I have my Patreon page up and the major differences between something like Patreon and something like let’s, say GoFundMe right or Kickstarter is that Patreon is a recurring charge. Type of thing right, I’ve, got multiple tiers here, where my patrons get charged monthly to continually donate to my content creation cause.
Ok, so so they can donate, let’s, say $ 5, and every month they ‘ Ll. Get new content for that $ 5 right. If we look at something like GoFundMe, usually somebody sets up a price goal: that’s, a one-time charge to support some cause, the same thing with Kickstarter right, so you set up a project.
You set up a goal and you say I need to raise X amount of dollars by this date in order for me to reach my goal. So when this person emailed me and asked me if they should use Patreon for what was essentially a crowdfunding thing right, they needed to raise money to replace their laptop.
I actually pointed them towards giving WP so give WP is a free, WordPress donation plugin, and it allows you to install and start accepting donations immediately using paper, and the nice thing about give WP is that they have zero commission charges right.
So if you use something like Patreon or GoFundMe or Kickstarter, you’re, getting their platform right and maybe their audience. But I’ll talk about that in a minute, but they’re, also going to take a little bit off of the top right with Patreon.
It’s anywhere from five to ten percent of the pledges I’m, not, I think, with Kickstarter, it’s about five percent as well, so you lose a little bit of that control right and then if one day I Kickstarter or GoFundMe decides well, you can only use their payment processor or you can only use some certain thing.
Well then, you’re stuck with that, but if you have a WordPress blog and this person certainly did, I actually checked it out beforehand. I recommend give WP so in this video, I’m, going to install and configure give WP on my personal site.
Casa bonus, org right now, so just a quick disclaimer! I’m doing this life on my live site, but I have installed and configured give WP before. I, of course, recommend that you test these things before you roll them out into your own live site.
So let’s get started. We’re, going to go to plugins, add new and we’re, going to search forgive again give is a free donation plug-in available on the WordPress plug-in repository they make their money through the paid ad on.
So you’ll see some of the things that we can do with the free version of giving, and then we can look at some of the paid add-ons. So I’ve installed and now I’m activating this plugin. So the plug-in is now activated we can sign up for their newsletter.
If we’d like they actually put out a lot of really good content. The other thing that you can see is that test mode is activated by default right, so you won’t just start taking people’s money as soon as you activate the plug-in, which is good.
So they talk a little bit about who they are and what they do and then we can go to the get started area. So they have a really nice onboarding process where they tell us how to create a new form, how to customize our donation levels.
How to add content to the form and how to configure our display options? So we have a new donations area in our left-hand bar. So I’m going to hover over donations and click. Add form I’m just going to call this buy me coffee.
One of the nice things that you can do with giving is to create a multi-level donation right. So if you’ve ever looked at Kickstarter or GoFundMe or Patreon for that matter, you can have multiple levels where you have a recommended: donation, price, or different levels based on maybe rewards right.
So if somebody pledges $ 1 for me on Patreon, they get a certain set of rewards. If they pledged $ 50 to me on Patreon. They get a lot more rewards because they’re, giving me $ 50 a month because they like what I’m doing or whatever.
So we have a multi-level donation or we can just set the donation to something right. So if you just want to make a single recommended donation amount, you can do that here. So we’re. We could set this to $ 5 and that’s.
What we want, we can also set a custom amount. So if we want to set a donation but also give people the freedom to maybe donate whatever they want, we can do that here. So we’ve got the multi-level donation and then we have the set donation amount.
Now, since I’m, you know this is just to buy me coffee for him. I’m going to do a set donation. I’m going to do $ 4. I live just outside of Philadelphia, so that’s, a reasonable amount, and then I’m going to set the donation level two to three dollars here and that’s.
Basically, because, while give doesn’t make any money off of the top right. They don’t. Have any Commission fees? You still have to pay the payment processor right. So if you set it to something like $ 1 and it’s, PayPal that’s, 29 cents, plus 3 percent of the transaction, so you’re, losing 30 percent of the donation right there, whereas with $ 3, you’re, losing you know like something like 10 % and then of course, the higher you go, the less you lose so $ 4 after the fee is about enough to buy me a small cup of coffee at Starbucks, and then you could set a Maximum amount right, so you know people can donate whatever they want here and then here you can do custom amount text.
So if you have some punchy copy to convince people to donate a custom amount, you can do that as well, so that’s. Our donation options, if we go to form display, we can show like. Oh, we could display the donation here.
You know with all fields or we can have a modal pop-up or a revealer button. This all depends on how you want to design your page. I’m gonna have a dedicated page for this, so I’m. Just gonna show you all fields.
I’m, going to change the button to buy me coffee, the default gateway you’ll see. Is the global default? We haven’t configured this, yet we actually need to do that under settings. So we’ll. Do that as soon as we create this form, company donations will disable that guest donation.
We will enable us to don’t. We don’t necessarily want to force people to log in to make the donation, and we don’t want to register. We want to make the donation process as easy as possible for them, so those are our display settings.
We can also enable a donation goal. Okay, so you know if I wanted to pay for coffee or the year and that’s my goal, that’s, two cups a day times 365, which is like $ 2,900. Why don’t you? We just make this a round number of $ 3,000 and then we can show a mountain raised percentage raised for the goal format I’ll.
Just do amount raise, so people know how much has been donated so far. We can also choose to close the forum once the goal has been met, that’s disabled by default. We can add some forum content if we want.
So if we’re going to embed this on a page, we might want to include the content on the page instead of terms and conditions offline donations. If we want to allow that, I’m gonna turn that off and then email notifications.
All of these are set to the global options right. So I’m gonna click, publish and now our forum is created and we’ll go to the settings just to make sure that all of our global settings are correct, so the success page will be donation confirmation.
It looks like a few pages have been created. For me, the currency will be US dollar currency position and all that fun stuff, but we are more concerned with the payment gateways. So we’re going to enable PayPal standard.
We’ll. Make that the default we’ll disable these other two options and we will turn off test mode, so they ‘ Ll click Save Changes. Now we’ll go to PayPal standard and we’ll. Put in my PayPal address, everything else here is the standard set for just regular PayPal.
So, if like, if we have a page style that we want to use that we’ve configured at PayPal, calm, we can do that. I am NOT a non-profit, so I need to make sure to set this to a standard transaction. If you are a non-profit and you can prove your nonprofit status, then you could set this to donations.
I don’t need billing details, so I’m. Just gonna stay, save these changes, and then we’ll go through the rest. We’ll use all of the default, give styles, or the emails. There is some default copy associated.
We’ll use that if you’re looking to not do something quickly, if, like donations, is gonna be a big part of your business, then I would strongly recommend editing these emails. So now, then, the last thing I’m gonna do here is I’m, going to create a page going to call this page.
Buy me coffee, so I’ve added some coffee here. Buy me a cup of coffee, it’s. Only four bucks you can see. My goal is three thousand dollars that will pay for all the coffee I drink for one year. So I ‘
Ve got some coffee here and now I’m. Going to add the donation form right, so we ‘ Ll, choose donation form from the gift shortcodes I’ll, choose to buy me coffee, and then we can hide the title. We can hide the content and we ‘
Ll show all fields right so insert this shortcode here and then we will click, publish all right. So now we’ll look at the page and we have a very simple donation, the page where it says buy me coffee. You have the copy, you have the form and then we have this, which I will remove that most people.
The experts will recommend you have only one call to action on the page, so I’m using convert it for my forms, but I will choose to display. None here update that, and now we have only one thing on the page, and that is the donation form, so that’s, it that’s, how you get up and running with give just to recap: I did this because somebody Asked me: should they use Patreon, essentially for a donation-based thing that they were doing while Patreon is great for a lot of things, that’s more of a subscription service where people can pledge to support your content, creation or artistic goals? A lot of artists are on there and that’s.
What Patreon is best for what he was looking for was something more like GoFundMe, which is a platform where you can set a goal, and then people can make a one-time donation. He was running a WordPress site, so I recommend he check out give at giving WP comm because you can easily add it to your own WordPress site.
There’s, no Commission’s, so you get ever the payment gateway fees and it’s free and easy to set up. Now I did allude to something earlier where I said you have the platform. If you use something like Kickstarter or GoFundMe or Patreon, the problem is that those platforms are used by lots of people.
So you can ‘ T really rely on extra publicity that you’re, going to get from them because you want to build up a little bit of trust right. I don’t think that the benefit of the audience for that platform is worth the Commission that you pay.
I have a Patreon because I wanted to get it set up quickly and easily, but if I’m going to redo this sometime in the future, I’m, probably going to use, give on top of their free plugin. They have a bunch of add-ons, so you can buy them.
You know you can buy the bundles, but we can also look at just individual add-ons. So so, if I were doing this today, I would definitely use give and some of their paid add-ons where I can turn on recurring donations.
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