Recurring Donations
The Recurring Donations Add-on lets nonprofits collect ongoing support through subscription-based giving. It works right inside GiveWP donation forms and integrates with supported gateways like Stripe, PayPal, and more. This guide covers how to enable recurring donations, customize your settings, and manage subscriptions with ease.
Articles in this section:
Adding Existing Subscriptions to GiveWP- Managing Subscriptions via Donor Dashboard
- Managing Subscriptions via Recurring Donations Page (Legacy)
- Recurring Donation Form Fields
- Recurring Emails
- Renewal Donation Reports
- Subscription Payment Statuses
- Supported Payment Gateways
- Exporting Upcoming Renewals
- Testing Recurring
Recurring Donations is a GiveWP add-on that must be downloaded, installed, and activated. If this is your first time using a GiveWP add-on, read the instructions on downloading, installing, and activating GiveWP Add-ons.
Introducing How Recurring Donations Works
Recurring donations help nonprofits build long-term support, retain donors, and maintain steady, reliable funding.
This article covers how the Recurring Donations add-on works and how to enable it in your GiveWP donation forms.
Once the add-on is set up and your donation forms are configured, donors can choose to give automatically on a regular schedule—weekly, monthly, or even yearly. When a donor selects a recurring option, GiveWP creates a subscription that handles future donations automatically. You don’t have to do anything—GiveWP keeps track of each schedule, renewal, and payment for you.
Parent and Child Subscription Payments
Each recurring donation starts with an initial transaction called the Parent Payment. This first payment sets up the donor’s subscription.
In GiveWP > Donations, the Parent Payment is labeled with a Payment Type of Recurring. It holds key details like the donation amount, frequency, and payment gateway.
Every time the donor’s subscription renews, GiveWP creates a new Child Payment. These child payments are linked to the original parent and appear in the Donations list as separate entries with a Status of Renewal—making it easy to track every installment.
Viewing Subscriptions
To manage recurring donations, GiveWP creates a subscription entry for each donor’s ongoing gift.
You can find these entries by going to GiveWP > Subscriptions in your WordPress dashboard. Each entry shows the current status, donation form, donor name, amount, and next renewal date.
Click on a subscription to view full details—including billing history, renewal schedule, and the payment gateway where the subscription “lives”.
When viewing the Parent Payment, you’ll see a Subscription Information section. This area lists all the Child Payments once one or more recurring donations have been processed.
How Payment Gateways Work with Recurring Donations
When a donor starts a recurring donation, GiveWP sends the subscription details to the payment gateway. This includes the donation amount, billing frequency, and payment method. The gateway handles the schedule from there—charging the donor’s payment source automatically based on the interval you set.
Note: Not all payment gateways support recurring donations—or offer service in every country. Be sure to choose a gateway that supports recurring billing and is available in your region. See supported gateways for details.
After each renewal, the gateway sends a notification back to your site, and GiveWP records the new donation payment automatically as part of the donor’s subscription history. If the payment gateway cannot connect to your site, most will retry a few times (each gateway is different as to how many), the subscription status will changed to Expired. This doesn’t always mean the donor wasn’t charged; it often means the renewal was processed, however, your site wasn’t informed. When this happens, most gateways will send an email notification to the account holder to keep you informed.
How Donors Can Manage Their Subscriptions
GiveWP allows donors to manage their subscriptions inside the Donor Dashboard. With most gateways, you can change the recurring amount, update the card information, and cancel the subscription.
Read more about managing subscriptions »
Enabling Recurring On Donation Forms
There are many ways to configure options for recurring donations. Read the Recurring Donation Form Fields article to find out which settings are available, and how to configure them to achieve your desired result.
Configuring Recurring Emails
Once you have your forms all configured as you like, you might want to notify your donors each time their card is charged for a recurring subscription donation. The Recurring Donations add-on has this capability. Read about this in the Recurring Emails documentation article.
Common FAQs regarding Recurring Donations
We’re continuing to grow the list of supported payment gateways. To see an updated list, refer to our documentation on Supported Gateways.
Not necessarily. Stripe and PayPal Donations, which come with the free GiveWP plugin, both support Recurring Donations.
At the moment, GiveWP does not support setting different donation amounts for one-time and recurring donations within the same form. The best workaround for this scenario is to use different forms for one-time and recurring donations.
With recurring donations, the subscription “lives” at the payment gateway. The gateway processes the renewal payment at the specified interval, and if the payment is successful, it connects to your site to record the renewal entry.
The most common reason renewal payments do not reach your site is a missing webhook. A webhook usually consists of a URL containing your site’s URL and some parameters that GiveWP and Recurring Donations are always “listening” for. For more information on how to configure a webhook, check the documentation for your specific payment gateway for the details.
1. Go to GiveWP > Subscriptions.
2. Click Edit next to the subscription you want to cancel.
3. Select the three dots on the right-hand side.
4. Choose Cancel Subscription.
⚠️ Important: Simply changing the subscription’s status to Cancelled does not stop future payments. Always follow the steps above to properly cancel a subscription.
In some cases, especially when caching is active, a subscription may appear cancelled in GiveWP but remain active with the payment gateway. To be safe, always verify that the subscription is cancelled in both GiveWP and your payment gateway dashboard.
Tip: Double-checking both platforms helps prevent future billing issues for donors.
