Fundraising

1. Give

Give is our ultimate favorite plugin for creating fundraising portals. You can accomplish quite a bit with the free plugin and the built in PayPal payment gateway but the bundles offer a slew of powerful features that add value at a reasonable price. Some of these great features include Recurring Donations, MailChimp integration, Google Analytics Donation Tracking, and Stripe Payment Gateway. Another fantastic extension is the Zapier connection. Who doesn’t love Zapier?! The plugin comes with a built-in reporting module that allows you to visualize your fundraising trends over time so you can adjust your strategy when needed.

 

2. Charitable

Charitable is another great fundraising plugin. It comes with fewer bells and whistles than Give but still offers some great features. Of course, you can still start with the free base plugin that includes PayPal Payment. There’s also a lovely peer-to-peer extension as well as Recurring Donations, MailChimp Integration, Google Analytics Donation Tracking, Stripe Payment Gateway.

 

3. WooCommerce

If you’re already using WooCommerce you can also turn it into a donation portal. The base free plugin comes with PayPal integration and you can purchase additional extensions for added features like: Recurring payment with Subscription extension, MailChimp Integration, Flexible donation amounts with Name Your Price Extension.

 

4. WPMU Dev Fundraising

For those of you who happen to already be members of WPMU Dev, you can take advantage of their Fundraising plugin that comes free with your membership. There aren’t additional extensions for mix-and-match features but the plugin comes with PayPal payments, Recurring Donations, Thank you messages, and multisite compatibility. Again, it’s part of a membership so if you don’t already subscribe to WPMU Dev we wouldn’t recommend that you get it solely for this plugin.

 

CRM Integrations

When it comes to CRMs like Salesforce, Salsa, Zoho, or Hubspot lots of times you might be able to simply use some copy/paste code that they provide for your forms. But there are other options when using WordPress, namely plugins that allow for fairly simple integration.

 

1. Caldera Forms + Zapier

Our preferred method is to use Caldera Forms to create the on-site forms and then use their Zapier Connector extension to create a webhook that can be used to connect to a multitude of CRMs (and other services) through Zapier‘s interface. This is definitely a more cost effective means of connecting to a CRM than working with APIs or having to dig through documentation.

 

2. Gravity Forms + Salsa plugin by Cornershop Creative

If you use Salsa like many nonprofits out there, this is a great way to connect through Gravity Forms via Cornershop Creative’s Integration plugin.

 

3. Brilliant Web-to-Lead for Salesforce

And if you’re using Salesforce, possibly the most popular CRM out there, there’s a plugin by Brilliant Plugins that will help you connect your forms to your Salesforce account.

 

4. Hubspot + Gravity Forms

And finally, if you’re using HubSpot you can extend their free or paid marketing form capture feature with this Gravity Forms extension plugin.

 

Summing up

There are plenty of options for making your nonprofit WordPress website powerhouse for your organization. Connecting to your third party tech and marketing services directly from your website will allow your team to be more productive and reduce redundancy. And those of you out there who are in the plugin development business, there is still plenty more you can do to make these integrations even easier and help the folks doing good out there!