Donations allow a forum user to make a payment of any amount they choose. Donations are great for charities or non-profit organizations, but can still be valuable in other cases as well.

If you are considering charging your members for forum usage, then one factor to consider is the value of the content on your forum. If you are confident that the members will pay, charge a fixed price. If the value is questionable or you are not confident that the members will pay, you might consider asking for a donation.

You should also consider if your community feels like charging a fee for the content or the membership is consistent with the premise of the community. On the other hand, would they find it objectionable? If the latter is the case, you might consider asking for a donation rather than a fixed price.

Enabling donations

Follow the directions below to enable donations on your forum:

1. Log in to your Website Toolbox account.
2. Click the Settings link.
3. Click the Paid Access link.
4. Enable a payment provider if one is not enabled already: PayPal (Configuring your PayPal account for Paid Access) or Stripe (Connect Stripe as a payment processor). You can enable both. Users can donate with a credit or debit card through either provider, because PayPal processes card payments in addition to PayPal payments. Donations will not work until at least one payment provider is enabled.
5. Enable the Donation option.
6. Under Restricted Area, choose what a donation unlocks: None, the entire forum, or specific categories (use Add Categories to select them). Choose None if you only want the Donate link to appear without granting access to any part of your forum.
7. Click Edit next to Message to change the message users see before they pay, if desired.
8. Save the changes.

The Donate link

When Paid Access is enabled and the Donation option is on, a Donate link is automatically added to the navigation menu of your forum. You can also post an announcement with the donation link. The link address is https://FORUM_ADDRESS/?action=paid_access (Replace text "FORUM_ADDRESS" with the URL of your forum.)

What a donor sees

When a user tries to view an area of your forum that requires paid access, they are shown the Message you wrote along with the payment options your forum accepts. Once the user makes the payment, they automatically receive the user group for their plan in their Additional User Groups, which gives them access to the areas the donation unlocks.

If you also sell subscriptions, a user whose subscription ends or whose payment fails is automatically removed from the user group for their plan, and access to paid areas is restricted again until a payment is processed successfully.

Choosing what donations unlock

The Restricted Area you selected decides which categories or forum areas a donation opens. In the same section you can also choose which actions require payment, such as viewing the posts within topics, viewing photos or attachments, or creating topics, when you choose what users must pay to access.

Related Articles:

• Paid Access Overview
• Paid Access Best Practices
• Requiring users to pay to access the forum
• Requiring users to pay to access a category
• Choosing what users must pay to access