How to Set Up Recurring Donations for Nonprofits

Small-scale nonprofits often assume that setting up recurring donations is only worthwhile for well-known charities with extensive administrative resources. 

Unfortunately, this notion can ultimately be the reason why many nonprofits struggle to grow beyond a certain level. 

Making the donation process easier for your donors will improve their loyalty to your organization. And manually processing donations each month or year doesn’t provide an easy experience.

Even if they donate once, they will need to return to manually repeat the payment process. As a result, you’ll miss out on consistent support, limiting your organization’s growth and impact. That’s why setting up recurring donations for your nonprofit should be your first priority.

In this blog, we’ll discuss the benefits of recurring donations and how to set them up easily. Keep reading to unlock your nonprofit’s full potential. 

Recurring Donations for Nonprofits: How Does it Work? 

Recurring donation is a system that allows you to accept donations from your donors regularly without creating any hassle for them. The process starts when a donor goes to your website and chooses the “recurring donation” option as the donation method. 

Wondering how you would make this happen? 

Well, that’s where plugins come in. There are many WordPress plugins available in the market that can handle the whole donation process and manage the donor database for you. 

These plugins can handle tasks like automatic billing, keeping donation information safe, and handling changes or cancellations. Which helps you to focus more on the greater causes rather than worrying about getting funds. 

How Can Recurring Donations Help Nonprofits? 

Recurring donations can help your nonprofit in more ways than just making the donation process easier for the donors. 

Let’s go over a few more benefits of recurring donations that might make you regret delaying setting them up for your nonprofit. 

Financial stability: Recurring donations provide a predictable and steady income stream, allowing your nonprofit to plan and budget more effectively. Thanks to the stability, you can focus more on good work rather than worrying about raising money. 

Higher donor retention: Donors who agree to donate regularly are more likely to continue to support your cause over time. This long-term commitment helps your nonprofit build a base of loyal donors who will continue to support its goal.

Less administrative work: Handling individual contributions takes less time and resources when the donation process is automated. This frees up you and your organization’s people to work on activities that further the organization’s goal instead of the donation-related tasks.

Better cash flow: Regular donations keep the cash flow steady, which is important for paying for projects and covering running costs. This dependability makes it easier for your nonprofit to handle all the money.

Builds better relationships with donors: Regular donors resonate strongly with your cause and organization. This stronger connection can make donors happier, encourage them to give more, and possibly even lead to bigger donations in the future.

More capabilities for doing better: With a steady stream of income from recurring donations, you can plan and carry out long-term projects with more trust. This makes tracking and measuring effects easier, showing donors and stakeholders how well the organization’s work is doing.

Set up Recurring Donations for Nonprofits with MemberPress: 3 Easy Steps

Memberpress is a WordPress plugin that’s specially designed to manage a large number of people and collect payments from them. It works with almost any payment method and offers much more that a nonprofit can benefit from. 

But before we get into those, let’s use MemberPress to set up recurring donations for your nonprofit in 3 easy steps. 

Step1: Download and Install Memberpress

Once you purchase the perfect MemberPress plan, log in to MemberPress.com and download the plugin’s zip file. Next, follow these simple steps to install and activate MemberPress quickly. 

• Login to the WordPress dashboard on your site
• Head to Plugins -> Add New -> Upload

• Choose the memberpress.zip file you downloaded earlier

Once installed, don’t forget to activate the plugin. 

If you have successfully activated MemberPress, you’ll get the menus on your WordPress dashboard. 

From the Memberpress Settings menu, you can configure basic settings like currency, payment gateways, etc. 

Step 2: Configuring Donation Levels

As the name suggests, MemberPress is primarily a membership management plugin. By taking advantage of the membership feature, you can set donation levels. 

Say you have 5 different donation amounts set on your website. You’ll just have to create 5 different recurring memberships to charge the appropriate amount at regular intervals. 

Still confused? 

Let’s assume this is your donation page. 

You can create a donation page in many ways. There are various page builders available for WordPress. On top of that, you can use the block builder of WordPress to build a donation page too. 

That’s what we did in the example. 

Now, all you need to do is link the memberships to the prices accordingly. You can set a price range considering what your usual donations look like. Cater your donation levels according to your typical donor’s budget and expectations.

This will make it easier for them to find the best amount for their budget.  

Step 3: Create Recurring Donation 

From the MemberPress dashboard, select Memberships. On the next page, click on Add New. 

In the membership set up page, give an appealing title to the membership. Then on the right side bar, you’ll see the option to set up price, billing type, and interval. Set them according to your preference. 

If you scroll down, you’ll also get the option to set up a thank you note to pop up once the donation is made. 

Once you’ve done this, click on publish. Now, repeat the process to create recurring memberships for all the amounts mentioned on your donation page. Once you’ve done this, go to the membership page and copy the URLs. Don’t forget to paste them into the donation page accordingly.

Now, as soon as someone clicks on the link, they’ll be taken to the checkout page, where they can make the payment any way they want. 

Now you are all set to collect recurring donations from your donors. But things will only start scaling up now. And MemberPress can keep helping your nonprofit as it grows in more ways than just collecting donations. 

How MemberPress Can Help Your Nonprofit

Now that your organization has recurring donations up and running, it’s time to focus on the other sectors to ensure the proper growth of your donors. From user database management to digitally promoting your nonprofit, you can do it all with MemberPress. 

Easily Manage Donors

With MemberPress, you can easily keep track of a lot of users. You can divide your donors into groups based on how often they give, how much they give, and other factors. This makes it easier to make personalized communication plans, which increases donor involvement and retention rates.

Helpful analytics and reports

To grow your nonprofit, you need to know your donors and how they behave. MemberPress provides detailed reports and analytics that show trends in donations, membership renewals, and your site’s general financial health. 

This information can help you make smart choices, improve your funding efforts, and show donors how your work is making a difference.

Different ways to pay

Users who don’t find their preferred payment method look for alternative options, and you lose a prospective customer. 

MemberPress includes many payment gateways, which allow donors to donate using the method of their choice. This flexibility can lead to more customer satisfaction and higher retention. 

Power of Automated Emails

Use automatic emails to contact your donors and send them confirmations, thank-you notes, and membership renewals. These personal touches can help you build stronger ties with donors and keep them coming back.

Credible and Trusted by Thousands 

All information about payments and donors is kept safe by MemberPress. This shows your donors that you believe them and gives them peace of mind that their personal and financial information is safe.

Easy to Integrate Other Useful Tools

MemberPress is easy to connect to other plugins and tools that your charity may use, such as email marketing tools, CRM systems, SEO tools, and more. This ensures that everything works together smoothly, and that data is managed better across all devices.

Ensure Better Funding for Your Nonprofit Today! 

We hope this blog helped you understand how crucial recurring donations are to ensure your nonprofit’s sustained growth and impact. By utilizing MemberPress, you can streamline the donation process, manage donor relationships efficiently, and ensure financial stability. 

We encourage you to implement the necessary steps to set up recurring donations for your nonprofit. This will free up your time to focus more on the real-life impact. 

Don’t forget to comment if there’s any confusion or you want to learn more about Memberpress. If you found this article helpful, be sure to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn!

S Showrabh

From writing poems and short stories to writing technical stuff about WordPress and running a membership site, plenty of things have changed for Showrabh. What did not change is his love for writing and wasting time. He loves music, football, and cricket. He either spends hours looking at the celling or put on his headphone and write for hours. While he is not doing either of these, he's often found explaining how someone can love both cricket and football equally at the same time.

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