Great Ways to Use Offline Donations

We’ll look at how offline donations work and even share a few ideas for how to implement an offline donation strategy as part of your fundraising plans. 
Left: people eating from a community table. Center: a person carrying donated clothing items. Right: a canned food drive.

While having a great tool to help collect donations online can be valuable for your nonprofit, you also need a method for collecting donations offline as well. These can include everything from checks to tip jars to in-kind contributions.

GiveWP includes a free Offline Donations payment gateway. When implemented, you can track offline giving alongside digital donations to get a better idea of where money is coming from for more accurate reporting.

Understanding How Offline Donations Work

The Offline Donations payment gateway is a method for empowering your donors to express their intent to donate non-digital goods to your organization. Enabling this gateway allows you to track your non-digital donations against your digital ones.

For example, it’s common to provide a way for donors to donate via check by mail. The Offline Donations add-on is perfect for this purpose.

What’s great about this payment gateway is that you can include an option for offline donations in online donor forms and then “process” the transaction when the payment arrives. This creates a unified reporting process for you and ensures that the donor’s dashboard also reflects all of their giving.

Get Started with Offline Donations

First, enable Offline Donations in your dashboard. Go to “Donations > Settings” then the Payment Gateways tab. You’ll be able to enable it and configure the Global settings for Offline Donations and all your other Payment Gateways.

Now, head over to your donation form. There you’ll see a setting called “Customize Offline Donations.” Enable that, and you’ll be able to add billing fields and provide custom Donation Instructions.

You can also provide custom instructions for the email receipt that your donors receive. This is important because by default an Offline Donation is automatically put into “Pending” status until you manually change it to complete. In the example of mailing in a check, you would change the status when you receive the check in the mail.

Once you have that all configured, here’s what your form would look like:

Offline Donations GIF

Users Can Manage and Track Their Offline Donations

When you enable offline donations as a payment gateway, any donor can use the online form to make a donation by check. It automatically connects in their donor account when they login so they can see the full value of donations they have made.

Here’s how it works for the donor user:

  • They choose “Offline Donation” from the list of Payment Options on the donation form
  • They fill out their information and will see your  pre-populated  information on how to provide their offline payment
  • They hit submit and get a confirmation showing their payment is “Pending” (this is important and explained below)
  • They get an email saying that you received their submission and their payment is “Pending”
  • They send you their Offline Donation (via mail or in person)
  • You manually switch the status of their transaction from “Pending” to “Complete”
  • They get another email saying that their donation is complete

Ideas for Offline Giving Campaigns

Let your imagination be your guide when thinking about ways to get the community involved in your organization through offline giving. We all know that in-person asks and events can be a powerful fundraising tool.

A few ideas for offline giving include:

  • Bake sales or potlucks
  • Car washes
  • Athletic competitions or field day events
  • Arts and craft
  • Contests where you vote with cash
  • Tip jars at events
  • Any event where you sell tickets at the door
  • Thrift or used book sale
  • Auction or silent auction
  • Carnival or talent show
  • Sell concessions at an event
  • Gala with a donation ask at tables

There’s an almost unlimited number of ways to generate fundraising ideas that create an offline ask. These can often be combined with online campaigns and efforts, making it important to track everything in one place.

Your loyal, annual donors will appreciate the care you take to ensure that all of the donations are tracked and reported accurately.

Offline Donation Case Study: Maroons Make Masks

During the early days of the COVID pandemic, a group of Roanoke College students came together to make masks for those that did not have them. The charitable effort went from idea to website to action in a short time using a WordPress website GiveWP and offline donations.

The Maroons Make Masks fundraising website doesn’t accept any monetary donations. Instead, they simply want to help everyone feel more connected through acts of generosity and kindness. Their donation currency was masks, which was tracked in GiveWP as an offline donation.

A customized masks and caps donation form that showed items, not dollars, for the Bradley Free Clinic.

They customized GiveWP forms to keep track of items instead of dollars without any knowledge of code. Using the GiveWP snippet library can get you a long way to the customization you’re looking for, even if the exact code isn’t there.

How Will You Implement Offline Donations?

There are as many possible implementations for Offline Donations as your creativity allows. Between customizing directions, emails, and payment gateways, the possibilities are endless.

Let us know ways you can imagine using Offline Donations in the comments below.

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