Charitable plugin review and common issues

Charitable uses Stripe webhooks to confirm payment completion and record donations. Check: (1) the Stripe webhook is registered — go to Charitable → Settings → Payment Gateways → Stripe and find the webhook URL; register it in Stripe Dashboard → Webhooks with all payment events; (2) verify the webhook secret in Charitable settings matches the webhook signing secret in Stripe; (3) check Stripe webhook delivery logs for failures — a 500 response from your site causes webhook delivery failures; (4) clear server caches — some configurations serve cached responses to webhook requests that cause processing failures.

The campaign progress bar updates based on completed donations in the Charitable database. Check: (1) donations are recorded as “Completed” status in Charitable → Donations — pending or failed donations do not count toward the goal; (2) clear all page and object caches — cached campaign pages may show stale donation totals; (3) verify the campaign goal is correctly set in the campaign editor (a campaign with no goal configured shows no progress bar); (4) if manually entered offline donations are not counting, ensure they are saved with “Completed” status.

The Charitable donation form loads via JavaScript. Check: (1) browser DevTools Console for JavaScript errors; (2) the campaign page uses the Charitable campaign template or includes the [charitable_campaign] shortcode; (3) a caching plugin serving incomplete HTML may cut off the form loading scripts — test without cache; (4) a security plugin may block Charitable’s AJAX requests — check security plugin logs for blocked requests; (5) verify the campaign is published (not draft) and its start date (if configured) has been reached.

Use the Charitable campaigns shortcode to display multiple campaigns: [charitable_campaigns]. Filter by category using [charitable_campaigns category=”category-slug”], or manually specify campaigns using [charitable_campaigns include=”campaign-id1, campaign-id2″]. The shortcode renders campaign cards with title, goal progress, and donate buttons. Configure the number of columns and whether to show campaign descriptions in the shortcode parameters. The Charitable Gutenberg block provides the same functionality with a visual editor interface.

Go to Charitable → Donations → Add Donation. Enter the donor’s name and email, select the campaign, enter the donation amount, and set the payment method to “Offline.” Set the status to “Completed.” The donation is added to the campaign’s total and counted in donor management. This allows gift checks mailed to your organization or cash received at events to be recorded in Charitable’s database alongside online donations, maintaining a complete giving history for each donor.

Charitable is often the better choice for small churches due to its more generous free tier (Stripe included), simpler admin interface, and clean campaign pages. Many small church giving campaigns fit within Charitable free — ongoing general fund giving (Stripe one-time donations), special project fundraising campaigns with goal displays, and basic donor records. GiveWP becomes the better choice when the church needs recurring/recurring subscription giving (requires GiveWP add-on vs Charitable Starter), peer-to-peer fundraising for events, or integrations with church management software.

Yes — Charitable includes UK Gift Aid functionality. UK taxpayers can check a Gift Aid declaration during donation, allowing the charity to claim an additional 25p for every £1 donated from HMRC. Charitable records Gift Aid declarations with each donation and provides a Gift Aid report for HMRC submissions. Configure Gift Aid in Charitable → Settings → General → Gift Aid, enabling the declaration checkbox and the custom Gift Aid statement text that appears on the donation form.

Yes, that can happen, especially on older sites with many plugins. This usually happens when the plugin, theme, and add-ons are updated out of sequence. In most cases, testing on staging catches the issue before it reaches the live site. From experience, backups and changelog reviews save a lot of cleanup time.

Start by checking whether another plugin already does the same job. In most cases, overlap is what creates avoidable conflicts and performance issues. A common issue is installing a plugin because it looks convenient without checking the stack first. From experience, a short compatibility review avoids most of the pain later.