Charitable Blog

Everything you need to know about Charitable and our team.

Charitable: Now available on WordPress.org

Last updated on

  • By

Charitable is here. Version 1.0 is now available to download from WordPress.org.

Our goal with Charitable is to give non-profits a powerful fundraising solution that plugs straight into their website.

Theme montage
Charitable works with any theme Pictured here with Twenty Fifteen Twenty Fourteen Make Checkout and Enfold

Use PayPal or offline donations

You can start accepting donations today with PayPal or offline (via cheque of direct bank transfers, for example). More payment options are planned, with a Stripe extension coming soon.

No transaction fees

Other fundraising software charges you for every donation you receive, with fees ranging up to 10%.

Charitable will never charge you for transactions. You only pay us when you need to ramp up your fundraising efforts with our extensions (see below).

Easy to use

Creating a campaign is simple. If you can use WordPress, you can use Charitable.

Create as many fundraising campaigns as you want. You can set targets for your campaigns and give them an end date — or you can run them as ongoing campaigns.

Diagram to show how to add a campaign

Built to be extended

We built Charitable from the ground-up to be an extendable platform. Right now, we have three extensions available in our Standard Package.

  • Anonymous Donations – Allow people to make donations anonymously.
  • User Avatars – Let your donors upload their own profile photo to your site, instead of using their Gravatar profile.
  • Simple Updates – Add updates about your fundraising campaigns.

Stay tuned for Stripe support, recurring donations, pledge campaigns and more. Looking for something you don’t see mentioned? We’d love to hear your ideas. Get in touch via our Support form.

Here to stay

It’s been a long road to get here, but we’re only just getting started.

Can you help us spread the word? Please share this post through your favourite social network, or pass it on to someone you know who works at a non-profit.

Download Charitable now from WordPress.org.

author avatar
Eric Daams

Disclosure: Our content is reader-supported. This means if you click on some of our links, then we may earn a commission. We only recommend products that we believe will add value to our readers.

4 responses to “Charitable: Now available on WordPress.org”

  1. We are Retiring Plugins & Themes this Week – Studio 164a

    […] You can read more about Charitable in our announcement post. […]

  2. Charitable: Year One in Review

    […] year ago today, we released version 1.0 of Charitable on WordPress. As we turn a new page, I wanted to take some time to reflect on and […]

  3. Joni Millar Avatar
    Joni Millar

    Hi, I saw your page asking for feedback on your plugin. I am looking for a plugin where I can create a store, but the store would just be temporary, in order to run a fundraiser for a kids’ group. Many groups run a fundraiser a few times a year, re-selling things like steak, coffee, chocolate, whatever… So I have been searching for a plugin that I could use with wordpress to set this up. It would need to have all of the products we were selling available, and then the parents and friends would come in and check how many they’d want of everything, get the total from the bottom, and either write a cheque for the total or we could use stripe or paypal or somethng like that if there was the possibility of adding a percentage charge to cover the fees. I know I can do most of this with Woo commerce, but I’d also need the ability to have all of the product orders put into a spreadsheet of some sort – maybe a google drive spreadsheet so we could add up how much of each item was ordered and how much each customer spent (ideally linked to each child that they are supporting). So I just thought I’d let you know in case you’re still adding to it, that there would probably be lots of groups who could use that functionality.

    1. ericnicolaas Avatar
      ericnicolaas

      Thanks for the feedback Joni! It’s not something we’re currently planning to add to Charitable, but we’ll definitely keep it in mind if more people request similar functionality.

      Cheers,
      Eric

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Get free tips and resources right in your inbox, along with 60,000+ others

Join our Newsletter

We won’t spam you. We only send an email when we think it will genuinely help you. Unsubscribe at any time!

Featured Video:

Watch more videos on our YouTube channel.

What's New In Charitable

View The Latest Updates
🔔 Subscribe to get our latest updates
📧 Subscribe to Emails

Email Subscription

Join our Newsletter

We won’t spam you. We only send an email when we think it will genuinely help you. Unsubscribe at any time!

ambassadors New

🏃 Introducing Activity: Show Progress on More Than Money!

Most peer-to-peer fundraisers are about more than the money. A read-a-thon is about minutes read, a walkathon is about miles walked, and a food drive is about meals packed. Activity for Charitable Ambassadors lets your fundraisers show that effort right beside the dollars they raise. Why this is important:

  • 🎯 Progress on what you actually count: A progress bar shows each thing you count against its own target, sitting right beside the money raised.
  • 🏅 Milestones for the yes or no things: A milestone badge marks the efforts that are simply done or not done, with no number to chase.
  • ✍️ Fundraisers log their own numbers: Your supporters enter their totals from their own pages, so the effort stops living in a spreadsheet, a comment, or nowhere at all.
  • 🤖 Some numbers count themselves: An AUTOMATIC tag appears wherever the site worked the figure out from completed donations, so you can see at a glance what nobody typed in.
  • 🧩 Set it up once, use it anywhere: You decide what gets counted one time, then choose which campaigns count it. Available now in Charitable Ambassadors 3.4.7, with no new plugin and no developer.

Check out our announcement here.

author avatar
Eric Daams
ambassadors New

🖨️ Introducing Fliers and Posters: Raise Money Away From the Screen!

A lot of peer-to-peer fundraising happens away from a screen: at the finish line of a 5K, on a school noticeboard, in an office kitchen. Charitable Ambassadors 3.4.7 adds 2 printables, a fundraiser flier carrying each fundraiser’s own story and QR code, and a recruitment poster that signs new fundraisers up. Both open as a normal web page and print straight from the browser. Why this is important:

  • 🏁 A flier for every fundraiser: Each one carries that fundraiser’s own photo, story and goal, with a QR code that opens their page rather than your main campaign.
  • 📌 A poster that recruits: It shows “Now Recruiting” above your campaign name with a large QR code that opens your sign-up form, so someone can start fundraising without waiting on a link from you.
  • 🪄 No design tool needed: Both printables render as a normal web page and print from the browser, with no PDF plugin and no designer.
  • 📄 2 flier layouts: Hand out carries the full story for giving to friends and family, and Post up carries a short hook with 5 tear-off tabs for a noticeboard.
  • 🛡️ Off until you switch it on: Fliers stay off after the update until you enable them under Charitable » Ambassadors » Other » Fliers, and only the owner or an administrator can open one.

Check out our announcement here.

author avatar
Eric Daams
Improvement Payments

💸 Introducing Tiered Rates for Fee Relief: Match the Ask to the Gift!

Fee Relief asks your donors one short question at checkout: would you like to cover the processing fee on this gift? Until now that question used a single rate for every donation on a gateway, so a $10 gift and a $500 gift were asked for the same percentage. Fee Relief 1.3.0 lets you set as many donation bands as you like, each carrying its own rate. Why this is important:

  • 🪙 Gentler on small gifts: A fixed transaction cost is a far bigger share of a $10 donation than a $500 one, so bands let you ask for less at the bottom.
  • 🎚️ As many bands as you need: Each band carries its own percentage and its own fixed amount, and the top band runs on with no upper limit.
  • 🛑 An optional ceiling: A Maximum fee field stops any donor being asked for more than a number you choose, however large the gift.
  • 🔌 Set per payment gateway: Stripe can run on four bands while Windcave and Payfast stay on a single rate, because bands belong to a gateway and not to your whole site.
  • 🛡️ Nothing changes until you say so: Your current rates stay exactly as they are until you switch Use Tiered Rates on under Charitable » Settings » Advanced » Fee Relief.

Check out our announcement here.

author avatar
Eric Daams
Donations Improvement

📊 Your Pro Dashboard Can Now Compare, Export, and Score!

Most fundraising dashboards only tell you how much you have raised. Charitable Pro 1.8.19 rebuilds the dashboard and the Reports Overview around the harder questions: whether anything is broken, whether this period beat the last one, and which single change would make the most difference today. Why this is important:

  • 📈 Every figure has a trend: Pick a period and the tiles and the chart move together, with each total shown against the previous period.
  • 🗓️ Charts that stay readable: Short ranges group donations day by day, while longer ranges group by week or month, so a full year reads as a curve instead of a flat line.
  • 🔀 Compare any 2 periods: Not just consecutive ones, so you can ask how this December did against last December. That matters because fundraising is seasonal.
  • 📤 Export the whole summary: Send the full overview out as CSV or PDF, ready for a board pack or a funder report.
  • 🎯 Score your setup for free: Have your fundraising setup scored, so the one change worth making next is the one you can see.

Check out our announcement here.

author avatar
Eric Daams
Feature New

🎟️ Introducing Charitable Events: Sell Tickets Inside Your Campaigns!

Most nonprofits sell event tickets in one tool and collect donations in another, which leaves two sets of reports and a manual match at the end of the year. Charitable Events brings both together, selling tickets through the same donation forms and payment gateways you already run in Charitable. Why this is important:

  • 🎟️ Every ticket is a donation: Ticket sales run through the gateway you already use and count toward the campaign goal, with everything managed under Charitable » Events.
  • 📱 QR check-in from any phone: Each attendee gets their own QR code on the receipt, and volunteers scan at the door through a check-in link that needs no WordPress account.
  • 🧾 Receipts ready for tax time: Give each ticket type a fair market value, and Charitable puts the correct tax-deductible amount on every donor receipt.
  • 📋 Attendee details at checkout: Ask every guest for a meal choice, shirt size, or access needs, with a separate attendee record created for each ticket.
  • 🗓️ Blocks and calendars included: Three editor blocks plus Sugar Calendar and The Events Calendar support put your events where supporters already look.

Check out our announcement here.

author avatar
Eric Daams