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Are you a church, charity or not-for-profit organization and want to set up an online donations page and learn how to collect Online donations for free, but don’t know how to do this?
Well, this Stripe payment links tutorial is designed just for you!
We are going to take a dive deep into how to collect donations in Stripe using their payment links feature.
Haven’t heard of Stripe before?
You’re missing out!
Stripe is a popular payment processing software used by both small and large businesses to collect and manage online payments.
One of the reasons we love Stripe is that you can seamlessly integrate the platform with website builders such as Wix and E-commerce platforms like Shopify.
Essentially, Stripe is an easy yet amazing way to keep track of all your online payments.
Read more: Best website builder for online stores.
How To Collect Online Donations for Free?
In this brief Stripe tutorial, we’re going to share how to use Stripe donations with Stripes free donation software so you can simply create an online donation form within minutes and start collecting and capturing donations.
Let’s go ahead and learn how to collect donations for charity!
1. Getting Started With Collecting Online Donations With Stripe
To collect donations in Stripe for your organization, you’ll first need to create a donation page.
You can actually do this for free with Stripe.
All you need to do is:
- Simply head over to Stripe.com in your chosen browser or click here.
That’s going to take you to the landing page.
Read more: How To Create A Free Payment Landing Page with Stripe
2. Stripe Pricing
It’s important to note that whilst Stripe is a free donation software and is free to create an account with no subscription fees, they do have a pay-as-you-go pricing model.
This means that you pay 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction (see screengrab).
What exactly does this mean?
Basically, every time that you receive a donation through Stripe, Stripe will take 2.9% plus 30 cents from those donations.
Stripe also offers a discounted processing fee for not-for-profits.
If you’re completely new to Stripe and you’ve never used Stripe before then we recommend reading our complete Stripe beginners tutorial before continuing with this tutorial.
That tutorial will guide you through the process of understanding how Stripe works and how to initially set up your account.
Go ahead and sign-up and sign into your Stripe account.
We’ll meet you inside your Stripe account and continue with this tutorial on How to Collect Online Donations for Free!
Also read: How to Use PayPal to send and receive money.
3. How To Use Payment Links
First, you’ll need to locate the ‘Payment Links’ feature within your Stripe account.
- Navigate over and click on ‘More’ located in the menu at the top of the page.
- Select ‘Payment links’ under ‘Direct Payments’.
That’s going to take you here where you can customize and preview what your payment or donation page will look like (see screengrab).
- Navigate over and click on the ‘Select type’ drop-down menu.
- Click on ‘Customers choose what to pay’.
This is best for tipping donations or Pay what you want donations.
If you want to learn more about how you can create a payment page for ‘Products or subscriptions’, check out our guide here where we walk you through the process of using the Payment link feature to create a payment page.
Also read: How To Collect Online Donations On Any Website For Free
4. How To Customize Donation Page
For the purpose of this tutorial showing you how to collect donations in Stripe, we’re going to create a donation page for your organization.
To do that:
- Click on ‘Customers choose what to pay’.
- Simply navigate down and add a title for your donation page under ‘Title’.
We’re going to create an example organization called ‘The Heart Foundation’.
Ideally, you want the title to be either the name of your organization or the name of the cause or event that you’re using to collect donations.
Once you’ve added your title name:
- Type in a description for your donation page under ‘Description’.
We’re going to add ‘Every dollar you donate goes towards children born with heart issues’.
- Navigate over to ‘Image’ and click on ‘Upload’.
- Locate and click on the image that you want to use.
Ideally, you should add a logo or image that’s relevant to your donation page.
You can read our beginner’s guide on how to make a logo for free.
Currently this is what our donation form will look like! (see screengrab)
- As you can see, we have the name of this page which is the name of the organization ‘The Heart Foundation’.
- Then we have the amount that people can donate.
- And we have a description about our organization, issue, cause or event.
Once you’ve added in these details:
- Navigate over to the left-hand side and add your chosen currency under the drop-down menu ‘Currency’.
We’re going to keep the ‘New Zealand dollar’ selected.
- Select ‘Suggest a present amount’ if you like.
‘Present amount’ is the minimum amount that you want people to donate to your organization or cause.
We’re going to select this and add ‘Ten dollars’.
As you can see, if we now navigate up here (see screengrab), donors can simply change the amount if they like.
Alternatively, if you don’t want to set a ‘Present amount’, you can:
- Navigate down and click ‘Set limits’.
This is where you can add a minimum amount and a maximum amount.
These settings are completely up to you and your organization!
Once you’ve selected these settings:
- Come down and click on ‘Advanced options’.
This is where we can change the call to action button.
At the moment, you can see we have ‘Pay’ as the call to action button (see screengrab).
To change your call to action button:
- Simply select the drop-down menu below ‘Advanced options’.
- Choose what you want your call to action button to be called.
We’re going to change ours to ‘Donate’.
As you can see, our call to action button on our donation page is now ‘Donate’ and then the amount that the donor can add (see screengrab).
- Navigate back down to ‘Advanced options’.
You also have the option to add specific information that you want to capture.
You can select or unselect:
- ‘Allow business customers to provide tax IDs’.
- ‘Collect customers addresses’.
- ‘Require customers to provide a phone number’.
Depending on the nature of your organization, how you collect donations, and what you do with the donors’ information, you can simply go ahead and collect the customer’s addresses if you like.
We’re going to enable ‘Collect customers addresses’ and select ‘Billing and addresses only’ (see screengrab) as we don’t need their billing and shipping address.
We’re also going to select ‘Require customers to provide a phone number’.
Again, these advanced options are purely based on your organization’s requirements, so take the time to go through these and select or deselect relevant settings for your organization.
Also read: How To Set Up Recurring Payments in PayPal
5. Customize Confirmation Page
Once you’ve done that, follow these steps to customize your confirmation page:
- Navigate up to the top and click on ‘Confirmation page’ next to ‘Payment page’.
- Under ‘Confirmation page’, select ‘Show confirmation page’.
This will then preview your confirmation page on the right-hand side.
If you’d like to create a custom confirmation message, follow these steps:
- Under ‘Show confirmation page’, select ‘Replace default custom message’.
- Type in your custom message that you want your donors to see after they’ve made a donation.
We’re going to quickly add a custom message (see screengrab).
Alternatively, you have the option to not show a confirmation page and just redirect your customers to your website.
- Come down and select ‘Don’t show confirmation page’.
This works perfectly for businesses that have a ‘Thank you’ page on their website, or a specific destination on their website where they want donors to arrive once they’ve made a donation.
Again, this is completely up to you and what works well for your business.
We’re happy with the default confirmation page and our custom message.
Once you’ve customized your confirmation page and your payment page, you can preview both of these pages across your desktop and mobile.
- Select the desktop and mobile icons on the right-hand side (see screengrab).
When you’re happy with your donation page:
- Simply navigate up to and click on ‘Create link’.
As you can see, it’s as simple as that to create a free donation website through a donation page with Stripe!
6. Let’s Start Collecting Online Donations For Free!
Just a few more steps and you’ll be all set on how to use Stripe donations and how to collect donations for charity.
You can now use your payment link in your marketing materials.
- Simply click ‘Copy’ to copy your link (see screengrab).
You can add this link to your website, across your social media channels and more.
- Next to ‘Copy’, click on ‘QR code to generate a QR code’.
You can then embed this QR code on your website (or other marketing materials) so that your potential donors can simply open their phone camera, scan the QR code and then make that donation.
- Navigate over and click on the three dots next to ‘QR code’.
- Select ‘Deactivate’ to deactivate your donation page if you like.
Additionally, Stripe provides useful ‘Tips for using your link’ on the right-hand side of this screen (see screengrab).
Read more: How to create a QR code for FREE.
7. Donation Page Test
Let’s go ahead and see what our donation page will look like from the perspective of a potential donor!
- Simply navigate back up to and click on ‘Copy’.
- Head over to your browser.
- Paste in this link.
As you can see, this is the donation page that potential donors will see when they open up that link.
- They can then navigate over to and click on ‘Change amount’ and add the amount that they want to donate to your organization.
- On the right-hand side, they’ll need to input contact information, card information, and billing address information.
- Once they’ve inputted that information, they can navigate down and click ‘Donate’.
As you can see, it’s as simple as that to quickly create a donation page to start collecting donations in Stripe from your donors for your organization completely for free!
That concludes this tutorial on how to collect donations online for free.
We hope you are now confident in this process and can now simply start collecting donations using the Stripes payment links feature.
We hope you gained value from this brief tutorial and now know how to collect donations for charity using Stripe’s free donation software!
How to Collect Online Donations for Free with Stripe (Video Guide)
Feel free to check out our video guide below for more information on how to use Stripe donations for your organization or charity to boost your online donations!
