Get Donations For Your Museum With Fundraising Website Plugins

Is your museum looking to get donations online? Are you looking for a WordPress donation plugin?

With the current crisis hitting museum finances, institutions are looking at how they can raise funds online. In this article, we will share fundraising and donation plugins that can help your museum to collect one off and recurring donations from those visiting your website.

We’re focusing on WordPress websites in this article as this is the world’s most popular content management system and is used extensively to build museum websites.

One of the advantages of using WordPress is the extensive plugin library. A plugin is a piece of software that can add functionality or features to your website without the need for programming knowledge.

There are dozens of WordPress donation plugins available, some are free, while others require either a one off payment or a subscription. In this article we look at the two most popular options the free PayPal Donations Button and the most popular paid option GiveWP.

GiveWP

GiveWP is the most popular donations plugin for WordPress with 80,000+ nonprofits using it.

GiveWP will allow your museum to accept one-time or recurring donations, set campaign goals, manage donors and track progress with reports. You can add donation forms to your WordPress site in different styles including stand alone pages, buttons, popups and more.

In terms of integrations, WPGive works with payment gateways including Stripe, PayPal and Square and can link with marketing tools MailChimp, Convertkit and AWeber.

GiveWP costs either $144 or $216 annually, with the more expensive option allowing more functionality including recurring donations, currency switcher and PDF receipts.

The flexibility and breadth of fundraising options that GiveWP offers makes it a clear winner for any museum looking to quickly increase online fundraising.

PayPal Donation

PayPal is a free plugin that allows you to add a PayPal Donation button anywhere on your site and start collection donations. Your website visitors can use their PayPal account or Credit Card to donate money to you.

What makes this PayPal donation plugin powerful is its simplicity. Just install the plugin and in just a few minutes customers from around the world can start donating to you via PayPal.

Its simplicity is also what makes it a lot less powerful than something like GiveWP.

Finding the right WordPress Donation Plugin

Now is the time for museums to think seriously about fundraising, and setting up your museum for online donations is an essential step that ever museum needs to take. If your museum website is built on WordPress then these two donation plugins make this easy.

In my opinion the greater functionality and visually appealing calls to action available with GiveWP make it the clear winner. While there is a cost for this plugin, you’re getting access to a tried and tested fundraising system for less than a $1 a day.

GiveWP offer a 30 day money back guarantee, so my advice would be to try it and if it isn’t the right fit for your organisation look at the simpler PayPal option.

Museums around the world facing challenging financial times brought on by the Coronavirus crisis. While some museums might feel uneasy about asking for financial help at this time, I think it’s essential that we communicate the danger that this crisis poses for our cultural institutions and ask for help.

If your museum website is built on WordPress, fundraising plugin’s like GiveWP and PayPal Donation button make it easy for you to start attracting donations with little effort. Doing this is going to put your museum is a better position to weather the current storm.

If there is one piece of advice I’d give museums at this time, it would be to look at online fundraising.

–

MuseumNext offer online learning for museum professionals striving for engaging, relevant and flexible professional growth content. Learn more about our virtual museum conferences here.