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3 WordPress Plugins for Giving and Donations

As digital currency continues to play an increasing role in the way today’s financial transactions are made, churches and non-profits understandably desire more flexible and secure options for giving. 

At Truepath, we recognize that you want these options. Online giving tools have the advantage of simplifying and automating the giving process, which lends itself to more regular giving. 

When conveniently offered through your website or an individual member’s mobile phone, givers will appreciate how this complements their anywhere-banking approach to finances. 

As a WordPress user, you can easily add this functionality to your site by choosing from any number of proven giving/donation plugins, each with a variety of features that add flexibility to the giving process. 

But before we go any further, we want you to know: if working with plugins isn’t something you want to tackle, Truepath web design services are at your disposal. We can help you seamlessly integrate your chosen plugin to keep your website running smoothly. 

That said, here’s an overview of 3 WordPress giving plugins for you to consider as you add giving/donation functionalities that will best fit your church or nonprofit’s needs: 

1. GiveWP 

GiveWP promises “more donations, less hassle.” 

Some giving sites have links that take users to a secondary site, which may be confusing to givers. The great thing about GiveWP is that it’s actually embedded into your site to streamline and simplify the process. 

In addition, GiveWP’s customizable donation forms go beyond a simple button like PayPal, which cannot be customized to fit your organization’s brand. This fact alone can provide givers with a greater sense of trust.

Utilizing donation page best practices, GiveWP’s flexibility and robust functionality inspire givers for optimized online fundraising. 

Donations can be made as one-time gifts, or with advanced versions, be set up as recurring for regular givers. (GiveWP does offer a free version, however, if you want these additional features/add-ons, prices range from $149 to $599 annually). 

Here are some of the features you’ll receive with the free version:

  • Unlimited Donation Forms
  • Stripe & PayPal Payment Options
  • Donor Management
  • Insightful Reporting
  • Donor Dashboard
  • Customizable Email Receipts and Notifications
  • Multi-step Donation Form
  • Multiple Donation Form Templates
  • Donor Wall
  • Form Grid
  • On-site Credit Card Donations
  • and more.

Advanced plans offer:

  • Recurring Donations
  • Form Field Manager
  • Fee Recovery
  • Funds and Designations
  • Tributes
  • Salesforce
  • Currency Switcher
  • Annual Receipts
  • licenses for multiple sites 
  • Customer support packages, and more.

 

2. WPForms

WPForms boasts over 5 million plus users – a strong sign of a trusted plugin. It offers attractive, pre-built form templates on which to build and customize the form you need. 

Whether for donations, event registrations, surveys, or contact forms, building your form is easy with a simple drag & drop builder. (You can see their over 600+ pre-made web form templates here).

Flexible giving options are also possible with integrated payment gateways through PayPal, Stripe, and Authorize.net, with credit cards.  

Prices start at $49.50 (basic version) and top out at $299.50 (Elite package) per year.

The basic version of WPForms provides:

  • Use on 1 Site
  • Unlimited Forms
  • Unlimited Submissions
  • Unlimited Users
  • All Essential Features
  • Form Templates
  • Entry Management
  • Advanced Form Fields
  • Field Validation
  • Smart Conditional Logic
  • File Uploads
  • Form Notifications
  • Improve communication with automated follow-up emails after form submission.
  • Send customized internal emails to notify the right team member or department
  • And more.

With the Plus and above versions you receive a license to use WPForms on additional sites, the ability to accept payments through PayPal, etc., and the following marketing Integrations:

  • Mailchimp
  • AWeber
  • Constant Contact
  • GetResponse
  • Campaign Monitor
  • Drip
  • Sendinblue
  • MailerLite

 

  1. Formidable Forms

Like WPForms, Formidable Forms uses a user-friendly drag-and-drop process, allowing the creation of “solutions-focused” WordPress forms that complement and integrate perfectly with your site. 

Possible forms include donations, as well as surveys, quizzes, contact forms, registration forms, payment forms, lead forms, calculator forms, and many more.

At the time of this writing, pricing starts at $39.50 per year for the basic version and ranges up to $299.50/yr. for the elite package.  

Basic version features include:

  • 65+ Form Templates
  • File Uploads
  • Multi-Page Forms
  • Repeaters
  • Conditional Logic
  • Review Before Submit
  • Seamless Styling
  • Conditional Redirects
  • Unlimited Forms
  • Unlimited Monthly Entries
  • 1 Site

The business version ($199.50/yr) provides 200+ Form Templates, Calculators, Signatures, Collect Payments, Forms to PDF, Export Tables to CSV, ACF Front-End Forms, Google Sheets, Geolocation, Formidable Forms API, Zapier (5000+ Apps) and more, while the Elite version gives you all this as well as Salesforce, Hubspot, and white labeling.

Final thoughts

Your organization’s needs will determine the best giving/donation plugin for you. Making the process pain-free for your givers is key, so you’ll probably put greater weight on factors like ease of use, flexibility, recurring giving functionality, branding options, and the ability to offer a variety of payment options.     

Truepath’s vision is to empower Christian organizations and businesses to take full advantage of their online presence by providing affordable and best-in-class applications and dedicated, live customer support. You can reach us at (760) 480–8791.

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Afterlife, after Easter

by Stephen Trout

It’s a misnomer, really, this thing we call “afterlife.”

As if this present age we’re living in is the real life, and what follows is necessarily something far less.   

But is it? 

If we accept that premise – as Ricky Gervais’ character Tony does in the fascinating series After Life – we may find ourselves justifying all kinds of things we didn’t expect in the here and now.

For example, after his wife dies, Tony seriously contemplates suicide as an option – but opts instead for bitterly living and punishing this world by saying and doing whatever he likes. 

It sounds tragic – but why not, right? Who’s to say that shouldn’t be done, if there isn’t anything more and we all just disappear?

Not caring for himself or anybody else almost becomes like a superpower for Tony – a kind of artificial life that gives him purpose in his seemingly purposeless world.   

But (as you might have guessed) that “life” doesn’t quite work out – at least the way Tony envisioned. Turns out, people don’t actually enjoy being so mistreated (surprise, surprise).

Again, we might say that Tony’s version of dealing with “after life” might sound extreme, but there’s a logic to it. Why not live how you want if we all end in despair eventually?

But that wasn’t Jesus’ story; and because it wasn’t, a revolution took place that changed the world. 

Life… because of Easter

You don’t have to be a Christian to acknowledge the above statement about a world-changing revolution.

Respected historian Tom Holland isn’t (though he may be in process), and yet calls what happened after Christ’s resurrection, “the most disruptive, the most influential and the most enduring revolution in history.”

What Holland observes as world-changing has impacted everything – from our ideas of freedom, progress, equality, and much more.

Though we could discuss each of those in detail (read his book, or Glen Scrivener’s excellent The Air We Breathe), one thing that was especially powerful was how it reshaped our whole notion of after-life.

For Jesus, passing through that door was a truly death-shattering moment. After enduring the hell of separation from his Father on the cross, he punched a hole in the grave and walked victoriously through. 

And when we see him soon after, his still-scarred hands have made a fire on the beach and are cooking some fish to feed his friends. Life giving life, as he always did.

This triumph over sin and death that we celebrate as Easter was actually a passage – not to some post-life nothingness – but to a new and better existence and physicality. So it will be for all who, by grace, follow in his train (Ps. 68:18, 2 Cor. 2:14).

So what does all this have to do with your vision of life – displayed on your website and through your everyday loving of others in ministry? Or to say it another way, what does life look like after Easter, in our here-and-now challenges and struggles?

For starters, I’d like to suggest that it tells us at least 2 things:

1. “afterlife” isn’t our real story. 

Rather, we’ve been written into a new and far better story – one where the hopelessness and despair and death we see all around us (and that Tony felt) isn’t the final word. 

Though we grieve those things – particularly when we see that life wasn’t designed to be ripped apart like that – we find we’re in a story that is far more glorious and hopeful, one where creation’s release from its bondage to decay and “all things new” is the Savior’s plan (Romans 8:21, Revelation 21:5). 

Not only that, our lives become even more real and “physical” as we are made alive in Jesus by grace, through faith, and become better lovers of created things — people especially.

The great and self-titled “most reluctant convert” CS Lewis found this out, and tried hard to picture this in his writings. He knew that, rightly grasped, this vision of the “real life” that Jesus brought should fire our imaginations. Consider some of the pictures which Lewis used to describe our new birth in Christ, by grace:  

“It is like passing from death into life, or like laying down your rebel arms and surrendering, or like saying sorry, or like killing part of yourself, or like learning to walk or to write, or like buying God a present with his own money… or like a tin soldier or a statue becoming alive, or like a horse turning into a Pegasus, or like a compass needle swinging to north, or like a dark greenhouse transformed as the roof suddenly becomes bright in the sunlight….”

2. “Real” life is a Person. 

It’s not as if we receive a life gift – like CPR or a transfusion – and then go off on our own, disconnected from the Giver. That’s not how this story unfolds.  

That’s because the One who wrote himself into this play is Himself Life (John 14:6). 

Even before demonstrating that through his resurrection, think of how he tried to tell us that: he said he is bread, our sustenance; he called himself “living water;” he said we’re like a branch engrafted into a vine, and he is that vine. Nourishment comes only as we’re in Him, not by trying to muster up life on our own.

The truth is, when heaven came down to earth – to you – not only in Emmanuel’s incarnation but even more fully at his return, we begin to see what real life is. Our connection to him, he said, is the Way, Truth, and Life.” 

I like what Ann Voskamp writes about this: 

“I do not merely believe in Jesus, I live in Jesus… in this polarized war over what is truth, what is reality, what is identity, what is Christianity, what is evangelicalism, what is wrong, what is right, what is left, all I’ve got left is this: 

Jesus is not a belief to me, He is breath to me, not some theory, but all my gravity, not a lens for my life, but He is my life. The Triune God is not one sphere of some multi-dimensional life — He is atmosphere, terra, lung and the only way to not suffocate in self.

People may almost universally believe that Jesus is a good person, but the only way to have a good life is to choose Jesus as your whole universe. Live in a universe where the sun revolves around you, and eventually you find your life just withering up and dying in a thousand painful ways. 

Create your own alternate god — of self, of some identity, of political power — and you end up living in an alternate reality. The only way to not live in some parallel universe, but in the one and only real world that is our Father’s world — is to come to the Cross of Christ. 

Only when your life revolves around the Son is there any hope of real life.”

Your True Reality

What is your truest reality? What animates your days, and gives hope to your ministry? What is it to know real life – in the light of Easter, and for all your days?

It is this: you were meant to live out of a better story; a story that Tony longs for in which life and love actually go on, forever.  

You were meant for this Life, and that Life is pursuing you even now – for you belong to God.

Truepath’s vision is to empower Christian organizations and businesses to take full advantage of their online presence by providing affordable and best-in-class applications and dedicated, live customer support. You can reach us at: (760) 480–8791.

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20 Blog Post Ideas for your Ministry Website

A regular, well-written blog can do a lot for your site and ministry – from providing helpful resources for growth, to attracting people to your site – even boosting your search engine rankings.

Certainly, there are no shortage of themes and wonderful Gospel promises from Scripture to discuss in a blog, reminding us of God’s faithfulness and fatherly commitment to his children. A series on difficult and frequently misunderstood passages – graciously unfolded – can be another source of ideas for your blog.

Or, you might want to write an “arts and culture” feature that introduces readers to recent books, films, music, and plays that creatively reflect redemption. Like a master artist whose paintings help you see life from a fresh perspective, a regular feature on the arts can reveal God’s beauty and truth in imaginative ways.

In addition, including your own, first-hand life experiences (both struggles and new steps in obedience) not only helps your readers to apply truth and connect personally with your theme, they are also looked highly upon by Google’s new algorithms! And, they’re a great way to keep your blog lively and fresh.

With all this in mind, the following list of 20 blog ideas can help provide that freshness, and spark your creativity when the well may be running a bit dry. (We selected these – with a few modifications – from an even larger list, which can be found here).

Hope it gets your wheels going, and happy writing!

1. Your Favorite People from the Bible (and Christian history)

The Bible is filled with many excellent stories and characters from which any Christian can learn. (That’s part of God’s design in fleshing out his truth!) Create a weekly series where you write about your favorite characters from the Bible or from more recent history, including what you were able to learn from their stories.

2. Your Testimony

Do you have any particular experience where God impacted your life? If so, don’t be shy to write about it. This can be about healing, promotion, being saved from troublesome experiences, etc. You may also choose to end the post by encouraging your audience to share their testimonies in the comment section.

3. How You Struggled with Faith

If you have a personal blog, write about the different times that you have struggled to keep your faith, and how (by grace) you were able to overcome these difficulties. Your audience likely understands the obstacles that can make it difficult to put your faith ahead of many other things, so they will be able to sympathize with this post.

4. Best Devotionals

Create a post where you list your favorite daily devotionals and what makes them unique. Encourage your audience to list any that you may have missed in the comments.

5. Your Favorite Books, Films, and Music

Almost everyone has works of art that inspire them. Write a post containing your (or another’s) favorite book, movie, play, or piece of music, including how it helps you (them) see and worship God more deeply. Your post may also include interviews of artists giving an inside look at what inspired them to create.

6. How You Became a Christian

Share the memory of how you were converted or what caused you to want to dedicate your life to Christianity. Your post may also include what your life was like before you became a Christian, and how it has changed since.

7. What does X Proverb mean?

Create a series where you go through each proverb and write about its explanation. This can be helpful for members of your audience who struggle to find the meaning behind each verse.

8. X Things You Love About Your Church

Create a post where you list the things that make your church special.

9. Best Ways to Communicate with a Child that Does Not Believe in Christianity.

This is one of the many struggles of Christian parents today. Offer advice on the best ways that a parent can speak to a child who doubts Christianity.

10. The Sermon That Changed Your Outlook on Life

Through the course of your Christian life, there may be certain sermons that touched you. Think back deeply about these and give a summary of what the sermon was about. Additionally, if you remember any verses or chapters relating to the sermon, be sure to add these to the post.

11. Best Bible Verses For X

Certain Bible verses can be helpful for Christians dealing with certain issues. Draw your audience’s attention to these by creating a series where you write about the best verses for a problem they may be facing. For example, one of the posts may be, “Best Bible Verses for Dealing With Grief.”

12. Helpful Apps for Christians

Tell your audience about the best apps that can help bring their Christian experience to the digital world e.g., your recommended Bible app, prayer tools, etc.

13. Difference Between the Christian Denominations

A new Christian may get confused by the different sects of Christianity. Create a post where you write about the different branches of Christianity, including a brief history, and the differences between each of them.

 14. Your Favorite Psalms

The book of Psalms is filled with many beautiful verses. Write about your favorite psalms and why they inspire you.

15. Your Favorite Proverbs

Many Christians see the proverbs as the book of wisdom or insight. Create a list of what your favorite proverbs are and encourage your audience to share theirs in the comments.

16. How to Pray for X?

Create a series of posts where you show your audience the best way to pray for certain things. For example, one of your posts may be, “How to Pray for My Wife”.

17. What Does X Biblical Concept Mean?

Fully being able to understand the Bible is not an easy task, and certain parts may still be difficult to interpret despite being a Christian for many years. If you come across phrases or chapters that you think could be challenging to some Christians, create a post explaining what it means.

18. How to Talk to Your Children About Coming to Church

Christian parents who may want their children to attend Church, often find it difficult to get the message across. Create a post where you offer advice on the best ways to get unwilling children to try out Church.

19. How You Memorize Scriptures

Can you quote scripture from memory? If so, create a post about the methods that have helped you easily remember Bible verses. Being able to recall scripture is often seen as an important skill for Christians and your audience will be appreciative of your advice.

20. Interview Your Pastor

During the interview, try to offer information that your audience would love to hear about, such as how they became a pastor.