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Introducing charitable 1811

Stop Spam and Save Time with Improved Security in Charitable Pro

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We’ve been working hard to make your donation forms cleaner, more secure, and easier to manage!

Introducing Charitable Pro 1.8.11 with new CAPTCHA options, IP controls, rate limiting, and a simple tool to remove unwanted donations right from the tools menu.

Now you can choose Google reCAPTCHA v3 for invisible bot protection or Cloudflare Turnstile for a free, privacy-friendly alternative. Add trusted IPs to a whitelist to skip checks entirely, or blacklist troublemakers to block them outright. Rate limiting stops form spam across donations, registrations, and more by tracking submissions per IP, with automatic log cleanup to keep your database light.

Plus, the new donation cleaning tool lets you wipe pending or failed entries by type and date range, perfect for ditching test donations or past spam. Gift Aid users get a handy new column in donor exports marking eligibility based on real donations. Update to 1.8.11 today and spend less time on cleanup, more time on your cause.

Let’s explore the new update. Here’s what’s new:

New CAPTCHA Options

Choose the CAPTCHA option that works seamlessly for your donors and fits your setup. This will help keep spam away while letting real supporters donate without hassle, boosting your donation form conversions and saving you cleanup time.

The new update adds two new different CAPTCHA providers, giving you the freedom to choose what works best for your donors:

  • Google reCAPTCHA v3 (Invisible): Our recommended option. It analyzes user behavior in the background to assign a “risk score,” blocking bots without ever interrupting the user.
  • Cloudflare Turnstile: A free, privacy-focused alternative from a trusted source that is very easy to enable (Cloudflare also provided additional protections much of which is included in their free plan).

IP Whitelisting / Blacklisting

You can take full control of your donation forms with straightforward IP management.

Add your trusted office IP, team addresses, or partner IPs to the whitelist, and they will skip CAPTCHA checks and rate limits entirely, keeping your testing and internal work smooth.

The IP Whitelist lets you bypass rate limiting and CAPTCHA checks for trusted sources – perfect for your own IP address or known partners.

The IP Blacklist provides an immediate block for problematic IPs, preventing form submissions regardless of other security settings.

Both lists support IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, and you can add multiple IPs (one per line) for flexible management.

This works alongside rate limiting and CAPTCHA for layered protection.

Rate Limiting

Rate limiting stops bots from flooding your forms with fake submissions, saving you hours of cleanup. You stay safe from automated spam attacks on donations, registrations, or password resets without blocking real donors. Plus, it keeps your database clean by auto-deleting old logs, so everything runs faster and leaner.

Now in Charitable Pro, you can protect your donation forms from spam and abuse with General Rate Limiting. This tracks all form submissions (donations, registrations, password resets, and more) by IP address, providing a first line of defense against automated attacks.

You can set the maximum number of form submissions allowed within the time window before blocking and define the time window and blocking period. Charitable Pro will even automatically clean up expired rate-limiting logs, keeping your database lean and ensuring only relevant blocking data is retained.

New Donation Cleanup Tool

Charitable Pro has a new tool to allow you to remove any unwanted pending or failed donations.

We noticed that fake donations from spam bots or testing gone wrong fill your dashboard with noise, skew your analytics, and force you to manually delete one by one.

That’s why we built this tool, which fixes that pain instantly. You pick pending or failed donations, set a date range, and wipe them all out in bulk.

Now your donor lists look sharp, reports tell the real story, and you save hours for actual fundraising work.

You will find this in the Tools » Misc tab.

Here, you can select the type of donation you want to remove along with a date range. This tool can help if you have experienced past issues with fake donations or just want to get rid of test donations.

We hope this makes your donation management easier. Your records stay clean, reports are accurate, and you focus on real donors instead of cleanup headaches.

Gift Aid

For those using the Gift Aid addon, your donor export CSV now includes a dedicated “Gift Aid” column. This feature automatically marks donors as “Yes” or “No” based on their history of valid, completed donations – making it easier than ever to identify eligible supporters for tax purposes and communication.

Get The New Features Today

These features are available today in Charitable Pro version 1.8.11 and later. Make sure you update your plugin to the latest version in your WordPress dashboard.

Not using Charitable yet? Check out Charitable Lite for free, which has basic security protections built in. It has all the essentials that you need. Sign up for free and explore Charitable Lite now.

What More Secure Features? Upgrade to Charitable Pro!

For even more robust protection, consider updating to Charitable Pro, which offers advanced rate limiting, expanded CAPTCHA options, IP address blacklisting/whitelisting, dedicated rate limiting for Stripe, and more comprehensive security features that go far beyond what the legacy Spam Blocker addon provides – all built directly into the plugin.

Added to that, you’ll also get access to premium features:

…and so much more! Ready to give Charitable Pro a try?

Sign up today and get up to 50% off on your plan. We’re confident you’ll love raising funds with Charitable. If for any reason Charitable is not the right fit for you, we’ll refund your purchase with our 14-day money back guarantee

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We’d Love to Hear From You!

The security tools in Charitable Pro 1.8.11 are part of our commitment to democratizing fundraising technology. Our goal is simple: we want you to focus on your mission, not on cleaning up spam donations.

How are these new features working for you? We are dedicated to evolving Charitable based on your real-world needs. Whether you have feedback on the new security settings or ideas for what we should tackle next, please reach out. Your input directly shapes our roadmap for 2026.

author avatar
David Bisset Project Manager
David is the project manager of Charitable since 2022. David works with several non-profits (one operated by his wife) along with managing and developing features, support, and marketing for Charitable. Has been with WordPress since 2006 and has been lead organizer of multiple conferences, events, and meetups.

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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
David Bisset Project Manager
David is the project manager of Charitable since 2022. David works with several non-profits (one operated by his wife) along with managing and developing features, support, and marketing for Charitable. Has been with WordPress since 2006 and has been lead organizer of multiple conferences, events, and meetups.
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
David Bisset Project Manager
David is the project manager of Charitable since 2022. David works with several non-profits (one operated by his wife) along with managing and developing features, support, and marketing for Charitable. Has been with WordPress since 2006 and has been lead organizer of multiple conferences, events, and meetups.
ai New

🚀 Unleash AI Power in Charitable!

Your AI assistant can now build, edit, and manage your Charitable fundraising campaigns directly — just by asking. With Charitable Pro adding write support for the WordPress Abilities API, tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Cursor can handle full administrative actions safely through MCP. Why this is important:

  • 🤖 Campaign creation in plain language: Prompt your assistant with a goal like “Set up a fundraiser for the shelter with a $5,000 goal”, and it builds a real draft campaign complete with suggested donation tiers.
  • 🎨 Instant donation form tweaks: Add custom fields, change button colors, or reorder elements without diving into form settings.
  • 📝 Offline gift logging: Tell your assistant about cash or check gifts, and it will match donor emails and record transactions into your history.
  • 🛡️ Safety and control by default: Write access stays strictly off until turned on in Charitable » Tools » AI MCP, keeping read-only reporting safe by default.
  • 📜 Full audit logging: Every change made by an AI assistant is tracked under Charitable » Tools » Logs, so you always know who (or what) updated your site.

Check out our announcement here.

author avatar
David Bisset Project Manager
David is the project manager of Charitable since 2022. David works with several non-profits (one operated by his wife) along with managing and developing features, support, and marketing for Charitable. Has been with WordPress since 2006 and has been lead organizer of multiple conferences, events, and meetups.
Improvement Payments

💰 Accept Recurring Donations with Windcave and Charitable

A donor sets their gift up once on Windcave’s secure payment page, and Charitable bills every renewal after that on schedule. Why this is important:

🏦 Organizations banked in New Zealand or Australia: monthly giving on the gateway your bank already set you up with, with no second processor to onboard.
⛪ Churches taking regular tithes and offerings: congregants set their own schedule once, which is the simplest way to launch recurring church giving without a separate platform.
🌏 Groups with donors in several currencies: Windcave handles more than 20, so a supporter can give in the currency they actually hold.
📅 Operating funds rather than one-time campaigns: switch on Recurring Only mode and the one-off option disappears, so every gift to that campaign is a subscription.
🧾 Teams with no developer on staff: 3 sets of credentials pasted into a settings page, and no code anywhere.

Check out our announcement here.

author avatar
David Bisset Project Manager
David is the project manager of Charitable since 2022. David works with several non-profits (one operated by his wife) along with managing and developing features, support, and marketing for Charitable. Has been with WordPress since 2006 and has been lead organizer of multiple conferences, events, and meetups.
automation update

⚡ Visual Automation Builder: Drag and Drop With No Code!

Charitable Automation Connect 2.3.0 introduces the Visual Automation Builder, a full-screen canvas that lays each automation out as a flow of connected cards: a trigger, optional conditions, and a list of actions that run in order.

🧩 Many actions, one trigger: Tag a donor, send an email, add a note, and fire a webhook from a single event, dragged into any order.

✉️ Act inside Charitable: New Send Email, Tag Donor, and Add Donor Note actions run with no external service required.

🔤 Merge tags: Personalize emails and notes with live fields like {first_name}, {total}, and {campaign_name}.

🔁 Apply to existing donors: Run Tag Donor and Add Donor Note against the donors you already have.

🖥️ Canvas or Simple: Switch views anytime, and automations built before 2.3.0 keep working unchanged.

Read more here.

author avatar
David Bisset Project Manager
David is the project manager of Charitable since 2022. David works with several non-profits (one operated by his wife) along with managing and developing features, support, and marketing for Charitable. Has been with WordPress since 2006 and has been lead organizer of multiple conferences, events, and meetups.