WP Crowdfunding: The Complete Solution for Fundraising Websites

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Remember the days when you thought that creating a crowdfunding platform like Kickstarter or Indiegogo would cost you a fortune? Wait, you still do? No wonder people call you old school! Let me tell you this: making a crowdfunding website is very easy these days.

You can do it with WordPress — just adding a WordPress crowdfunding plugin would be enough to make a fully-fledged crowdfunding site within an hour. There are a lot of crowdfunding plugins out there, but since you're a busy person and researching on your own will be very time consuming, I'm going to recommend you my favorite one: WP Crowdfunding, which is by the way the best-selling WordPress plugin in it's category.

What does the WP Crowdfunding plugin have in it for a fundraising site?

WP Crowdfunding is entirely based on WooCommerce, which allows you to use your familiar WooCommerce interface in the backend. And for your campaign owners, they don't need to worry about roaming on the dashboard because this WordPress crowdfunding plugin comes with front-end form submission to submit their campaigns/projects and many other frontend operations to run their campaigns/projects properly.

Let's have a look at the key features of WP Crowdfunding plugin.

• A theme designed for crowdfunding sites

• Based on WooCommerce to provide a familiar and solid platform

• Unlimited rewards for each campaign

• Stripe Connect payments

• PayPal adaptive payments to easily split payments

• Email notifications option

• More detailed analytical reports

• Google reCAPTCHA to protect from spam

• Custom project start date & end date option

• Minimum, maximum, and recommended price option

• Campaign end method with different types

• Display the backer in project single page

• Template overriding system for developers

• Multiple methods to end campaigns- monetary goal, date, or unlimited

• Native wallet payment system

Now let's dig deeper into some of the core features.

Full control over the platform

As the owner of the platform, you might want to have complete control over the the platform. It will help you protect against misuse and everything will happen right before your eyes. This WordPress crowdfunding plugin lets you have control over sign up, project publishing, withdraw request etc. You can configure the settings from the backend.

I like the project approval settings because it lets you approve all campaigns manually, so you have the complete control of what kind of campaigns you want to run on your fundraising platform. You can also set the limit of minimum and maximum withdraw request from the backend as well.

Dedicated WordPress theme

You can use this WordPress crowdfunding plugin on any WordPress theme, but to enjoy a smoother experience and to have a friendly user interface, the paid version of this plugin provides a special crowdfunding theme inside the package. The plugin integrates with the theme properly so you need not worry about buying other themes.

Template overriding

The WP Crowdfunding plugin supports template overriding, so if you want to change anything, you can customize the style of the page/element very easily. New enhancements will stay the same even after updating the plugin to a new version. If you want to know more on how to change the template style you can checkout this link.

User dashboard to manage profile and campaign details

In order to make your fundraising platform stand out from others, you've got to provide your users with a super-friendly front-end environment. This WordPress Crowdfunding plugin offers a few predefined pages that will take care of all of your front end operations. Dashboard, My Account, Campaigns list and Add New Campaign are the key pages of the frontend operation. You can create other important pages using shortcodes. Check out these handy shortcodes from this link.

Let's have a detailed look at the front end operations.

Dashboard

Summary: One of the things that you definitely want to have on a Dashboard page, it will let you see the overview of all of your campaigns. You can see the summary of the total fund raised, and total number of pledges received. There are few predefined ranges but you can select the date range to get a specific summary.

My Campaigns: All of your campaigns will be listed under My Campaigns. To give you a quick access to all the campaigns, the list is provided on the dashboard page. You can get to the main campaign details page right from here. Let's have a look at the campaign overview page.

The campaign detail page provides four sections: campaign story, backer list, updates and reviews. All of them are pretty self-explanatory — campaign story shows the details of the campaign, backer list shows the list of backers that have contributed to this campaign so far. If you want to make the backer anonymous you can do that as well.

My Campaigns: All your campaigns will be shown here and you will have the access to modify them. There is an "Update" button using which you can post an announcement regarding any particular campaign. The "Edit" button will allow you to make changes in your campaign.

Add New Campaign

You can create a new campaign from this page. All the options in this page are pretty self explanatory but I'll highlight the key features. The frontend editor offers the same visual and text editor as found the default one on the WordPress backend.

Project customization

Project customization of this WordPress crowdfunding plugin lets the campaign creator customize their campaign. It offers interesting features like recommended amount and predefined pledge amount. Users can select their project goal and thus the project ending method.

There are actually four project ending methods in this WordPress crowdfunding plugin - Target Goal, Target Date, Target Goal & Date, and Campaign Never Ends.

As mentioned earlier, if the campaign owner does not want to show the backer information on the site, they need to enable "Contributor Anonymity" from the Add New Campaign page.

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by SitePoint Team via SitePoint