Do Good Better: Online Credit Card Processing, Donation Progress Bars, and Donor Rolls

Considering online credit card processing for your nonprofit? Other people are, too. And we’re here for you answering your questions to help you do good -- better.
Considering online credit card processing for your nonprofit? Other people are, too. And we’re here for you.

Considering online credit card processing for your nonprofit? Other people are, too. We’re here for you answering your questions to help you do good — better.

Online Credit Card Processing is complex! We understand. When Give was first released, we mostly approached the business from the “solve the online donation platform challenge” perspective and help others. Sure, we had been involved in nonprofits serving in leadership roles at churches and political campaigns, but building things online was what we spent our energy doing.

When we built Give we spent more time in front of a computer than we did at fundraising events.

Today, Give serves over 30,000 nonprofit executives, marketing directors, and second career folks in addition to “the WordPress enthusiast.” In our journey, as well, we’ve discovered that we are as diverse in how we think about the web as we are in everyday life.

Over the past three years in my role at Give, I have been one of the friendly and professional folks who answer your sales questions. I even do phone calls for those that request them, though I’ve found people lately seem to want to simply ask questions via forms.

This blog series is dedicated to sharing some of the sales questions, as they are written by folks like you, so you can understand Give, too. Hopefully, this perspective will also help you choose our donation platform to power your online fundraising campaigns.

With our first in the series, here are three questions I received last week and some insight into our product.

Question 1: Online Credit Card Processing

“I want to accept credit cards online and allow folks to opt in to donate every month. Can Give do that?”

When nonprofits want to accept credit cards from their donors every month, we call that recurring donations. Recurring donations are implemented on Give and can be managed in the Give Donor management center and your credit card processor.

To accept credit card donations you need a “Credit Card Processor” which is also referred to as = a “Payment Gateway.”

To accept credit cards on your site, choose a payment gateway (processing company), like Stripe and create your account. When you do this, you will link the payment gateway to the bank account of your choosing.

Then you can hook up our Stripe Payment Gateway Add-on and the Recurring Donations Add-on.

You can have your donors manage their payments, change their payment amounts, and change their credit card information, too.

Question 2: Donor Rolls

“Next to the donation form on my site, I want to show a list of donors that recently gave and the amounts they gave. Can I do that using Give?”

Highlighting your donors directly on your website is something that a lot of local nonprofits ask about, often. In fact, we got this question last week.

There’s many ways to handle your donor list, but what we’ve done is create a simple code snippet that you can insert into your site.

How do you insert a code snippet? Well, that’s pretty easy. Here’s a tutorial on placing a code snippet into a site.

We decided to place the donor list as a code snippet for now; though it might be in the Give core plugin eventually. As a snippet, it highlights how easily Give can be extended.

Question 3: Progress Bars

“I thought it would be cool to place a progress bar on my site to show my website visitors how much was raised. I also think it would encourage giving? Can Give do this?”

We love progress bars! I remember when Devin released the progress bar, I was so stoked because customers had been asking about it. So, now Give core allows you to place progress bars on your website. It’s called the Give Goal Shortcode and you can read more about it here.

Give’s Progress Bars are driven by what WordPress users call shortcodes. Above each editor on your site is a button called “Give Shortcodes.” Use that to generate any Give shortcode you like. Then you can simply take your shortcode and place it anywhere throughout your WordPress site. New to shortcodes? That’s okay. You can learn about how shortcodes are used in WordPress here.

Once you learn about how to use shortcodes, I’m sure you will want to create a whole bunch of other items for your form. Remember, WordPress was made for everyone, but requires real software development experience to master. That’s why we always recommend hiring a best-practice WordPress engineer to customize your Give form. Your website is important and having a professional developer ensure it’s built correctly is highly recommended.

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