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Customize Your WordPress Donation Form — Without Code

Graphic showing various ways the donation form can be customized.

When I started chatting to nonprofits about their online fundraising system, many mentioned the same problem: the fundraising platform they used did not give them enough control.

Too often, they were set up as a one-size-fits-all solution.

As we began developing Charitable, we knew that we wanted to give users a way to tailor it to their needs. A year and a half on, we have seen that decision validated again and again.

In this post, I’ll show you six easy ways you can customize the donation form that is added by Charitable — all without writing any code.

Charitable is the top-rated WordPress donation plugin. Best of all, you can get it for free! Click here to start now.

6 Code-Free Ways to Tweak Your WordPress Donation Form

1. Only show required fields

By default, the donation form includes a few required fields for the donor’s name and email address, and a bunch of non-required fields for the address. Did you know you can completely remove those non-required fields from the donation form? Here’s how.

  1. Open the WordPress Customizer by clicking the paintbrush icon in the admin bar or by going to Appearance Customize in the WordPress dashboard.
  2. Click on the Charitable tab.
  3. Next, click on Donation Form. If you don’t see this listed, try navigating to a Charitable donation form in the preview window.
  4. Set the “Only show required fields” option to “Yes”.

2. Change any field’s label

Sometimes, the label used for a particular field in the donation form isn’t right for your needs. Need the “State” field to be a “Province” field? Or want to replace “Postcode / ZIP code” with just one or the other?

You can change this with a little bit of code (I’ll show you how further on), but for now I’d like to show you a sneaky way you can do this without writing any code.

Meet Loco Translate. As the name suggests, it’s a translation plugin; but even if you’re using WordPress as an English speaker, it gives you an easy way to change the default text added by plugins like Charitable. All you need to do is activate the plugin and create a “translation” of Charitable into English. You will be able to easily change any text added by Charitable, without leaving your WordPress dashboard.

3. Allow donors to subscribe to your newsletter

Another easy one. With our Newsletter Connect plugin, you can connect your MailChimp or MailPoet newsletter list to Charitable. Once you have linked your newsletter, donors can opt in to start receiving your newsletter when they make their donation.

4. Allow donors to remain anonymous

This one’s easy. All you need is our Anonymous Donations plugin. Buy it, download it, install it, activate it — you’re done.

Read more about anonymous donations here.

5. Accept credit card donations directly on your website

PayPal is great, but it does result in donors being redirected away from your website — and unfortunately that can lead to donor confusion or even drop-off. Adding a credit card form to your website is a smart way to avoid that problem, while giving you a more professional donation experience.

To start accepting credit card donations, you can use either our Stripe or Authorize.Net extension. You will also need an SSL certificate if you don’t have one already.

6. Allow your donors to pay the donation fee

This is a great way to boost your online fundraising revenue, and it’s easy to get set up.

The Fee Relief extension gives you all the tools you need. Install the plugin, then set up how the fee should be calculated, and your donors will be ready to start pitching in to cover the fees charged by your payment gateway.

Customizing your WordPress donation form, the easy way

With Charitable you can customize your WordPress donation form easily, without writing code, using off-the-shelf tools that are designed to help your non-profit collect donations.

Using WordPress and want to start collecting donations with Charitable for free?

Click here to download WP Charitable

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22 Comments

  1. Todd on October 31, 2017 at 6:27 pm

    Hi there – Are we able to add our own custom fields to the donation form to collect specific information we need outside if the standard details built in?

    • ericnicolaas on November 1, 2017 at 7:51 pm

      Yes, the donation form can be completely customized with code. We have a library of code snippets available at https://github.com/Charitable/library which shows various ways to change the donation form (amongst other things).

  2. Leoleroi on July 1, 2018 at 1:43 pm

    I am using the free version. Can I remove the checkbox that says monthly donation?

    • ericnicolaas on August 13, 2018 at 1:26 pm

      Hi Leoleroi,

      The monthly donation option is not included in the free core version of Charitable. It’s part of the Recurring Donations extension.

      Cheers,
      Eric

  3. Shane on October 27, 2018 at 12:51 pm

    Hi!

    I, too, am using the free version of Charitable, for now, but may be upgrading soon.

    For the free version (Or paid, for that matter): Is there a way to just place a Donation Form on a page, without having to create a “Campaign” for it??

    I have the Campaigns working, and the form pops up in the modal, as I specified, BUT… I would also like a generic Donation Page with a generic Donation Form, so users can just Donate, without having to specify a particular Campaign.

    Is that possible with the Free, or Paid, version of Charitable?

    Thanks!
    Shane

  4. Shehroz Asmat on December 12, 2018 at 3:55 pm

    Hello, I want to make phone field to be required on donation form but i cannot find it anywhere can you please tell me where i can do this so? I am code guy so you can tell me if i can do it in the code as well ?

  5. smackqueenyaqueen on January 21, 2019 at 1:36 pm

    Hi

    I am using free Charitable.
    Can I add a campaign from my own page instead from wp-admin?

    • ericnicolaas on October 29, 2019 at 12:22 pm

      Hi @smackqueenyaqueen,

      Sorry for missing your comment! With the free Charitable plugin, you can create campaigns in the admin area. If you want people to be able to add campaigns from the front-end, you’ll need our Ambassadors extension:

      https://www.wpcharitable.com/extensions/charitable-ambassadors/

      Cheers,
      Eric

  6. cathryn wade on April 17, 2019 at 8:41 am

    is it possible to manually add mailed check donations as an admin without having an e-mail address for the donor? It would be great to have all of the donations in once place for year end statements.

  7. Shripad on May 3, 2019 at 8:28 pm

    Any user who is not registered in website, the campaign donation page displays in the top
    “Registered before? Log in to use your saved details.”

    Also, after the donation flow completes, final page displays the text on top
    “you must be logged in to access your donation receipt.”

    How to disable these texts and avoid any confusion to users on the registration process

    • ericnicolaas on October 29, 2019 at 2:14 pm

      Hi Shripad,

      Those are great questions! Sorry for not responding sooner. We just came across a number of comments stuck in our approval queue.

      To remove the prompt to log in at the top of the campaign donation page, you can use a little bit of code:

      https://github.com/Charitable/library/blob/master/donation-form/remove-login-form.php

      See https://www.wpcharitable.com/documentation/3-ways-to-add-code-customizations-to-your-site/ for a guide to adding bits of code like this.

      After a donor completes their donation, the donation receipt should automatically show for them. One thing that can affect this however is if your site/server is doing a lot of caching; it may be blocking Charitable’s cookies from working correctly, and without the cookies the user is not able to see their donation receipt until they log in. If the user doesn’t have an account yet, there is a “Register” link at the bottom of the login form so they can create an account straight away.

      That said, if you are having problems with the donation receipt not showing automatically, please reach out to us via our support page so we can help you resolve that problem.

      Cheers,
      Eric

      • Shripad on December 31, 2019 at 11:55 pm

        Thank you Eric, this has resolved the Login issue. The code snippet is doing wonders now.

        Now, the next issue is donation receipt is not shown automatically after completing the donation. page shows the message “You must be logged in to access your donation receipt.”, but I don’t want user to create their account. Will you please help

        • ericnicolaas on March 9, 2020 at 10:23 am

          Hi Shripad,

          Sorry for missing your comment. This is an issue that comes up with certain hosts and is usually related to aggressive caching. If you’re still having problems with this, please get in touch with us through our support page.

          Cheers,
          Eric

  8. Youssef on May 13, 2019 at 2:37 am

    Hi,
    I want to hide donation amount and total donation amount in forms in the frontend, because we use the plugin only to let people join the causes not for donations. I added this filtre :
    function ed_remove_donation_amount_field_from_profile_form( $fields ) {
    unset( $fields[‘donation_amount’] );
    return $fields;
    }
    add_filter( ‘charitable_donation_form_donation_fields’, ‘ed_remove_donation_amount_field_from_profile_form’ );

    But it’s not working.
    Any idea what i can do?
    Thanks,
    Youssef

  9. Yusuf Abdul-Alim on November 15, 2019 at 2:33 pm

    Hello, is there a way to have guest donations where people do not have to register to give donations?

    • ericnicolaas on November 16, 2019 at 4:15 pm

      Hi Yusuf,

      Yep, that’s available right out of the box when people go to make a donation.

      Cheers,
      Eric

  10. Gene on December 22, 2019 at 12:28 pm

    Hi,

    I need to change the words Phone Number to Local Phone

    I tried doing it in Loco Translate, I can see the new words, but Charitable doesn’t see the update.

    Is there another way to do this?

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