time donations processed through Stripe.
PayPal Donations — Allow worldwide donations with PayPal Donations. No additional fees applied.
Venmo Donations — Give donors the option to pay through Venmo with their account balance or connected bank account.
Offline Donations — Enable your donors to send checks or physical donations with an offline gateway with instructions.
Test Gateway — use the Test Gateway to see exactly how your donors will walk through the donation process.
And many more Gateways – View additional payment gateways on our website. These include Authorize.net, Bitpay, Square, Razorpay, Paytm, and more.

⚙️ Extend GiveWP with Powerful Add-ons

GiveWP’s goal is to “Democratize Generosity.” We want to make it easy for everyone to raise funds online.

In addition to our free donation plugin, we have premium GiveWP add-ons available to extend the functionality of GiveWP. Ultimately, these tools allow you to raise more money and give you a better relationship with your donors.

Must-Have Add-ons for GiveWP:

View all of GiveWP’s Add-ons to discover all the ways you can further enhance and extend GiveWP.

🛠️ Easy to Customize and Enhance

Are you a developer? GiveWP is built with best practices and easy to extend and customize. Here are some great developer-oriented tutorials and docs to help you customize GiveWP to your liking:

💚 About the GiveWP Team

GiveWP is part of StellarWP, a Liquid Web Family Brand. Our donation plugin is backed by a growing team of WordPress developers, support engineers, customer success managers, and marketing professionals who’ve worked with WordPress and nonprofits since 2009. This means GiveWP is made with best practices in mind; extremely extensible and customizable, stable, and reliable. We’ll be here in years to come for you and your nonprofit organization.

📧 Connect with GiveWP

Stay in touch with us for important plugin news and updates:

🐱‍💻 Contribute to GiveWP

This plugin is proudly open source (GPL license) and we’re always looking for more contributors. Whether you know another language, love to code, or just have an idea, we would love your help and input.

Here’s a few ways you can contribute to GiveWP:

Star/fork/watch the GiveWP GitHub repository to learn more about what issues we’re tackling and the project is developing. If you’ve never worked with Github before, learn about pull requests here and submit one for GiveWP, we’d love to give you our feedback.
Translate GiveWP into your native language. The best place to do that is here on wordpress.org. Go to https://translate.wordpress.org/, then search for your language, click the “Plugins” tab, then search for “GiveWP”. When you’ve submitted at least 95% of GiveWP’s strings, the language moderators will review and approve your translations and then they will be available to all WordPress users for your native language. If you are interested in translating any of our Premium Add-ons, contact us, we’d love to chat with you about that.
Join the GiveWP Community Facebook group. We chat about all things related to WordPress, GiveWP, fundraising, and online donations in general.

Installation

Minimum Requirements

WordPress 6.3 or greater
PHP version 7.2 or greater
MySQL version 5.7 or greater
MariaDB version 10 or later
Some payment gateways require fsockopen support (for IPN access)
cURL version 5.40 or higher
An SSL certificate — while this is not strictly required, it is highly recommend. If you are converting your site to use SSL/HTTPS now, we have a detailed guide to help you here.

Automatic installation

Automatic installation is the easiest option as WordPress handles the file transfers itself and you don’t need to leave your web browser. To do an automatic install of GiveWP, log in to your WordPress dashboard, navigate to the Plugins menu and click “Add New”.

In the search field type “GiveWP” and click Search Plugins. Once you have found the plugin you can view details about it such as the point release, rating and description. Most importantly of course, you can install it by simply clicking “Install Now”.

Manual installation

The manual installation method involves downloading our donation plugin and uploading it to your server via your favorite FTP application. The WordPress codex contains instructions on how to do this here.

Updating

Automatic updates should work like a charm; as always though, ensure you backup your site just in case.

Screenshots

Creating powerful donation forms is easy with GiveWP. Simply install the plugin, create a new donation form, set the desired giving options, and publish!
Customizing your donation forms is easy and intuitive with customization options for any fundraising campaign.
Display you donation forms within a responsive grid on any page to make it easy for your visitors to choose a giving option.
Show of your donor's generosity with our customizable Donor Wall block and shortcode.
Manage your donors and receive key insights to maximize your fundraising efforts.
Extend GiveWP with a robust suite of powerful Add-ons. Accept recurring donations, credit cards, add custom form fields, and more!
GiveWP is thoroughly documented to help you get started quickly and learn basic to advanced features and functionalities.
GiveWP has a dedicated support team to help answer any questions you may have and help you through stumbling blocks.
Customize your forms with design mode.
Use almost any payment gateway integration with GiveWP through our add-ons or by creating your own add-on.

FAQ

Where can I learn more about how to use GiveWP?

We have extensive documentation on installing and configuring GiveWP on our website. We suggest starting with the GiveWP 101 article.

How can I get support for GiveWP?

We work hard to the best support possible for GiveWP. The WordPress.org Support Forum is used for free community based support. We continually monitor the forum and do our best to ensure everyone gets a response.

Priority support is given to users who have an active license for one of GiveWP’s Add-ons or Pricing Plans. We provide email-based support to our Premium Add-on customers with an average 1st response time of 2 to 4 hours and average time to resolution of 24-48 hours depending on the severity of the issue.

Do you have any demos?

Yes! We have several live examples of GiveWP and the wide variety of form options you can use with GiveWP. Check out our live demo, where you can see what your donors would see.

GiveWP Plus, Pro, and Agency Plan customers will also get a free 30-minute website audit with our Customer Success Team after they purchase. In this meeting, we’ll cover everything you need to know about GiveWP to fit your needs.

Do you have Case Studies of Nonprofits using GiveWP?

Yes! We have two different types of studies that highlight nonprofits in different ways.
“GiveWP Stories” are stories of how nonprofits or individuals implemented GiveWP with success. You can read them all here.
“Case Studies” are more detailed examples of how an agency implemented GiveWP for a specific purpose for an organization. You can read those here.

How is GiveWP better than a simple PayPal donate button?

PayPal donate buttons take your users off-site, which can cause you to lose some in the process. With GiveWP, your donors can stay on-site and you get the benefit of gathering donor data, viewing free fundraising reports, and creating unlimited donation forms. On the other hand, you can always use GiveWP as a simple customized PayPal donate button if you prefer.

How is GiveWP better than a form plugin for accepting donations through WordPress?

Form plugins are excellent solutions for general intake forms. That said, they most often lack substantial donation reporting features, and donor management options. They also lack a variety of presentation options like GiveWP has for embedding your forms in different places throughout your site. If you want a “Donate Now!” button in the header of your site that opens in a modal, you’ll most often have to do quite a bit of customization to get that working just right with form plugins — but not with GiveWP.

GiveWP works great alongside all the most popular form plugins. Use GiveWP for donations, and Caldera Forms, Ninja Forms, Gravity Forms or other for your general purpose intake forms. They’ll work great alongside each other.

How is GiveWP better than an eCommerce plugin for accepting donations on WordPress?

We built GiveWP specifically to overcome many of the hurdles you have to go through in order to get an eCommerce plugin (like WooCommerce) to be streamlined for donations. You want to treat your donors right. No donor wants to add their donation to a cart and go through several page refreshes just to type in their information. You, as the site admin, don’t want to have to change the word “Products” to “Donations” everywhere, and go through all the hoops of removing taxes and shipping, either.

On top of that, customizing the plugin’s terminology is a daunting task. You never want your users to receive an “invoice” for the donation “product” they “purchased.” Rather, you’d like for them to receive a receipt for the donation they gave.

Use GiveWP for donations, and let your WooCommerce or WP eCommerce plugin or the like handle your products. They work alongside each other just fine. Your donors will be happy, your customers will be happy, and so will you.

Additionally, you can use our Donation Upsells for WooCommerce GiveWP add-on to allow your customers to do a donation upsell in the cart or checkout.

How do I eliminated the 2% fee on Stripe donations?

The 2% fee on Stripe donations only applies to donations taken via our free Stripe integration in GiveWP Core. If you purchase the premium Stripe add-on you will not have any additional fees at all. Additionally, even with the free Stripe plugin, the fees only apply to one-time donations, never to recurring donations.

Read our release announcement for all the details, and if you have further questions feel free to reach out via our contact page.

Changelog

3.14.1: July 24th, 2024

Fix: Resolved an error with the give_totals shortcode when using multiple form IDs

3.14.0: July 17th, 2024

Enhancement: Updated the visual donation form builder with various UI design improvements
Enhancement: Updated the form builder design tab preview to be more responsive
Enhancement: Improved the design of single active gateways on forms
Enhancement: Improved the login block design
Enhancement: Improved the Terms & Conditions block UI
Enhancement: Improved the donate button hover state & secure donation tag
Enhancement: Improved the donor title prefix setting styles
Enhancement: Improved the checkbox style for form builder Build & Design screens
Enhancement: Improved the Consent block by removing “Link Text” option when “Show terms in form” display type is selected
Enhancement: Improved the File Upload field interactivity to limit the button scope
Fix: Resolved an issue with the drag and drop block placement in the form builder
Fix: Resolved an issue where the Give Goal and Multi-Form Goal blocks and shortcodes were displaying the wrong donation amount
Fix: Resolved an issue when exporting donations that use Razorpay gateway
Fix: Resolved an issue in the form builder where recurring donations descriptions were not always matching frequency selection
Fix: Resolved an issue with custom donor columns in csv exports and revive filter give_export_donors_get_default_columns
Security: Resolved various security issues related to user permissions

3.13.0: June 26th, 2024

New: Added option to PayPal settings to keep webhooks when disconnecting account
Enhancement: Updated donor comment block active state border color to be the primary color
Enhancement: Updated form builder global settings links to open in new tabs
Fix: Resolved an issue with some validation errors using Stripe Payment Element Gateway not displaying information correctly
Fix: Resolved an issue with Stripe accounts using API keys and the Stripe Payment Element Gateway

3.12.3: June 19th, 2024

Fix: Resolved an issue where PayPal was not processing donations due to missing billing address fields

3.12.2: June 11th, 2024

Fix: Resolved an issue where only the donation amount was sent to PayPal, ignoring event ticket values for one-time donations.
Fix: Resolved an issue where donations were processed on PayPal but not recorded in GiveWP due to missing city, state, and zip fields.

3.12.1: June 5th, 2024

Fix: Resolved an issue where the Donor Phone field was not included in the donor export
Fix: Resolved an issue where the Billing Address field was not saved in Stripe
Security: Added additional escaping to Stripe onboarding
Dev: Added a new filter givewp_log_source_view to allow customization of the log source column

3.12.0: May 15th, 2024

New: Updated the donation amount block with options for donation amount level description in the visual form builder
New: Updated form goal settings with options for start and end dates in the visual form builder

3.11.0: May 7th, 2024

New: Added pre-requisite form builder compatibility for upcoming ConvertKit add-on release
New: Added ability to customize alt tags for header images in the visual form builder
Security: Added additional escaping to the give_form shortcode
Security: Added additional sanitization to the custom css field in the form builder

3.10.0: April 30th, 2024

New: Added pre-requisite form builder compatibility for upcoming ActiveCampaign add-on release
Enhancement: Updated PayPal support phone number
Enhancement: Updated various strings to be translatable (open-source contribution by @DAnn2012)
Security: sanitize additional give_form shortcode args
Fix: Resolved styling issues with recurring labels in the form builder

3.9.0: April 24th, 2024

New: Added a donor phone number block to the form builder to collect donor phone numbers on donation forms
Enhancement: Updated form field inputs to have a single border color when selected

3.8.0: April 17th, 2024

New: Added pre-requisite form builder compatibility for upcoming double the donation add-on release
Enhancement: Updated the form builder tour to highlight where to find the guided tour again
Dev: Added BlockType api for easier block to field conversion

3.7.0: April 10th, 2024

New: Added pre-requisite form builder compatibility for upcoming constant contact add-on release
New: Added phone number field to the donor details page, more updates for this field will come in future releases!
Enhancement: Updated the form block option to select more available forms than the original limit of 10
Enhancement: Updated the form builder left-side menu to open automatically when entering the build screen
Security: Added sanitizing and escaping to shortcodes
Fix: Resolved a conflict with GiveWP and WordPress bulk actions functionality

3.6.2: April 5th, 2024

Fix: Resolved an issue with WordPress 6.5 and the visual form builder that was making it difficult to interact with blocks

3.6.1: March 21st, 2024

Fix: Resolved an issue with PayPal donations and currency switcher on donation forms using the visual form builder

3.6.0: March 13th, 2024

New: Introduced a new beta feature called “Event Tickets” that is open for feedback! If enabled, you can create events and sell tickets on your donation forms.
New: Added a new form builder layout called “Two Panel” that offers a side-by-side appearance and a multi-step donation experience.
New: Added a new setting in the form builder styles tab for the header image overlay
Fix: Resolved several styling issues with the donation form modal
Fix: Resolved styling conflicts with native WordPress UI components

3.5.1: March 6th, 2024

Fix: Resolved an issue with PayPal that was preventing the ability to connect a PayPal account to GiveWP.

3.5.0: February 29th, 2024

Security: Resolved a couple potential security vulnerabilities
New: Added the ability to add a header image to forms in the Visual Form Builder
Fix: Resolved an issue with new Stripe accounts having trouble making credit card donations
Fix: Resolved a PayPal Donations issue where the donation buttons didn’t show up in the modal view of an Option-Based Form Editor form

3.4.2: February 19th, 2024

Fix: Resolved an issue with PayPal donations that ensures the correct donation amount will be used after filling out payment details and modifying the original amount.

3.4.1: February 13th, 2024

Fix: Resolved an issue with the default email block that ensures it is always a required field in the donation form.

3.4.0: February 8th, 2024

Fix: Resolved several issues with the billing address block including dynamically requiring certain fields and allowing state/county field input
Fix: Resolved an issue with multi step form layout where the title was missing on the first step when show header was disabled
Fix: Resolved errors when adding/removing a sub-site in a WP multisite environment (open-source contribution by @Genevieve-K)
Fix: Resolved an issue with form modals and some gateways that redirect offsite to display the confirmation page after a donation
Fix: Resolved a fields api compatability issue with showInReceipt metaKey
Fix: Resolved a nonce validation issue with translated values (open-source contribution by @Genevieve-K)
Fix: Resolved a PHP 8 compatability issue with the system info page (open-source contribution by @JeromeBeckett)
Fix: Resolved several styling issues with the form modal block
Fix: Updated Stripe connect redirect to be limited to specific pages
New: Added form migration step for the GiveWP Gift Aid add-on
New: Added new filter givewp_stripe_payment_element_appearance_options to modify the Stripe Payment Element gateway appearance options
New: Added donation form processing lifecycle actions for more programmatic control over form processing
Enhancement: Made donation list table programmatically extendable (open-source contribution by @pulsovi)
Enhancement: Improved the flexibility of donation confirmation page detail values to allow sanitized html
Enhancement: Added new filter to the gateways block to control visibility
Enhancement: Made several improvements to the give importer for third-parties and admin

3.3.1: January 23rd, 2024

Fix: Resolved an issue checking for the GiveWP Funds and Designations add-on information during form migrations

3.3.0: January 10th, 2024

Happy new year!
Fix: Resolved an issue where some migrated forms were being duplicated
Fix: Resolved an issue with the donor export filter by donation form
Fix: Added additional attribute escaping to the donor wall shortcode
Enhancement: Improved current compatibility with PHP 8.2
Enhancement: Improved the UI of the visual donation form builder to be more intuitive with dedicated Build, Design, and Settings screens
New: The donor dashboard now has a way to update and reset passwords
New: Added pre-requisite v3 compatibility updates for the Give Funds and Designations add-on
New: Added v3 form migration compatibility for select GiveWP add-ons including: Mailchimp, Funds and Designations, and Per-Form Gateways
New: Added a new programmatic way to interact with the v3 confirmation page using our fields api

3.2.2: Dec 20th, 2023

Fix: Resolved an error on the donor details page when they have no donations
Fix: Resolved an issue where the continue button setting was not being reflected on forms using legacy template

3.2.1: Dec 13th, 2023

Fix: Resolved an issue that was duplicating the “Donate Now” button on legacy form template
Fix: Resolved an issue that was preventing display options from being reflected on the form
Fix: Removed an error notice that was showing up on admin menu pages
Fix: Resolved an error in the donation form block when the admin page is refreshed

3.2.0: Dec 6th, 2023

New: Embed form button added to the Visual Donation Form Builder
New: Pre-publish confirmation panel added to the Visual Donation Form Builder
Enhancement: Updated parts of the Form Builder text areas to Text Editors to provide more formatting options
Enhancement: Improved compatibility with the donation block and Visual Builder forms
Enhancement: All donors are connected with a user for improved security and caching compatibility
Enhancement: Improve the Name, and Terms and Conditions blocks with global settings
Fix: Resolved some strange behaviors when using the Amount Levels setting in the Form Builder
Fix: Removed WP_Background_Process and WP_Async_Request to avoid conflicts with other plugins
Fix: Donor honorific (Mr, Mrs, etc) is now properly saved as part of the donor record
Fix: PayPal Donations displays a helpful error message when incorrect credit card information is entered
Fix: Visual Donation Form Builder loading is improved by preventing the formBuilderSettings meta from becoming too large
Fix: Resolved an issue where some donations list tables were failing to load due to missing donation mode meta
Fix: Resolved an issue where the donation forms list tables were resulting in duplicate forms
Fix: Resolved an issue where PayPal smart buttons were not being displayed on embedded forms using legacy template
Fix: Resolved an issue with PayPal donations and fee recovery where the fee was not being added to the donation total

3.1.1: November 3rd, 2023

Fix: Embedded forms created with the Visual Builder now redirect to the confirmation page after a completed donation.
Fix: Donor title prefixes are now formatted as strings (like Mr or Ms) instead of numbers.

3.1.0: October 25th, 2023

Feature: Design Mode changes in the Form Builder are now instant and awesome! Instant gratification!
Feature: Donor prefixes can now easily be reordered in the Donor Name block
Feature: The form goal is now changeable from the Design mode of the Form Builder
Enhancement: The form goal amount now better displays the currency amount
Enhancement: The first time a form (in the form builder) is saved, the title is used as the page slug
Enhancement: Improved translations in the form builder and gateways
Enhancement: Compatibility improvements in preparation of WordPress 6.4
Enhancement: Improved donor flow that passes along their name, email, and address to PayPal Donations
Fix: Minor wording improvement on the login block
Fix: Added a give_user_info_fields_user_info filter to allow for customizing the user info fields
Fix: Links on the donor list table now work properly on sub-directory WordPress instances
Fix: Resolved an issue where errors failed to display on older forms upon donation submission
Fix: Multi-form, form grid, and totals shortcodes no longer throw a warning
Fix: Multi-form goal block no longer throws an error when filtering by form
Fix: Multi-form and progress bar goals no longer throw an error for themes that return false for get_theme_support
Fix: Resolved old GiveWP behavior that altered default WordPress behavior when retrieving GiveWP post type meta

3.0.4: October 30th, 2023

Fix: Resolved issue with some Stripe gateways not recording incoming recurring donation renewals. To recover missing renewals from Stripe in GiveWP, please use the “Sync Subscription” button on the individual subscription details page. Click here to learn more about syncing subscriptions in GiveWP.

3.0.3: October 20th, 2023

Fix: Using the multi-form shortcode with the ids attribute no longer causes a fatal error
Fix: Forms no longer have fatal errors on Elementor websites when the Display Content option is enabled

3.0.2: October 19th, 2023

Fix: Stripe per-form settings are included when migrating a form to the Visual Donation Form Builder
Fix: Gateways are properly separated in the settings page and Global Settings for Fee Recovery shows all gateways when you select per gateway

3.0.1: October 17th, 2023

Fix: Resolved a conflict with Matomo plugin that was causing a fatal error

3.0.0: October 16th, 2023

New: Try out the all new Visual Donation Form Builder!
New: All new form infrastructure for forms using the Form Builder!
New: Stripe Payment Element gateway for Stripe with support for many types of payment methods
New: Existing forms can be migrated and upgrade to use the Form Builder

See the full GiveWP changelog on Github