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Accept Direct Debit Donations with GoCardless: Plugin News (February)

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We’re only a couple months into the year, but we have been busy with updates to Charitable, its extensions, and the launch of a brand new integration: GoCardless.

Highlights from the GoCardless plugin

GoCardless is a unique payment gateway with a focus on facilitating Direct Debit payments. It works seamlessly with a variety of Direct Debit schemes, including Bacs (UK), ACH (USA), SEPA (most of Europe), Autogiro (Sweden), Betalingsservice (Denmark), PAD (Canada), and BACS and BACS NZ (Australia and New Zealand).

Besides being a more familiar way for certain donors to contribute, one key benefit of Direct Debit is that it has dramatically lower transaction costs, which means less overhead for your non-profit.

Our GoCardless plugin has full support for Recurring Donations, Fee Relief and our other extensions.

Plugin updates in January & February

Besides the release of Charitable GoCardless, we also put out eight plugin updates.

Charitable 1.6.55 & 1.6.56

Charitable has received a pair of updates which implemented a few new features for developers, as well as bug fixes:

  • The charitable_template_donation_form() function was added, allowing you to embed a donation form for a specific campaign in your template. It requires a campaign ID to be passed along as the first argument.
  • There is a new charitable_currency filter, as well as a charitable_get_default_currency() function, which retrieves the unfiltered site currency. charitable_get_currency() now returns the filtered currency.
  • Each donation now stores its currency. You can get the currency for a donation through the Donation Fields API:
charitable_get_donation( $donation_id )->get( 'currency' );
  • Charitable has improved compatibility with block themes like Twenty Twenty Two by handling the way templates are loaded in those themes. In particular, there were problems on dynamically generated pages such as the Donation Receipt or Password Reset / Forgot pages.
  • We fixed a bug where editing a donation in the admin could change its change date to January 1, 1970. This happened in situations where the person editing the donation had their profile language set to something other than English.
  • In the donation receipt, the total donation amount now correctly includes any fees added through Fee Relief.

Braintree 1.0.3 & 1.0.4

  • Our Braintree plugin faced a few unexpected hurdles with the release of WordPress 5.9, as scripts are loaded in a different way. These were resolved and Braintree works lovely now — including with block themes.
  • We’ve avoided unnecessary overhead by skipping the registration of Braintree-specific donation fields unless Braintree is active as a gateway.
  • We also fixed an issue preventing translations from working as expected for the Braintree plugin.

Recurring Donations 1.2.17 & 1.2.18

  • We fixed a bug that resulted in the recurring donation total being formatted incorrectly in the donation receipt on sites where commas are used as the decimal separator.
  • Like our Braintree plugin and Charitable itself, Recurring Donations needed a little fine-tuning to ensure full compatibility with block themes such as Twenty Twenty Two.
  • We fixed a fatal error when a donation form is loaded in a modal while viewing a grid of campaigns.

Ambassadors 2.1.13

  • Ambassadors also received an updated to handle compatibility with block themes and WordPress 5.9.

Fee Relief 1.1.9

  • We fixed a bug preventing fees from being added correctly when using Stripe Checkout and a currency where commas are used as the decimal separator.

Mollie 1.0.3

  • We fixed a bug preventing renewal donations from being recorded correctly, which could result in duplicates being created in Charitable.

Payrexx 1.0.1

  • Got rid of an annoying nag to update to the latest version despite being on the latest version.

What’s coming next?

GoCardless is the first new plugin for 2022, but it won’t be the last. Our PDF Receipts extension is almost ready to be released (if you’d like to be part of the beta testing, get in touch), and we have a few other goodies planned which we’re keeping a little closer to home for now — including some significant updates to Charitable itself. Stay tuned. 😉

author avatar
Eric Daams

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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
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
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
Eric Daams
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
Eric Daams
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
Eric Daams