When you’re starting a website, it’s important to make sure that you have a clear and concise donation policy in place. This will help your visitors know how they can donate to your site, and it will also help you avoid any potential conflicts of interest. Here are some tips on how to set up a clear and concise donation policy on your website:

  1. Make sure that all donations are clearly labeled as such. This will help visitors know which donations are for the website itself, and which donations are for marketing or other purposes.
  2. Make sure that donors can easily donate money to your site by using PayPal or another online donation platform. This will ensure that donors can easily donate money without having to worry about their credit card information being stolen or used in an unauthorized way.
  3. Make sure that donors can easily find out how much money they’ve donated so far. This will help donors feel confident about donating money to your site, and it will also help you track the progress of donations over time.
  4. Keep track of the total amount of money donated by all donors on your website. This will help you determine whether or not you’re making enough money from donations from individual donors, and it will also help you determine whether or not you’re losing any money from donations overall.

If You Have a Goal: Use GoFundMe or Kickstarter

Sometimes, the best way to raise money is on other platforms. This has a few benefits: You don’t need to handle payments yourself, you don’t need to set up a website if you don’t want to, and it gives you an easy external link to spread awareness. Plus, people on the platform itself can browse through trending fundraisers, which is more exposure for you.

Services like GoFundMe and Kickstarter work best if you have a specific goal in mind that you want to get crowdfunded. GoFundMe can be used for anything, although it has a reputation for being used for medical bills and other serious emergencies. Kickstarter is generally used for creative projects and inventions that need early funding. IndieGoGo is another alternative.

For a Monthly Subscription: Use Patreon

Subscription models are the secret to long-term, sustainable income for many companies, and the same applies to donations. Getting someone to donate $1 a month, every month is a lot better than getting them to donate $10 once and forget about it. Once they’re subscribed, many people will stay subscribed.

Patreon is a subscription-based crowdfunding platform. It’s commonly used by YouTubers, artists, and other creators, but there’s no limit to what you can use it for. For example, it’s often used for open-source software products to support the developers. It has made it possible for many developers to quit their jobs to work on their projects full time without having to worry about severely fluctuating income.

It can also be used to give access to exclusive downloads. This could be used to sell your product on a subscription model, but in the case of software products, it’s also used to give early beta access to supporters before the general public. For some, it’s used to give access to support communities on Discord as well.

Accepting Direct Donations with PayPal

If you’d rather just have a “Donate” button on your website, PayPal makes it really easy. You will, of course, need a PayPal account to receive funds, which you can transfer out to your bank account periodically.

Once you have an account, making the buttons is really simple. Head over to this configurator page and enter your info. You will need to enter your email, and you can edit the style of the button.

Then, you’ll get a form like this that you can add to your site.

This is just a form that gets sent to paypal.com/donate. You can edit the style however you’d like. (The default button is quite ugly.) The last img tag is a tracking pixel, which you can actually remove.

Alternatively, you can just link to paypal.com/donate with your email address as the “business” parameter as well as the currency code.

In either case, donations will be immediately accessible in your PayPal account, although you might have to wait a few days to transfer them to your bank account.

Accepting Cryptocurrency Donations

This one is extremely simple. All you have to do to receive cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum is leave your wallet address somewhere on your site. Since payment processing is handled by the blockchain, you don’t need to set anything up, and anyone can send crypto to your wallet if they have the address.

You will, of course, need a crypto wallet to receive money as well as a way to sell it for paper money. You can set one up easily at Coinbase, which you can also use to sell crypto on their exchange.