Having put in plans for our fundraising in 2017 I thought it might be useful to give a shout out to my 2 favourite Wordpress plugins for fundraising. Each has benefits for small charities and local groups depending on what they plan on doing.

Web site of smaller charities and community groups are sometimes run by eager volunteers and the Wordpress CMS is first choice for many people due to ease of use and flexibility - not to mention the fact that the core system and large numbers of plugins and extensions are free. Even as someone who has been hard coding web sites for over 20years I moved over to Wordpress about 8 years ago because it does all the heavy lifting of coding and I just need to make minor tweeks and modifications for my own use. This means I can concentrate on what is important which is the marketing and content rather than coding.

Both these plugins are free to install on your Wordpress based web site and both use Paypal as the payment processor. Don't forget if you are a recognised not-for-profit organisation you can apply to Paypal for reduced processing fees. If you don't like Paypal then both plugins offer a paid for extension to allow for credit card processing directly through Stripe.

Small charities and other community groups should still look at other online fundraising and crowd-funding platforms as they reach out to donors and you get your project placed in front of people who are searching for projects to donate towards. But the aim should be to get donors onto your site and donating directly to your project.

Wordpress plugins make taking online donations affordable and easy for small groups. At Raising Noise in our first year of 2015 we raised donations online totally over £27,000 towards purchasing musical instruments and audio-video equipment. Last year our fundraising projects was a £44,000 mini-coach which we are about to complete. This year we launch our fundraising to purchase a building for our Christian performing arts centre and recording studio.

This new fundraising project is a substantially bigger project and so I had to review our fundraising technology and make a change to which plugin to use for fundraising.

Our initial plugin was Give. This worked very well for us in the first couple of years. You can set up different fundraising goals and each project has it's own donation facility. It is relatively easy to set up each project and each is assigned a target and as donations are made its shows the percentage towards the target and also gives a graphical indication towards the target. 

If you have just one or two main fundraising targets then this is a  great way to instal a fundraising page on your web site. The default plugin only offers individual donations to each project. If you are looking for you donors to make a regular contribution then you need to purchase an additional module to make that happen. It also does not offer the option for donors to agree to be added to a mailing list to keep them informed of future developments. Mailing lists for small groups are essential to help keep the funds flowing. If you want this option with Give you need to again purchase another module to allow this to happen.

So while Give has been great for our first couple of years and been very effective as we move and grow into bigger  - and more - fundraising projects I needed to look for a more flexible option.

After looking through the many different plugins I opted for Seamless Donations.  I had come across this plugin a few years ago but it was not been maintained and was a little out of date. fortunately it has now been adopted by a new developers and a major update has taken place. As a fundraising plugin there is much to like about it.

It does not have the targets and graphical indications of the Give plugin for individual projects but it offers a much more flexible approach. There is the option to put in place different projects so people can donate to specific needs. Instead of of having to have individual forms for each project that happens in Give with Seamless Donations there is just the one form with a drop down menu for people to select which fund to donate to.

Another really useful feature of Seamless Donations is that the plugin has recurring donations in the core code to allow you to set up a patrons or 'friends of' facility. Having reliable constant income is the secret to successful fundraising for smaller charities and community groups and this is the plugin to use if you want to build a bank of donors and sponsors.

The one issue with the core of Seamless Donations is that there is only a set number of amounts you can have for people to donate - though there is an another box for people to fill in. If you want to have the option of changing the £200, £100, £50 etc per month to your own custom amounts you need to purchase a separate module.

Seamless Donations also win out over Give on the cost of these optional extra modules. Most modules for Seamless Donations cost around $20 compare that with Give where the cost of modules such as recurring donations is over $125.00 and the Seamless Donations because a natural choice for smaller charities and community groups.

Seamless Donations also offer a section on their donation form for tribute gifts. This is a great option for legacy gifts and also for those in lei of flowers gifts. Donors can leave a message and address and you can offer to print out and send a card for a memory instead of people spending money on flowers.

This year because of moving into fundraising for building and development this option will play a big part in our legacy fundraising plan.

Seamless donations has two other really nice options. The plugin allows you to draw down information about the donor's employer so you can use it for payroll giving marketing though I'll probably be modify this aspect of the code to make it fit gift aid information - if we eventually decide to become a registered charity.

The other option is that it provide a tick-box on the donor form to give permission to be added to your mailing list.

Technically the Seamless Donations plugin can be a little more challenging. It checks various aspects of your web site to ensure it is secure and meets the minimum requirements of the latest Paypal api. If you are on shared hosting with a provider one of the biggest failures will be outdated cUrl modules on the server. If you don't have the ability to update server software because you don't run your own server then you may need to fall back to Give if your web provider is unwilling to update their server software.

For those who are just starting out with fundraising on their own site or have a limited number of projects for funding then Give is the quick and easy way to get started.

For those who want a more robust and flexible solution then Seamless donations is the way to go.