Kori Ashton reviews the Give plugin for WordPress taking #donations on your website. If you need to accept payments on your website – this is a great way to start! Get the Give Plugin – (Affiliate Link)
Full Video Transcript
Hey y’all, it’s that time again for another WordPress Wednesday. My name is Kori Ashton, here at WebTegrity in San Antonio and I’ve just gotten back from hanging out at, and being honored to speak at WordCamp DFW-Dallas, Ft Worth area. Had a blast and got to meet some of y’all awesome subscribers, who hang out on this channel with me.
Y’all were there and you came up and said hi and I so appreciate seeing y’all’s beautiful faces and getting your feedback and Deb asked me if I would be able to do the next video on donation options. So, that’s what we’re going to look at today. I do have another video that I did, just about a year ago, almost exactly this time last year about accepting payments.
So, I’ll put the link to this video in the description box below; because I cover quite a few plugin options for making payments. But, because of Deb’s question, I decided to keep looking through what might be brand new since It’s been a full year since I’ve done this.
Is there another option?
So, check this out, you guys.
I found another plugin that could certainly be a solution to donations on your website. So, let’s look at this. It’s called “Give”.
So, it’s specifically a WordPress plugin. I am going to install it, right now. I have not done that, yet. At all.
I’ve never used this plugin before and what I’m gonna do today with you is do an honest review. An open, honest real-time review, where you get to see all my blunders. All my issues with plugging it in.
See what the experience is like in sort of a real-time type video setting. So, what I do know, the research that I have done on it is, just by watching this quick YouTube video that they have.
It does tell me that it has some of the features that Deb was asking about. A lot of times on your site you want reoccurring payments or you want the ability to set different levels for payments, or you want the ability to get the financials from the individual, so you know where to send a receipt, or you want the system itself to send an automatic receipt.
How do you do that without looking clunky and just using PayPal all the time? How do you do that? It seems as though this plugin might be the actual solution for that.
So, let’s take a look. I’m gonna go ahead and this is what it looks like over here. This is the other thing, just really quickly before moving forward, I want you to always do this. Moving forward in the future, if you’re watching this video in a month, two months, ten months…
Whatever it is, I want you to be sure, before you plug this in.
That it still has outstanding ratings. That it still has a lot of active installs and that of course it’s been updated recently and that it’s compatible with the version of WordPress that you’re using.
It’s very, very important that you research this prior to plugging something like this into your site. Especially when it has to do with accepting payments and credit card information.
So, here I am logged into my staging site. I’m gonna go ahead and click “Add New” in the plugins area. Of course, if you are on the WordPress dot com version, you’re not able to see this. This is only self-hosted WordPress sites. We’re gonna look for “Give”. Do a quick search for it and here it is “Give- WordPress Donation Plugin”. Again, outstanding reviews and it is compatible with my version.
I’m gonna click “Install”. I’m gonna go ahead and “Activate”.
The other thing I do know from doing a little bit of research, which is pretty typical of free plugins, you get a little bit up front for free and then there’s going to be a paid option for a Pro version or these add-ons that they’re showcasing or advertising. So, let’s experience this together.
Here we go.
So, I’ve activated it. This is the first screen it takes me to. Here’s the thing, a lot of people don’t do this. A lot of people just don’t read. Stop for a second, now, and we’re going to read down this page and see what the instructions say.
A lot of times our students look at this and say “Okay, now what do I do?” and they start to scroll and they want to start clicking on stuff.
So, let’s read.
“Thank you for activating or updating the latest version of Give. If you’re a first-time user, welcome. You’re well on your way to empowering your cause. We encourage you to check out the plugin documentation.” That’s great to see.
So, that basically means those are your instructions on how to set things up. So, if you click on that, you get to come over here and look at the different PDF files that are going to be instructions to help us set this up on our site. Be sure to sign up for the “Give” newsletter if you want. To stay informed about the updates.
Let’s look down the page and see what else it offers. So, here’s “Getting Started”. We’ll jump in there and we want to create a new form, so it’s an area to add forms.
So, notice it says that there should be an area on our left nav over here, for donations. And there it is right here, “Donations”.
So, we’ll want to “Add New Form”. See, it just gives you step-by-step instructions. Already I’m impressed with that; because a lot of times plugin authors don’t give you very detailed step-by-step instructions and it does get a little bit confusing.
This is pretty cool.
Step 1 is “Creating New Form”. It says “From the Add New Form page you’ll be able to choose how and where you’ll be able to receive your donations. You’ll be able to set the donation amounts. You’ll even get to choose whether you want to create a whole page for your form or embed it into a different page on your site.”
That’s a nice feature.
“But, all the features begin simply by going to the menu and choosing ‘Add New Form'”.
Second step, “Choose Your Levels”. “Each form can be set to receive either a pre-determined amount or have multiple suggested levels of giving. Choosing multiple level donations opens up a level section where you can add as many levels as you would like with your own custom names and amounts.”
So, that’s pretty spectacular. And then, “Landing Page” or “Shortcode Mode”. So, this looks like it’s just an option to do “Yes, display the content above the form fields”. “Yes, display below the form fields”. You get to add in a shortcode or put it on a page. “Configure your display options” Here’s that.
“Lastly, you can present the form in A lot of different ways.” So, that’s kind of cool to take a look at.
Let’s go do it.
Y’all ready?
Here we go.
“Donations”
“Add Form”
Let’s see what it looks like.
So, we’re going to title this, for now, “Testing”. Set donation.
So, let’s go for it and do “Multiple Donation Levels”. Let’s say “$5”.
“Basic Help”
That’s default.
“Add a Level”
So far, so easy.
“$10”
“Giving Heart”
and then, let’s do “$25”. and say “Give Big”. I’m going to go ahead and set that to “Default” as the $25; cuz, that’s what I’d really rather have. So, display style, do you want these to be buttons that they click on or radio buttons, meaning that they can only choose one. So, what you’re seeing right here is a radio button. This little round button. So, this is probably set to look more like an actual button. Something like this. So, I’m gonna leave it with that. I think that’s nice.
“Custom Amount”
“Do you want the users to be able to input their own donation amount?”
That’s kind of nice.
“Give your own amount” How about that? That’s kind of cool.
“Do you have a goal for this?”
Wow. That’s a really cool feature. So, maybe you have a building project or maybe you have some sort of a goal that you guys are trying to reach. Let’s say $5,000. We can throw that in there and say “Do you want to display the amount that’s already been raised, or do you want to display a percentage to show “Hey, we’re 20% there. We’re 50% there.”
“What color do you want the progress bar to be?”
So, this could start to match the customization of your website, now, with a color scheme. You just click on that and choose your color pallet. So, let me change things around. Let’s go closer to our crazy WebTegrity bluish. Something like that.
“Close Form When Goal is Achieved”?
Wow, so basically, if we hit our $5,000 this form would close and not accept any more donations. We don’t want to do that. We want to just leave that open and let people just keep giving.
“Display Content”.
So, yes. “Do we want to display content either above or below?”
“Payment Field”
“Show on page”
“Reveal upon click” or a modal. A modal is like a popup window, pretty much. That’s what that is.
“A complete donation text” So, this is the button for the completing the text and that can just say “Donate Today” or “Make a Difference” or whatever you want that call to action button to say that’s basically triggering the donation.
The default gateway. “By default, the gateway for this form will inherit the global default gateway. “See under Giving settings”.
So, there’s a “Settings” area that we probably need to go to, to set up how we’re actually going to be accepting these payments. This is, “Do you want to require users to log in?”. Do you want to absolutely have to have their contact information? If you do, you should not allow guest donations, basically.
“Register”
“Login Form”
How do you want that to be for the registration? Man, this has a lot of options all the way down.
“Do you need Terms and Conditions set in place?”
You want to say “Agree to Terms” and you can copy and paste all your terms in here. This is huge. A lot of donation options, especially if you’re just grabbing them from PayPal, you don’t have this capability.
This is already set in here.
So, I just want to keep going down to see is all this available for free? I haven’t paid anything yet. I’ve just installed the free plugin, so far. I get to see, also, here’s my shortcode from embedding it on a page.
I’m gonna go ahead and publish what I have, right now. Notice here, it says, it’s looking for a file. It says this may cause issues with it, so we might want to take a look at that and make sure that everything is functioning correctly.
For now, I’m just gonna go to a page and make sure and just click “Add New”, so I can say “Test Donations” here.
I’m gonna drop in my shortcode and I’m gonna preview the page just to see what this form is looking like. So, remember that it’s gonna take on a lot of styling from your website’s theme, right?
So, that’s probably a little bit of what we’ve got going on here.
“Giving Heart” is my $10.
“Give Big” is my $25.
“Basic Help”
“Give Your Own Amount”
Wow, check that out, you guys.
This is pretty cool. Look how nice this is. And there’s our “Donate Today”. So, if we’re the “Give Big” it’s $25 and “Donate Today” and you’re ready to rock and roll.
Of course, these are my colors from my theme. So, let’s just quickly jump into the “Settings” area and see how we would actually
(Let’s “Save Draft” for this)
See how we would actually set up the payment gateway and see what sort of add-ons are available for us. I know that this is a really long tutorial for us, today; but, one thing I did realize was, that it does have additional add-ons for other payment gateways. Like, Authorize.net, PayPal, Stripe, Wepay and more and more and more. I know you can incorporate it with MailChimp, so that’s kind of cool. PDF Receipts, that’s pretty fantastic you guys.
They’ve got some amazing add-ons; however, I will say this, I’ve already checked out their prices and they’re a little bit of a higher budget. It feels like you get a lot of bang for the buck. You can bundle things together.
If you only wanted to do the reoccurring donation option, you can jump over here and see what it
looks like just to purchase a singular license for just this. Let’s see if it’ll allow you…”Reoccurring donations”
Here we go.
Check this out. “Or just get this add-on” So, there you go. A single license is $127. But, if you bundle and save you’re getting a lot more. “Basic”, you’re getting 13 of the premium add-ons for $147 and then, of course, they’ve got different levels here.
Please note, that this is per year. You’ll have to come back again and renew your license and purchase this. A lot of times these plugins offer you a discount when it comes down to that time of the year.
Alright, so let’s see if this is going to function. Really quickly let’s finish up. So, “Payment Gateway”, I’m in my “Settings” area. “Success Page”, so once they donate you can redirect them to a successful page. That’s pretty nice.
“Field Transaction” page. So, it looks like they automatically created these pages for you inside of your website as you activated the plugin. Which is super nice, very thoughtful of them.
You can set your different currencies here. If you’re in a different country. “Payment Gateways”
So, right now I’m in test mode and it looks like, right away, what you get is a PayPal standard option. So, you would uncheck these whenever you’re able to go ahead and start accepting and you could choose your PayPal.
Here’s your email associated with your PayPal account. So that you get the alert and the money comes to your account.
It looks that simple, you guys. You would just follow through all of this. Here are your email instructions. Here are your display options. It looks like here are your emails here for setting up the receipts.
That’s really nice for them to automatically get a receipt, so your organizing team or your accounting department doesn’t have to mess with that. You guys, this looks like the real deal. Obviously, if you’re gonna need advanced add-ons, you’re gonna have to pay; but, it looks like out of the gate, this would work for you.
If you’re using this plugin or something else, would you put it in the description box below and let us know what you’re using for your payments? And for any donations on your WordPress site? I’m so excited to see how this works for you.
Let us know and I’ll catch you next WordPress Wednesday. Bye, y’all!
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