DonateOcean – Donation Suite
DonateOcean is a WordPress PayPal donation plugin for nonprofits, charities, churches, schools, and fundraising organizations.
Accept one-time and recurring donations, send automated tax receipts, manage donors, track fundraising campaigns, and let supporters manage their own subscriptions through a secure self-service portal. All features are included in the GPL release, with no separate premium add-ons.
Every donation is confirmed by webhook-verified payment: PayPal’s servers notify your site directly, so donations are recorded even if the donor closes their browser before the redirect completes. If a webhook delivery is delayed or temporarily unavailable, the plugin retries verification and updates the donation record once confirmation is received from PayPal.
Why nonprofits choose DonateOcean
- No paid tier, no upsells — every feature shipped is available to every user; you only pay PayPal’s standard processing fees
- Built for fundraising — campaigns, goals, tributes, anonymous giving, and offline donations in one place
- Webhook-backed reliability — donations are recorded even when the browser callback drops
- Donor self-service — donors manage their own subscriptions through a secure magic-link portal, no WordPress account required
- GDPR-aware — includes tools that assist with personal data export, erasure, and retention workflows
Core features
- PayPal Orders API v2 — credit card, debit card, and PayPal balance
- Webhook-verified payments — every donation confirmed by PayPal signature
- Recurring donations — monthly and annual PayPal Subscriptions with admin controls
- Donor self-service portal — donors manage subscriptions via secure magic link
- Four display modes — inline, modal, widget, and full-page donation forms
- Fundraising goals — progress bar with manual or automatic amount tracking
- Campaign date gating — schedule campaign open and close dates
- Tribute donations — “In honor of” and “In memory of” giving
- Anonymous donations and optional fee coverage
- Automated HTML receipts and PDF receipt downloads
- Year-end tax summaries for each donor
- Full admin suite — donations list, detail page, donor profiles, dashboard widgets
- CSV export — up to 10,000 records with all metadata
- Manual donations — record cash, check, and bank transfer donations
- Full and partial refunds via the PayPal Captures API
- Dispute management with automatic tracking and alerts
- Custom roles — Donation Viewer (read-only) and Donation Manager
- Capability-checked admin actions — refunds, settings changes, exports, and manual donation entry are all gated by WordPress capability checks
- GDPR compliant — personal data export, erasure, and retention
- Accessible donation form — keyboard-navigable controls and screen-reader-friendly labels and validation messages
- Gutenberg block with all settings as Inspector Controls
- Translation ready with a complete
.potfile - Zero runtime dependencies — no Composer or npm required
Integrations
Each integration is disabled by default and only activates after credentials are entered.
- Mailchimp — auto-subscribe donors to your mailing list
- Constant Contact — auto-subscribe donors on donation completion
- ActiveCampaign — add donors to your CRM and email lists
- Brevo (Sendinblue) — auto-subscribe with optional double opt-in
- Zapier — trigger 5,000+ app workflows on donation events
- Slack — receive rich donation notifications in any channel
- Twilio SMS — get text alerts for donations, refunds, and disputes
- Google Sheets — log every donation to a spreadsheet automatically
Shortcodes
Add the donation form to any page or post:
[donadosu_donation]
Examples:
[donadosu_donation campaign="building-fund" goal_amount="50000" goal_current="auto"]
[donadosu_donation display_mode="modal" donation_mode="both" fee_coverage="1"]
[donadosu_donation amounts="25,50,100,250" min_amount="10" button_text="Donate Now"]
Add a self-service subscription management portal:
[donadosu_donor_portal]
Donors enter their email, receive a secure magic link (valid for 30 minutes), and can view or cancel their active subscriptions. No WordPress account required.
Full shortcode and block attribute documentation is available in the plugin settings help tab.
Translations
DonateOcean is fully translation-ready and ships with a complete .pot file. Community translations are welcome through the WordPress.org translation platform once it is available for this plugin.
External Services
This plugin relies on third-party services to process payments and (optionally) sync donor data to external systems. Each service is described below, including what it is, when data is sent to it, what data is sent, and links to its Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. The plugin only contacts a service when the relevant feature is configured by an administrator; optional integrations remain inactive until their credentials are entered on the plugin settings page.
PayPal (required for online donation processing)
PayPal is the payment processor that handles every online donation. Without PayPal credentials, the plugin cannot accept online donations; manual (offline) donations recorded in the admin are the only exception.
- What it is: PayPal’s REST API (Orders v2, Subscriptions v1, Webhooks) and the PayPal JavaScript SDK used to render the payment buttons.
- When data is sent: each time a visitor initiates a donation (order creation), completes payment (order capture), creates or manages a subscription, when an administrator issues a refund, and whenever PayPal posts a webhook event that the plugin verifies.
- Endpoints contacted:
https://api-m.paypal.com(Live mode) orhttps://api-m.sandbox.paypal.com(Sandbox mode). The PayPal JavaScript SDK is loaded fromhttps://www.paypal.com/sdk/json any page that renders the donation form. - Data sent: donation amount, currency, frequency (one-time or recurring), donor name, donor email, billing address (when provided), shipping address (when provided), campaign identifier, and the order or subscription identifier.
- PayPal Terms of Service: https://www.paypal.com/us/legalhub/paypal/useragreement-full
- PayPal Privacy Statement: https://www.paypal.com/us/legalhub/paypal/privacy-full
Optional integrations
- Mailchimp — an email marketing service. When enabled, the plugin contacts
https://<dc>.api.mailchimp.com/3.0/on each completed donation to add the donor to the configured audience. Data sent: donor name, donor email, and the Mailchimp list ID. Terms of Service: https://mailchimp.com/legal/terms/ — Privacy Policy: https://mailchimp.com/legal/privacy/ - Constant Contact — an email marketing service. When enabled, the plugin contacts
https://api.cc.email/v3/on each completed donation to subscribe the donor to the configured list. Data sent: donor name, donor email, and the Constant Contact list ID. Terms of Service: https://www.constantcontact.com/legal/terms — Privacy Policy: https://www.constantcontact.com/legal/privacy-center - ActiveCampaign — a CRM and email marketing service. When enabled, the plugin contacts the administrator-supplied ActiveCampaign account URL on each completed donation to add the donor as a contact and attach them to the configured list. Data sent: donor name, donor email, and the ActiveCampaign list ID. Terms of Service: https://www.activecampaign.com/legal/ — Privacy Policy: https://www.activecampaign.com/legal/privacy-policy
- Brevo (Sendinblue) — an email marketing service. When enabled, the plugin contacts
https://api.brevo.com/v3/on each completed donation to subscribe the donor to the configured list (optionally with double opt-in). Data sent: donor name, donor email, and the Brevo list ID. Terms of Service: https://www.brevo.com/legal/termsofuse/ — Privacy Policy: https://www.brevo.com/legal/privacypolicy/ - Twilio SMS — a cloud-based SMS service. When enabled, the plugin contacts
https://api.twilio.com/2010-04-01/to send a text message to the administrator-configured notification phone number when a donation, refund, or dispute event occurs. Data sent: the administrator’s notification phone number, the Twilio “from” phone number, and an SMS body containing the donation amount, currency, and campaign name. No donor personally identifiable information is sent by default. Terms of Service: https://www.twilio.com/legal/tos — Privacy Policy: https://www.twilio.com/legal/privacy - Google Sheets — Google’s spreadsheet service. When enabled, the plugin contacts
https://oauth2.googleapis.com/tokento authenticate with a service account, thenhttps://sheets.googleapis.com/v4/spreadsheetsto append a row on each completed donation. Data sent: donation date, amount, currency, donor name, donor email, campaign, and donation identifier, written to the administrator-supplied spreadsheet. Terms of Service: https://policies.google.com/terms — Privacy Policy: https://policies.google.com/privacy - Slack — a team messaging service. When enabled, the plugin contacts the administrator-supplied Slack incoming-webhook URL on each completed donation to post a notification message. Data sent: donation amount, currency, campaign name, and (if the administrator has not disabled it in settings) the donor name. Terms of Service: https://slack.com/terms-of-service/user — Privacy Policy: https://slack.com/trust/privacy/privacy-policy
- Zapier — a workflow automation service. When enabled, the plugin contacts the administrator-supplied Zapier webhook URL on each donation event (completed, refunded, subscription created, subscription cancelled) to trigger a Zap. Data sent: the donation payload including amount, currency, frequency, donor name, donor email, campaign, event type, and donation identifier. Terms of Service: https://zapier.com/legal — Privacy Policy: https://zapier.com/privacy
The plugin does not send any data to DonateOcean servers or to any analytics or telemetry service.
Data Storage
Donation records, donor profiles, and plugin settings are stored locally in the site’s WordPress database. Payment processing is handled by PayPal; full card details are never stored on the site server by the plugin. PDF receipts are generated on demand and are not retained on the server after delivery.
Privacy
DonateOcean stores donor information (name, email, billing address, donation history) in your WordPress database as post meta. No donor data is transmitted to the plugin author.
The plugin integrates with the WordPress core privacy tools to fulfill data subject requests:
- Personal data export — a donor’s complete giving history can be exported via Tools > Export Personal Data.
- Personal data erasure — a donor’s personally identifiable information can be erased via Tools > Erase Personal Data, while preserving anonymized aggregate financial records.
- Automatic retention — administrators can configure automatic erasure of donor PII after a set number of months.
- Uninstall cleanup — before deleting the plugin, administrators can opt in from the settings page to remove all DonateOcean data from the WordPress database.
For details on data shared with third-party services (PayPal and optional integrations), see the External Services section above.