The Most Significant Feature Enhancement of the Give Donations Plugin Just Dropped

Have you ever used a product that you thought was awesome — one you thought couldn’t be any better — and then the creators of that product released a feature that took it from awesome to mind-blowing? For me, this is what the WordImpress team did with the Give plugin. Today, they just released the recurring payments add-on.

Now I have to be honest. I was hoping/expecting them to release a recurring payments add-on for a while now. Recurring donations are a pretty crucial. Studies have shown that donors who give on a recurring basis, on average, give 42% more than one time donors. That’s a pretty significant statistic! See my presentation with stats here. So it wasn’t that I didn’t expect them to release a recurring donations add-on at some point, but what I was absolutely impressed with was the elegance with which they implemented this.

If you’re using recurring donations on your website giving forms for the first time, you may not be able to fully appreciate the elegance with which this solution has been executed. That is to say, you won’t have suffered through the experience of the typical “recurring donations” implementation. Most tools pass recurring donations through to the payment processor. For example, if you make a recurring donation via PayPal with Gravity Forms, Gravity Forms notifies PayPal that this is a recurring donation type and PayPal sets up the recurring schedule. At this point, Gravity Forms drops all responsibility for the transaction and any future management/maintenance of the recurring donation transaction(s).

Why is this a problem? The issue with this sort of recurring donation structure is that there is no simple, central location from where you, or the client, can manage their recurring donations. This becomes especially dizzying when multiple payment gateways are offered. Let’s say, for example, that you offer Stripe and PayPal as payment gateway options for your donors. You, and/or the client would need to log into each of those payment gateway dashboards, just to manage that subscription. This is confusing at best and probably a big reason why donors might abandon their relationship with your organization.

So what is so cool about the Give Recurring Donations Add-on? The Give Recurring Donations Add-on allows you, and more importantly, your donors, to manage all of their recurring donations through a donor dashboard right on your website, no matter what Payment Gateway they used! It also centralizes the tracking of all of those donations collectively in one simple and intuitive dashboard within your WordPress dashboard. THAT IS AWESOME!

But wait, there is more… Way, way more! This might be the best part of all. Give allows you to set up custom email templates that can be sent every time a recurring payment is processed. This is not the boring, generic email they would receive from the payment gateway. This is a massive opportunity to re-engage that donor with your cause and encourage them to deepen their engagement with your organization. THIS IS PURE GOLD!! The same goes for when your client cancels their recurring donation. You can send them a customized email that could serve to recapture their attention or encourage to engage with your organization in other ways.

I literally heard about the Give Recurring Donations Add-on release less than an hour ago and I’m already super excited about the possibilities. Who knows what I’ll find as I dig further into it.

If you haven’t tried Give yet, you have to download it right now! It’s completely free. Just search for it in the WordPress Plugin Directory or click here.

Their cool add-ons are really affordable and don’t charge you any transaction fees, monthly fees, or per user licensing fees.

Last but not least: the Give plugin also seamlessly integrates with UkuuPeople for a full 360-degree view of your donor relationships.

Don’t wait another minute. This is a must have tool for your nonprofit organization!