While you can sell products and services with your WordPress site, you can even do more, like crowdfunding. Say you’re an anime and manga artist that has built a good fan base. Well, of all of your fans, you can post that you take tips, or can provide exclusive content to view, all for a small monthly fee.
Sounds cool right? In this article, you’ll learn more about how to do this, as well as some of the best crowdfunding WordPress plugins out there.
What is crowdfunding?
Crowdfunding is a way that you can fund a project, like starting a business, or getting interest to develop a new product, or just to get support for providing a special service.
Third party services like Kickstarter, Patreon, and Indiegogo allow this, but you can also do this with your own WordPress website (and Hosting package for WordPress).
If you offer unique and entertaining services, you could tap into the 6.4 million people that had supported crowdfunding campaigns in 2021. According to Statistica, the crowdfunding market-size is only going to get better, and projects it to grow to a 25.8 billion US Dollar industry!
Donation vs crowdfunding WordPress plugins
What's the diference?
Donation plugin and crowdfunding WordPress plugins are pretty similar in the fact that you can accept money from people.
However, the difference is that crowdfunding plugins allow you to measure your progress and even offer packaged subscriptions. This is great if you have loyal fans that want to send you money every month, in order to view exclusive content.
What makes a good crowdfunding WordPress plugin?
Accept and process money transactions
Offer package subscriptions
Ability to track what money has been received.
Accept and process money transactions
If you’re trying to make money through offering exclusive content or accepting donations, your crowdfunding WordPress plugin should allow you to process transactions from most major money processors.
Offer package subscriptions
Any crowdfunding WordPress plugin should try to offer some type of method for allowing subscription pay, or even allow you to put together levels of subscriptions. You can offer more exclusive content, merchandise, or other services, depending on the level that a person subscribes to.
Ability to track what money has been received
It’s important to know how much money you’ve taken in from your supporters. Your crowdfunding WordPress plugin should have an area designated for calculating all the transactions you’ve received.
Why use a crowdfunding WordPress plugin vs a third-party crowdfunding website?
So, why use a crowdfunding WordPress plugin, when there are so many useful third-party crowdfunding websites out on the Internet?
Well, with using 3rd party crowdfunding websites, you have to stick to their rules and some may even tack on an extra fee. Crowdfunding WordPress plugins only use your chosen payment processor, so you have only their fee to deal with, instead of 2 different fees.
Additionally, if you already have a WordPress site, and you’re publishing content to your email newsletter, and social media handles, you may find it tedious to register and post to yet another platform. While most crowdfunding websites may list you on their website, your campaign might get buried in their internal search results under the countless other campaigns.
7 Top Crowdfunding WordPress Plugins
Below are some of the best crowdfunding WordPress plugins you will find out in the WordPress.org plugin directory.
Charitable
Crowdfunding for WooCommerce
GiveWP
IgnitionDeck
Whydonate
WP Fundraising Donation and Crowdfunding Platform
WP Crowdfunding
1. Charitable
Charitable is designed to be a donation plugin, but you can certainly use it for crowdfunding. Here are some of Charitable’s features:
Set campaign goals
Create as a many campaigns as you’d like
Option to create time-sensitive campaigns
Works with your chosen WordPress theme
Customizable donation forms
Paypal gateway integration
Option for donators to send an offline donation
Options for customizing emails
2. Crowdfunding for WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a powerful WordPress eCommerce plugin, so when you install Crowdfunding for WooCommerce with it, you can open up a way for your fans to support you. You also reap the benefits of tracking money in WooCommerce, while also adding features like:
Campaign goals
Add campaign start and end dates
Generate custom labels like “Back this Project” for your campaigns
Offer option for supporters to name their own price
Progress bar
You can even add forms and other options when creating pages related to your campaigns.
3. GiveWP
GiveWP is one of the best donation plugins. It may not necessarily be for crowdfunding, if you want to run one that accepts users to register and run their own campaigns. This is something simple and will allow you to not only display beautiful campaigns, but also does a fantastic job delivering clear stats.
With GiveWP, you can set a goal, and time limit for your campaigns. You can display a progress bar for your visitors, and accept payments with PayPal too. In fact, GiveWP has a super easy setup wizard to get you launching your first campaign in minutes.
If you need other payment gateway integrations or to hook up your campaign to your email newsletter list, then GiveWP has paid add-ons too!
4. IgnitionDeck
IgnitionDeck is fully geared for crowdfunding. This plugin is really robust and offers many features, like:
Track campaign’s progress
Ability to split fees with project creators
Offers multiple payment gateways
Accept donations
Option for supporters to cover transaction fees
Customize emails that are sent out during transactions and messaging
Allows other project creators to post their campaigns
Option to offer custom fee per project
Integration with MailChimp
Integration with other plugins
…and much more. You can utilize IgnitionDeck if you want to run your own crowdfunding site, and allow others to post their own campaigns. Pretty neat, right?
5. Whydonate
Whydonate might have a strange name for a crowdfunding WordPress plugin, but it does a great job. While the plugin uses “donate” a lot, you can certainly use it for crowdfunding. You can create campaigns, set a goal, and even set how long you want to run your project. Other features of this plugin include:
Set multiple donation prices
Progress bar
One time or recurring donations
Multiple payment options
Ability to interact with donators
6. WP Fundraising Donation and Crowdfunding Platform
WP Fundraising Donation and Crowdfunding Platform is a mouthful for a plugin, but you can either use it for a single donation website, or for crowdfunding. This plugin can integrate with WooCommerce, social sharing options, and works with payment gateways like Paypal and Stripe.
7. WP Crowdfunding
WP Crowdfunding is a nice WooCommerce add-on if you want to run any fundraiser, take donations, or do crowdfunding campaigns. Here are just some of WP Crowdfunding’s features:
Ability to allow users to register
Option to allow users to submit their campaigns from the website’s frontend
Add a featured image or video to campaign
Option to set minimum and maximum pricing
Option to set campaign goal
The only downside is that the free version of this crowdfunding WordPress plugin doesn’t have any analytical reports. In the paid version of WP Crowdfunding, you can add social sharing, email notifications, and much more.
In Summary
Running a crowdfunding site could be a lucrative business. If you’re just an individual wanting to offer crowdfunding on your own website, by yourself, then you should definitely try out the crowdfunding WordPress plugins in this article. Test and see what you might like. Hopefully, with crowdfunding, you can open another successful revenue stream.
