Cheerful Give

Beautiful fundraising, no platform fee, right on your own WordPress site.

Cheerful Give turns any WordPress site into a warm, welcoming place to give. Drop in one shortcode and your supporters get a fast, mobile-first donation form they can complete in a few taps, one-off or monthly, in your own currency, with Apple Pay, Google Pay and cards. It’s for anyone raising money online: nonprofits and charities, churches, schools and clubs, community groups, creators and campaigns, anywhere Stripe operates.

And the best part: you keep 100% of every donation.

🙌 New to this? We’ll help you set it up, free. Most organisations are live in under 10 minutes, and if you’d like a hand, friendly one-to-one setup help is always available at no cost. Just get in touch through getcheerful.org and we’ll help you get your first donation form live.

💯 No platform fee, and here’s what that means

Cheerful never takes a percentage of your donations. Every gift goes straight into your own Stripe account and you keep 100% of it. (Stripe’s standard card processing fee still applies, exactly as it would with any Stripe integration, and is paid to Stripe, not to us.)

So how is the plugin free to run? Through an entirely optional tip. At checkout, a donor can choose to add a small tip toward keeping Cheerful free, on top of their gift, or skip it in a single tap. That tip is the donor’s own contribution to us; it never comes out of your donation, so you receive the full gift either way, whether the donor tips or not.

✨ Why Cheerful Give?

Everything you need to accept donations on your own site is built into the free plugin: a beautiful branded form, one-off and recurring gifts, Gift Aid, reporting and privacy tools. Connect Stripe with one click, add a shortcode, and you’re raising money in minutes, with a built-in test mode to try it all first, no platform fee, and nothing to unlock.

🎨 Beautiful, on-brand donation forms

• A fast, mobile-first form that works on any device, added with a single [cheerful-give] shortcode
• One-off or monthly giving, each with your own preset amounts, plus a custom-amount option
• Gift Aid for UK charities, with HMRC-approved declaration wording, for an extra 25% at no cost to the donor (elsewhere, it simply stays off)
• Unlimited campaigns, each with its own goal, preset amounts and story, with nothing to unlock
• Make it yours: primary and hover colours, corner radius, shadow, border, width, a header image and the font, all with a live preview as you edit
• A friendly live-donations popup that celebrates recent gifts and encourages others to give
• Translation-ready, and you can optionally hide the small “Powered by Cheerful” credit

💳 Payment methods

• Apple Pay, Google Pay and cards, all powered by Stripe
• Accept donations in your own currency: GBP, USD, EUR, AUD, CAD or NZD
• An optional “cover the fees” switch, so donors can add the card fee and even more of each gift reaches you
• 100% of each gift is paid straight into your own Stripe account, with no platform fee

✉️ Automatic emails, so you can set it and forget it

• An optional thank-you and receipt email to every donor, set up once
• A friendly notice to a monthly donor if a card payment ever fails, with a secure link to update it
• A new-donation notification to your team, plus optional large-donation alerts
• An optional monthly summary email, so you always know how giving is going

📊 Fundraising reporting you can act on

• A clean dashboard with total raised, average gift, Gift Aid claimable, recurring gifts and a monthly trend
• Quick filters and date ranges, plus your top campaigns and top donors at a glance
• Export your donations and donors to CSV, or straight to QuickBooks and Xero for reconciliation
• Every figure leads with the amount actually given to you, so your books and your Gift Aid claim start from the right number

🔒 Donor management and privacy

• See your supporters and their giving at a glance, and export a stewardship list of your top donors
• Donors give with no account to create; a monthly gift continues until cancelled through Stripe’s secure billing portal
• Per-donation anonymity, so each donor can give publicly or privately
• An optional mailing-list opt-in on the form, unticked by default, with a subscriber list you can export as CSV for your own email tool
• Optional privacy-policy and terms consent, with on/off toggles
• Built-in tools to export or anonymise a donor’s data (GDPR, CCPA and similar), wired into WordPress’s own Export and Erase Personal Data tools, plus automatic anonymisation after your chosen retention period

↩️ Refunds without the headache

Refund a donation from your own Stripe dashboard and Cheerful does the rest: it automatically returns the donor’s optional tip (in full on a full refund, or proportionally on a partial one) and updates your dashboard totals to match.

🛡️ Security your donors can trust

• Card details are entered directly into Stripe’s own secure fields and never touch your website or our servers
• Payments run on Stripe, a PCI-compliant, industry-leading payment provider, over encrypted connections
• Your organisation connects its own Stripe account and is paid directly; you never hold Stripe platform credentials on your site
• The donation form is served only over HTTPS, and the payment endpoints are protected against abuse

🤝 How Cheerful is funded

Cheerful is free to use and takes no platform fee. It’s kept going by two entirely optional things:

• An optional donor tip at checkout, a small, skippable contribution toward keeping Cheerful free for everyone. It’s collected as a Stripe application fee; your organisation still receives its full gift.
• An optional paid Mailsync Plus upgrade from getcheerful.org, which adds automatic mailing-list syncing to Brevo, ActiveCampaign, HubSpot and Klaviyo. Mailchimp and MailerLite syncing is free, and the core plugin is free and fully functional without any of it.

🌍 Who it’s for

Cheerful works for organisations and individuals of every size and cause:

• Churches and faith groups: collections, tithes, offerings and ministry appeals
• Animal shelters and rescues: fund medical care, rescue work and adoption drives
• Food banks and community aid: raise money to feed and support your neighbours
• Schools and PTAs: donations for trips, programmes and classroom supplies
• Charities and foundations: accept one-off and regular gifts for any programme
• Arts and culture: fund performances, exhibitions and creative projects
• Clubs, teams and community groups: subs, fundraisers and member support
• Creators, campaigns and individuals: a tip jar, a cause or a personal fundraiser

If you can add a shortcode to a page, you can raise money with Cheerful, in your own currency, without handing a slice of every donation to a platform.

🧩 Add-on (optional, separate plugin)

The plugin is free and complete on its own. One optional add-on is available separately from getcheerful.org:

• Mailsync: automatically sync new mailing-list opt-ins to your email platform. Mailchimp and MailerLite sync for free; an optional paid Mailsync Plus tier adds Brevo, ActiveCampaign, HubSpot and Klaviyo. Without it, the free plugin still captures opt-ins and exports them as CSV for your email tool.

External services

This plugin connects to third-party services to take payments. No data is sent until a visitor makes a donation.

Stripe: payment processing. When a donor pays, their payment and donation details are sent to Stripe to create and confirm the charge, and Stripe’s JavaScript is loaded from js.stripe.com on pages showing the donation form. Organisations connect their own Stripe account, and funds are paid directly to them. Stripe.js sets functional cookies required to process payments (not used for tracking or advertising).

• Terms: https://stripe.com/legal
• Privacy: https://stripe.com/privacy

Cheerful payments backend (api.thegiver.dev), a Cheerful-hosted service that performs the Stripe operations on the organisation’s behalf, so organisations never have to hold Stripe platform credentials on their own site. When a donation is made, the plugin sends the following to https://api.thegiver.dev over HTTPS, authenticated with a per-site token: the donation amount, any optional tip, the frequency, the campaign, the donor’s first name, last name and email, and, only if the donor opts in to Gift Aid, their name and home address. The service creates the charge or subscription on the connected Stripe account and returns donation events to your site. It is also used during the one-click “Connect with Stripe” step and, on a daily schedule, to fetch the non-personal tip options shown at checkout. No personal data is sent for those configuration or connection requests.

• Terms of Service: https://getcheerful.org/terms-of-service/
• Privacy Policy: https://getcheerful.org/privacy-policy/
• Data Processing Agreement: https://getcheerful.org/data-processing-agreement/
• Cookie Policy: https://getcheerful.org/cookie-policy/
• Sub-processors: https://getcheerful.org/sub-processors/

This plugin does not contact Mailchimp, MailerLite, Brevo, ActiveCampaign, HubSpot, Klaviyo or any other email provider. It captures mailing-list opt-ins and exports them as CSV for you to import into your own email tool. Automatic syncing is handled only by the optional, separately-installed Mailsync add-on, whose own documentation covers the data it sends.

Cheerful support diagnostic log (optional), off by default. If you turn on “Diagnostic logging” (Home → Support) to help troubleshoot a problem, the plugin records PHP errors on your site to a private log file in your uploads folder. Nothing leaves your site until you click “Send log to support”, which emails the log to Cheerful ([email protected]). The log records error messages only, but those can occasionally contain personal data, so you can download and review it first. Logging switches itself off automatically after one week.

Donor records are stored in your own WordPress database. You should disclose the use of Stripe and Cheerful (and the Mailsync add-on, if you install it) in your site’s privacy and cookie policies.

Quick setup

Most organisations are up and running in well under 10 minutes. If you need a hand setting up, get in touch through getcheerful.org.

1. Install and activate. Install Cheerful Give from Plugins → Add New, or upload the cheerful-give folder to /wp-content/plugins/, then activate it. A new Cheerful menu appears in your WordPress admin.
2. Turn on test mode (recommended first). Go to Cheerful → Home → Set up and enable Test mode, so you can try the whole flow with Stripe test cards before taking any real money.
3. Connect Stripe. Click Connect with Stripe and complete the one-click connection with your organisation’s Stripe account. There are no API keys to copy and no webhooks to configure. Cheerful handles that for you. You return to a “Your Stripe account is connected” confirmation.
4. Add your donation form. Create or edit a page and add the [cheerful-give] shortcode. A default campaign works out of the box; add more under Cheerful → Campaigns and target one with [cheerful-give campaign="your-campaign-slug"].
5. Make a test donation. Publish the page and pay with the Stripe test card 4242 4242 4242 4242, any future expiry, any CVC and any postcode. You’ll see the thank-you screen, and the gift appears under Cheerful → Dashboard (switch it to “test”).
6. Go live. Turn test mode off and you’re ready to accept real donations.

Your site must be served over HTTPS for the donation form to appear (a Stripe requirement). On a non-HTTPS site the plugin shows an admin notice and hides the form.

Credits

This plugin bundles the Bricolage Grotesque typeface (© 2022 The Bricolage Grotesque Project Authors), designed by Mathieu Triay and licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1. The font is self-hosted (never loaded from a third-party CDN). The full licence is included at assets/fonts/OFL.txt. Source: https://github.com/ateliertriay/bricolage