Nonprofits run on tight budgets and small teams, which makes free or low-cost WordPress plugins a genuinely practical way to add fundraising, event management, and email capabilities without hiring a developer. The ten below cover the areas that come up most: donations, forms, SEO, performance, events, and email.
The plugins
1. GiveWP
GiveWP is built specifically for nonprofit donations rather than general-purpose eCommerce repurposed for giving. It handles customized donation forms, multiple payment gateways (PayPal, Stripe, Authorize.net), and reporting to track donors and campaigns over time. Add-ons cover recurring donations, custom amounts, and donor engagement touches like automated thank-you emails. Still actively developed, 100,000+ installs.
2. WPForms
WPForms covers everything else a nonprofit needs forms for: volunteer sign-ups, event registration, contact forms. Templates get you started fast, conditional logic shows or hides fields based on earlier answers, and it connects to PayPal, Stripe, and Mailchimp without custom code. 5 million+ installs, still the most widely used form builder on WordPress.
3. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO isn’t nonprofit-specific, but visibility matters just as much for a cause as it does for a business. It handles titles, meta descriptions, readability, and XML sitemaps, with a snippet preview so you can see how a page will actually look in search results before publishing. 10 million+ installs, updated on a roughly two-week release cycle.
4. Jetpack
Jetpack bundles performance (image lazy-loading, a CDN, backups), security (malware scanning, brute-force protection), and basic marketing tools (social sharing, stats, email subscriptions) into one plugin from Automattic. For a small team that doesn’t want to manage five separate plugins for these functions, that bundling is the actual selling point. 3 million+ installs.
5. The Events Calendar
The Events Calendar handles fundraisers, volunteer events, and community gatherings with proper event pages (date, time, location, tickets), multiple calendar views, and social sharing built in. Premium add-ons extend it with ticketing and recurring events if a single free event page isn’t enough. 600,000+ installs.
6. Mailchimp for WordPress
Mailchimp for WordPress (officially MC4WP) connects your site to Mailchimp for sign-up forms and list building. Automation sequences can send targeted messages based on subscriber behavior, useful for donor nurture sequences that don’t require manually sending every email. 1 million+ installs.
7. SeedProd
SeedProd builds landing pages, coming-soon pages, and maintenance-mode pages with a drag-and-drop editor and no code. For a nonprofit promoting a single campaign or event, a dedicated landing page built in SeedProd is often faster than editing the main site. Integrates with Mailchimp, Constant Contact, and Salesforce. 700,000+ installs.
8. Gravity Forms
Gravity Forms is the paid alternative to WPForms, worth considering if you need multi-page forms, file uploads, or deeper conditional logic than the free tier of other builders offers. Payment gateway integration and CRM connections (Salesforce, Mailchimp, AWeber) make it a solid choice for donation and volunteer forms with more complex logic behind them. Pricing runs $59-259/year.
9. ExactMetrics (formerly Google Analytics Dashboard for WP)
This one’s had a name change worth knowing about: what used to be Google Analytics Dashboard for WP is now ExactMetrics. It still does what the old name promised, Google Analytics data inside your WordPress dashboard, including real-time traffic and behavior reports, without needing to log into Google Analytics separately. 300,000+ installs, though worth noting its reviews skew more mixed than the other plugins here, with some users flagging aggressive upsells to the paid tier.
10. WP Mail SMTP
WP Mail SMTP fixes a problem most nonprofits don’t know they have until donation receipts or contact form notifications start landing in spam. It routes outgoing mail through a real SMTP provider (Gmail, Microsoft, or a transactional service) instead of your host’s often-unreliable default mail function. 4 million+ installs.
What actually matters when picking from this list
- Match features to your actual need, a donation plugin and a form builder solve different problems; don’t install both if one covers it.
- Favor plugins your team can configure without help, a nonprofit with no dedicated developer needs clear settings, not raw flexibility.
- Check the support and update history, not just the feature list, everything listed above is still actively maintained, which matters more than most feature comparisons.
Most nonprofits end up running some combination of a donation plugin, a form builder, an SEO plugin, and an email connector, you don’t need all ten at once.
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