How to Create a Donate Form for Nonprofit Organization using WordPress [Updated]

Key Takeaways

today i'll show you how to create a donation form on your wordpress website and we'll cover it step by step so you can get up and running quickly so if you're ready let's dive in the easiest way to do this is by using a plugin and the plugin we're going to use is called wp forms wp forms is the easiest to use drag and drop form builder on the market for wordpress and you can do so many things with this including a contact form page you can automate your whole nonprofit as well as accepting donations to get started you want to head over to wpforms.com forward slash wpbeginner and this will give you the best price on wp forms you'll want to get the pro version or higher because that is what has the integration for payment once you create an account you can log into wp forms and you'll want to download the plugin we'll just head over to downloads download wp forms while we're here let's go ahead and also copy our license key then we need to head back over to our wordpress dashboard so we can upload and install the plugin so we can go to plugins add new and from here we want to upload the plugin now we need to choose file to find where we just downloaded the plugin and click install now you'll also want to make sure you stick around to activate the plugin as well once it's activated we'll want to add our license key that we just copied to do that we'll go to wp forms let's go to settings and let's right click and paste our license key in here once it's all activated we can create our donation form so on the left we can go to add new and so we can create the form from here there are all of these templates that you can choose from for the one that we're looking for we want to do the donation form so let's go ahead and use the template great and now we have our donation form and from here we can make a lot of different changes for instance this one has just a typical donation amount where somebody can fill in that form let's take it a little bit of a step further we'll create a multiple choice to give them some options that they can choose from a lot of times people want to donate but they don't know what a typical donation amount should be so let's help them along by adding a multiple item field so scroll down to the payments field and we're going to let's click drag the item field the most multiple items here and from here we can change this item we're going to change the label name to donation amount let's change the item's name to match the amount that we're asking for and we're going to add one more because we're going to keep this donation amount because if somebody wants to put in a particular amount we want to allow them to do that so we're going to add one more item so i'm going to click plus icon here and just put in enter amount and that way they can enter however much they want and then what we're going to do is make this a conditional field that it is only shown when enter amount is selected so let's click on donation amount and under smart logic we want to make this conditional so we want to show this if the donation amount is enter amount and so then this will be hidden unless somebody clicks on that in the field so that's perfect i want to go back to this field as well because since this is a donation form we do want to make this one required and i think all of the others are okay because we do want to make this as simple for them to donate to us as possible so let's save our changes and now we still need to set up payments so let's go over to our payments area so we can set up payments and when we click on payments it says you know don't forget you need to install the payment integrations this is where the power of wp forms comes in there are all of these payment gateways that you can use or payment programs and payment add-ons so let's go ahead and click on the add-ons page so we can enable this from the add-ons page as you see there were four different ones that you can choose from you can choose paypal stripe which will allow any type of credit card if you have an authorized.net account you can use that instead and then more recently they have integrated with square which most small businesses and nonprofits use square so you could also use square as well to keep this just simple i'm simply going to use the paypal standard once that's installed we can head back over to the form that we're working on so now let's go to all forms and we should see our form right here so let's go back and edit we'll go back to payments paypal standard let's go ahead and enable this you want to add your email address for paypal you want it the mode is production the products and services make sure you choose donation and the cancel url if they choose not to do the paypal checkout where are you going to send them a good idea is to send them to maybe your about page about your nonprofit as to why you're doing this and why it would be beneficial for them to donate to your cause but the payment is all set up so we can save them the next thing we need to do is we need to configure the notifications notifications simply means the email so go to settings go to notifications by default this pulls in the admin email of the website but you can change that here and you can change the subject line what i like to do with the subject line is i like to make it a little bit different so i'm going to say it's a donation form i like to show smart tags and i like to show either the name or the email address that it's coming from and that way it's different every time you get the email and then all fields and so that goes to you or whoever is handling all the donations next thing you want to do is add a new notification and this will go to the person who just donated so you want to send them an email saying hey thanks for the donation here's all of the information for tax purposes or for their records so we'll give it a donation a notification name and from here same with the smart tag that we did let's change this out and let's show smart tags and we want to send it to that email that they put in there the from name would be your non-profit and the from email and then you can send them all the fields so now we have two notifications set up let's go ahead and save this and now we're ready to put it on our website so the cool thing we can do now is let's click embed and it say hey do you want to put this on an existing page or do you want to create a new page i don't have a donation page yet so let's go ahead and click create new page i'm going to call it donate and say let's go so this is doing is actually creating the page and it will take us to that page and it automatically embeds it for us now if you already have a page that you need to put it on then you could just come into the page click the add block button search for wp forms and from the drop down find the form that you just created but because we did the embed it did all of that work for us so we can just remove this one once we have everything on there let's go ahead and click publish and now we can see our page in action and so this will be the donation amount that they do notice when they click enter amount then they can put in the donation amount and then if you want to make this page a little bit more interesting a little bit more dynamic you can use something like seed prod to help create a landing page specifically for your donation page siegepride is the easiest to use drag and drop page builder on the market and with this they come with several templates to choose from and you can create a dynamic and interesting landing page just for your donation so if you want to get a little bit more out of it make sure you watch this video next as i walk you through step by step on how to create a custom landing page for your website and that would be perfect for creating a custom donation page for your nonprofit and i'll see you over there