2021 was a huge year for Team Give! We started out celebrating a major milestone, with no idea that it was just the beginning of a year of awesome things to come. Not least of which was our acquisition by Liquid Web.
We’re getting ready to take a little publishing break, so we figured we should sum up the year. And quite a year it was!
Let’s take a look back at 2021 with Team Give.
We Started 2021 Celebrating 100K GiveWP Users!
At the end of 2020, GiveWP reached a major milestone: 100,000 active installs for the GiveWP plugin. That means 100,000 websites are using GiveWP to raise money online.
That number is now closer to 125,000 users and growing rapidly. We’re excited to see where 2022 takes us!
To celebrate this milestone, we hosted a little party in February on an app called Gather Town. Customers and GiveWP fans gathered to get to know each other, win prizes, and view a few exclusive Team Give music videos.
When we reach 200,000 users, we’ll host another party!
Customer Success Stories
In 2021, you all raised over $500M with GiveWP! That represents about a 20% increase over last year. Here are some of our favorite Give Stories from earlier this year:
- Funding Anti-Racism with the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society
- Give LIVE: Puppy Love, Rescue Websites Powered by GiveWP
- Give LIVE Recap: Giving is a Team Sport with Play Like a Girl
Now that we’re approaching the end of the year, we’re watching out for everyone’s end-of-year fundraising campaigns. Here’s one that caught our attention.
American Friends of Meir Panim
Meir Panim helps the impoverished of Israel with food and other neighborhood outreach programs. Their services are tailored to holocaust survivors and at-risk youth.
Their end-of-year campaign is on track to break last year’s record and help them make even more of an impact in 2022.
“I think we invested a lot more in making the page as comprehensive as possible, and we styled the form really well to match the page. We really spoke a lot about what the organization does over the entire year, and made a cool video as well. Last year we raised $223,931.87 so we are not there yet, but most of the money comes in the last week of the year, so we are well on track to surpass that. We also really planned out the email blasts and Facebook posts strategically so they are as effective as possible and tell as much of a story as possible”
– Jon Shyman
Team Give Joined Liquid Web and Grew!
This year, our team grew in a lot of ways. Most importantly, GiveWP was acquired by Liquid Web! So now we’re part of the StellarWP family of brands, which includes other WordPress plugins, like The Events Calendar and LearnDash.
New Hires
We welcomed a few new team members this year as well!
Alex Coleman: Support Technician
Alex joins us from Canada. He’s an excellent, detailed, and compassionate technician who spends his time playing Disc Golf. He even has his own Disc Golf store. Support Alex here!
Camber Clemence: Community and Social Media Manager
Camber runs our social media presence from her home in Florida. She’s touched so many people through our GiveWP Twitter account already and even launched our new Instagram account. If you’ve enjoyed GiveWP on social in any way, thank Camber!
Jessica Thomas: Developer
Jessica is our latest addition to Team Give. She’s a skilled front-end developer who hails from Chicago. We’re excited to use her skills to continue making your GiveWP experience more intuitive and easy on the eyes!
We’re Hiring!
We’re also currently hiring! We’re looking to fill the following two positions ASAP:
- Support Technician
If you love code, solving problems, and helping people on the daily, then you’ll love working with our highly skilled and courteous GiveWP Support Team. - Customer Success Manager
Join our team of compassionate superheroes who come alongside the causes using GiveWP and help them have their ultimate successes with online fundraising.
Internal Team Promotions
Toward the end of 2021, Amanda Gorman was promoted to Director of Customer Success! Amanda has been supporting all our customers as a Customer Success Manager for 3 years. Her energy and enthusiasm for fundraising and for our customers is what we want her to pass on to our whole Customer Success team in her new role as Director. She succeeds Michelle Frechette, who is now our Director of Community Engagement for StellarWP.
Around the same time, we also elevated Matheus to Senior Support Technician! Matheus has been providing top-notch technical support to our customers for 2 years now. In this new role he’ll continue to support our Director of Support, Ben Meredith, by helping with triage and encouragement to the whole Support Team.
Team Give Writing Community
We launched the GiveWP writing community about a year ago! With five consistent writers, we’re able to provide our readers with more useful content on a regular basis. You’ll see each of them on our blog as well as other StellarWP brands!
In 2022, we’re hoping to expand this pool of writers even more. If you’re an expert in fundraising, GiveWP, or the nonprofit sector, we’d love to have you on the team!
A Year of New GiveWP Features and Add-ons
2021 was also a record year for GiveWP software releases! We added five new add-ons as well as a few features to our core plugin and existing add-ons. Here’s a quick summary:
- Donation Modules for Divi: This free add-on gives you GiveWP form and other features through Divi modules.
- Donor Dashboard: We added the donor dashboard to the free GiveWP plugin!
- Text-to-Give: This new add-on allows your donors to text-to-Give. It’s included in all of our pricing plans.
- Salesforce: The Salesforce add-on connects your GiveWP donor database to your nonprofit’s CRM in Salesforce. It’s included in Plus, Pro, and Agency plans.
- Peer-to-Peer Fundraising: The Peer-to-Peer Fundraising add-on turns your website into a full peer-to-peer fundraising platform so your supporters can raise money for you. It’s available in our Pro and Agency Plans.
- Conditional Fields in Form Field Manager: This new feature for the Form Field Manager add-on allows you to create forms with fields that show up based on a user’s selections. Form Field Manager is available in Plus, Pro, and Agency Plans.
- BitPay Gateway: Now you can accept crypto donations with the BitPay payment gateway! This gateway is available in all GiveWP Pricing Plans.
To wrap up the year, our development team is working on a new Classic Donation Form Template. Look out for that and more donation form templates as we head into 2022.
Amplify your fundraising with a GiveWP Plan
But wait… there’s swag, too!
Last, but not least, in February of 2021, we launched our swag store! So now GiveWP fans can get Give Swag at any time.
Later in the year, we also added “limited time only” cause-supporting products. Each of the profits from these items are donated to the nonprofit we partnered with to raise money for.
We’ll see you in 2022!
We can’t wait to see what 2022 has in store for all of you. You can expect big things from GiveWP next year! Don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter to stay in the loop.
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