By default, memberships in MemberPress can have only one price, which is the way a lot of membership businesses work. On the other hand, this is not the ideal setup if you’re using any strategy where members can pay as much as they want (Name Your Price) for a membership, as often is the case with donations.
Though MemberPress doesn't come with a donations/name-your-price feature out of the box, this document will show you a workaround you could use for the name-your-price setup.
Name Your Price
The name-your-price strategy requires variable pricing which is not available with MemberPress. Thus, the limitation when trying to use MemberPress for donations is that each membership can have only one price added to the membership terms.
At the same time, MemberPress comes with a coupon feature that can be used to modify the membership price at registration. Also, you can automatically load coupons on your registration pages using links. Accordingly, coupons can be used as a workaround for the name-your-price setup.
Here, you would allow users to choose one of the predefined donation/name-your-price amounts and apply that price through the use of coupons.
Coupon Workaround
To create the workaround using MemberPress coupons you would need the following:
- A membership;
- A discount coupon for each predefined payment amount;
- A custom membership page for donations.
To illustrate this setup, we will create a lifetime one-time membership with five donation amounts: $100, $70, $50, $40, and $30.
Creating a Membership and Coupons
We will start by creating our one-time membership. You can apply the same steps if you wish to use a recurring membership instead.
In your membership terms, would set the biggest donation amount as your membership price. The reason for this is that your coupons will provide discounts based on this membership price. Thus, in our example, the membership price would be set to $100.
Next, we should create a coupon for each additional donation amount. In our case, we’ll need to create four coupons in total. Each coupon should be set like this:
- Discount: The discount should be set to a currency. The amount should be set to how much discount should be given. For example, if we want a user to pay $70 for our $100 membership, we would set the discount to $30;
- Discount mode: This should be set to “Standard”;
- Usage Count: The usage should be set to 0 (unlimited);
- Allow on Upgrades and Downgrades: This option should be enabled, so discounts work also in cases of upgrades and downgrades;
- Apply coupon to the following Memberships: You should select the membership you created previously.
Now that we created the membership and coupons, we can proceed to creating our custom membership page.
Creating Donations Page
The custom membership page should contain a call-to-action link for each predefined amount. Also, you could add membership benefits and any other related information important for users who would donate money to become a member.
You can design this page any way you want, for example using some page builder, and adding your predefined amounts as buttons or points on the slider, or using some other design solution. We decided to use buttons for our example.
To connect our custom page to the membership registration page, we need to create links that would auto-populate coupons.
These links can be created by adding ?coupon=CODEHERE to the end of the membership registration page URL. Instead of the CODEHERE part, you would use the coupon name, like this:
https://yourdomain.com/register/your-membership?coupon=XXXXXXXXX.
In our example, we would need to create four of these links. Since our biggest amount is actually our regular membership price (no coupon applied), for this amount we would simply use our membership registration URL.
These URLs would then be used as links for our payment buttons on the custom membership page. Accordingly, the five payment buttons would use the following links:
- $100 button: https://yourdomain.com/register/your-membership
- $70 button: https://yourdomain.com/register/your-membership?coupon=DONATE70
- $50 button: https://yourdomain.com/register/your-membership?coupon=DONATE50
- $40 button: https://yourdomain.com/register/your-membership?coupon=DONATE40
- $30 button: https://yourdomain.com/register/your-membership?coupon=DONATE30
How Will This Work
Finally, you should create a user flow that would match this setup. This means that your users should be landing on the custom membership page you created. Thus, you would link this page to your menus and other pages which should be taking users to registration.
Once they land on the custom membership page, users should see all the information about the membership, and call-to-action buttons/links.
In our example, users would see the page with our five payment buttons. Clicking on any of these buttons will take them to the same membership registration page but with different discount amounts applied.
Accordingly, users would be paying a different amount for the same membership depending on the button they clicked:
- A user clicks on the $100 button: No coupon will be applied, the user will subscribe at the full membership price of $100 (this is the fixed maximum amount);
- A user clicks on the $70 button: A $30 discount coupon (DONATE70) is applied, and the user will subscribe at the price of $70;
- A user clicks on the $50 button: A $50 discount coupon (DONATE50) is applied, and the user will subscribe at the price of $50;
- A user clicks on the $40 button: A $60 discount coupon (DONATE40) is applied, and the user will subscribe at the price of $40;
- A user clicks on the $30 button: A $70 discount coupon (DONATE30) is applied, and the user will subscribe at the price of $30 (this is the fixed minimum amount).
Additional Options
When using this workaround for your setup, there are some additional options that might be important to consider. Though these options are not required to create this workaround, they might be essential for the functioning of your organization.
The first thing to consider is that by default MemberPress allows each user can have only one active subscription to each membership. Thus, if you plan on using one-time memberships for individual donations, you might want to allow users to have multiple subscriptions to your donation membership, so they can donate multiple times. To do this, please follow these steps:
- Start editing your donation membership;
- Scroll down to Membership Options and click on the “Permissions” tab;
- Enable the “Allow users to create multiple, active subscriptions to this membership” option.
The second option you might consider is prorating when changing plans. If you want to offer multiple memberships with the name-your-price setup, add them to a MemberPress group, and also allow users to upgrade/downgrade, you might want to disable prorating. Prorating means that MemberPress will calculate unused funds from the user’s previous payment, and apply this as a discount or free days when users upgrade or downgrade to a new plan. To disable prorating, navigate to Dashboard > MemberPress > Settings > Account tab and make sure the “Pro-rate subscription prices when a member upgrades” option is NOT enabled.
Alternative Workaround
The coupon workaround requires you to use predefined donation/name-your-price amounts. If you require a solution where your users can pay any amount, setting hundreds or thousands of coupons wouldn’t be a good solution. Also, you would still need to set the membership price which would automatically become your maximal payment amount.
Thus, if using predefined donation/name-your-price amounts is not the solution that would work in your case, alternatively, you could use a 3rd-party plugin and create a custom integration.
You would need to use some 3rd-party plugin with the name-your-price feature. Further, the 3rd-party plugin you would use needs to support Zapier or UncannyAutomator integrations.
This would allow you to create a WordPress user profile for your member, charge that member any amount they type in, and trigger the transaction (and subscription if membership is recurring) creation in MemberPress through Zapier or UncannyAutomator.
You can find more information about setting up Zapier or UncannyAutomator integrations in related documents:
