Today, we’re going to talk about fundraising online with Give, a plugin from WordImpress, with Matt Cromwell, the brand ambassador and head of support at WordImpress, fellow advanced WordPress admin, and all around amazing, awesome guy.
What Do You Guys Do At WordImpress That Makes You Unique?
We’re creating really high-quality plugins with high-quality support. The plugins that stand out to me are the ones with a good team behind them, and that’s what we’re trying to do with Give and WordImpress in general.
What Is Give And How Do You See Your Customers Using It For Fundraising Online?
Give is the most robust and simplest plugin for fundraising online. It’s a donation platform that uses a form based on best practices for fundraising online. You can have as many forms as you like and add on more robust features for any fundraising campaign you need.
Why Is This Such An Important Plugin To WordImpress?
It was really important to both Devin and I. Devin worked with many nonprofit clients through SoundPress, and we still work with them regularly. Every time Devin built a site and did donations, setting up donations was a real pain.
To do fundraising online, you don’t want a shopping cart system where you go to checkout and finalize a donation. That makes sense with a lot of products, but with donations you just want to say, “Here’s $50—I’m done.”
There’s no way to do this kind of simple fundraising online with WooCommerce or other WordPress plugins, so Devin first built Quick Checkout to checkout directly on the page with WooCommerce.
I took a different approach. When I was freelancing, I would do a simple gravity form for online donations. Gravity Forms is an excellent plugin, but with donations, you lose the robust reporting features that you need to track your donations. There just wasn’t a good solution out there for WordPress.
When Devin and I came together, we saw the need for a plugin for fundraising online and wanted to fix it. It’s a big rubbing point that has plagued us for years, so we decided to kill it.
Do You Have Any Data That Shows People Collect More By Using Give Rather Than Another Solution?
We don’t have any case studies, but there’s lots of data available about best practices with fundraising online generally. One best practice is to keep donation forms as simple as possible and keep donors on the same page, which Give does. Ideally, that difference is already there.
Heather: I like the point of keeping people on your site—sending people away is a disadvantage and you lose control of their experience. You may want them to stay even after giving a donation, and the data bears this out.
How Does Give Compare To Traditional Fundraising Online? What Are Other Differences In The Experience?
The biggest difference is if you’re not using a WordPress native solution, like WooCommerce or Give or Gravity Forms, you’re using a 3rd party system that integrates—or you have to kick users to another website.
People love the infinite control they have over WordPress. So they say “I need it to do this or that” and customize it to the last pixel and have it function exactly as they want.
With a 3rd party, you don’t have that control. You just have their reporting tools, the data is always over there instead of on your website. There are several good third-party systems for fundraising online, like Donately, an excellent team that does an excellent job.
You have to make a decision: do you want to outsource your fundraising online to a 3rd party service that is robust and has a lot of great features, or do you want to keep it in house and have it all on your website and your server?
How Are 3rd Parties Generating Revenue Compared To How Give Generates Revenue? What’s The Difference Between How They’re Fundraising Online And How Give Is?
With a 3rd party system, they handle the credit card fees themselves and tack on a fee to those fees, keeping them funded and viable month to month. It’s nice because you pay one amount and you know that’s there and build it into your budget.
Give is different—We just charge a one-time fee per year for add ons. We don’t take any of your revenue whatsoever. All your fees go directly to your credit card merchant.
In the end, your monthly fees for all your fundraising online are a lot lower than a third-party system. PayPal Pro, for example, has a monthly charge but a lower rate for non-profits. Stripe only charges 2.7% per donation, so that’s just between you and the credit card merchant.
We stay sustainable through the sale of our add ons, for both Give and other plugins.
How Much Can Someone Do With The Free Version Of Give? Are There Add Ons They Absolutely Need To Use Give For Fundraising Online?
No, absolutely not! To be on the WordPress repository, a plugin must be fully functional out of the box. Give has multiple payment gateway options out of the box, including PayPal Standard, offline donations, and test donations.
PayPal Standard is going to kick you over to the PayPal website to finalize the transaction. If you want to keep users on your site and collect credit cards on your site, which you usually want to do when fundraising online, you need an add-on.
However, features like robust reporting, email notifications, user and donor management, user and donor history, limitless forms and form archive pages, categories, tags—all of that is built into the free plugin.
We followed the WooCommerce model—WooCommerce is a really robust ecommerce solution that is totally free. Many people feel they need a lot of add-ons to do ecommerce how they want to with WooCommerce; however, the free offering right out of the box is robust and awesome, and we followed the same model.
What Are Some Things You Need To Do Before Fundraising Online With Your Website?
In the U.S., there aren’t a whole lot of regulations around accepting money for free as long as you report it. With Give, you can designate funds as a normal payment instead of donations.
Things get tricky if you receive more than $10,000 in donations. If you’re a fully certified 501(c)3 and you’re accepting donations and fundraising online, you’re good to go.
We just had a guy named Marc from ServerPress who wanted to help a homeless woman he met in his neighborhood, so he installed Give and raised $3000 in 6 days with the basic plugin.
It’s easy to get up and running right away. If you’re running a big campaign, things are a bit different though, so maybe talk to your accountant first.
Is Give Only For Nonprofits?
Nope! Marc isn’t a nonprofit; we’ve had bands ask us to use Give to raise money to fund a new record. We see freelancers use Give, like Sara Pressler on Optimalist to support their new plugin. It’s good for anyone who wants to do any sort of fundraising online, nonprofit or otherwise.
Our primary users are 501(c)3’s.
How Are People Using Give For Fundraising Online?
Marc’s was great because it was so simple. He didn’t style Give in any way—he just created a simple page and got a return.
I’m working on a website for an orphanage, and they have many ways they want people to give to them. I built out the archive page to show 4 different forms where you can go to a donation form and give in different ways.
Like donating clothes, you might not want to process that through Give, though you could with the offline donation option. It highlights how robust the archive page is and your ability to go into single pages.
I also have some friends who need to raise money every single month to pay for their daughter’s medical expenses. I made a single page with a form and Give at the bottom so they could start fundraising online.
The simplicity of the plugin makes it excellent, but it can also be built out to be larger as well.
Can You Do Recurring Donations?
Not just yet. It’s a serious challenge, but we’re working on it. We’re working closely with Pippin Williamson from Easy Digital Downloads because his recurring payments are going to be similar to ours.
We’re hoping that will be released this month—it could really change the game for fundraising online.
Recurring donations is definitely best practice, and doing so with PayPal is really simple, but we want to make sure there’s a Give solution.
Are There Any Unique Applications You’ve Seen?
One of our early adopters is a guy named Greg Mount, and the first project I saw Give on from him was called “Save Korean Dogs.”
Give is on that site and is working really well, and it’s helping a campaign to stop dogs from being eaten in South Korea. It wasn’t something I would have thought of because we don’t have the same issue in the U.S.
Where Can People Learn More About You, Give, And WordImpress?
Give: givewp.com, @givewp
Matt: I’m on the livechat on givewp.com and on Twitter @learnwithmattc
WordImpress: wordimpress.com, @wordimpress
Give is the best plugin for fundraising online—period.
Here’s the video, just in case you missed it 🙂
