Casey Nix WordPress can be an ideal application for running a website for nonprofit organizations. With its giant community, finding resources to make website management easier can be only a few clicks away. But finding quality resources at a free or discounted rate for nonprofits can be a daunting task.
We’ve come up with a list of various resources that offer free or discounted services to help you manage your nonprofit’s website.
Web Hosting
There are hundreds of web hosts on the market with varying prices and plans that meet the minimum requirements to host a WordPress site. But there are only a few that offer free or discounted pricing for nonprofits and still provide quality and reliable hosting.
A Small Orange offers a free, small month-to-month plan for organizations that don’t need a large amount of space or bandwidth. In addition, they offer a 10% discount for nonprofits on any of their paid, shared plans.
Dreamhost is one of the larger, more popular providers on the market. They offer nonprofits a free, basic shared hosting plan to host a single domain. If you need a plan with more features, Dreamhost offers an affordable pricing structure with plans starting as low as $7.95 a month.
Themes for Your Site
With WordPress, the theme you choose essentially becomes the face of your website. There are lots of free themes that have sets of features and options to customize the look and feel of your site. But we recommend staying with well-known sites to ensure your free theme is properly designed and built.
Themes Kingdom has more than twenty beautifully crafted themes that could give your site that unique appearance you’re looking for. For nonprofits, they offer a 50% discount on all themes.
WordPress.org has more than 2,000 various themes that are free to download. Their Charitas Lite theme is specifically suitable for nonprofit websites. The modern and eye-catching theme provides a nice backdrop for nonprofits to tell their story and raise donations.
Form Plugins
Most websites require various types of forms in order to communicate with the user of the site, from contact forms to newsletter signup forms. In WordPress, plugins can be installed to make setting up these types of forms a breeze.
Contact Form 7 is a free contact form management plugin that’s easy to configure and customize. It has a handful of great add-ons that can extend its functionality and allow it to handle almost any type of contact form scenario. A few add-ons to highlight include the ability to save all incoming and outgoing email correspondence in the database and an integration to accept PayPal payments.
Polldaddy is an easy to-use plugin to create and manage polls and surveys within WordPress.
Mailchimp List Subscription is a simple plugin that adds a Mailchimp newsletter signup form to your site. In addition, Mailchimp offers a 15% discount to nonprofit organizations.
Event Management Plugins
Event management for nonprofits can be a bit of a headache. Whether it’s done in a notepad or in a spreadsheet, it can be a time consuming process. Fortunately, there are some powerful plugins that can handle and simplify the entire event management process.
Event Expresso is an extremely robust event registration and management plugin with over 80 various features to handle your events. Its mobile registration allows you to validate and track attendees on the fly. They also offer a discount for nonprofits.
Events Manager is a free plugin that allows you to quickly create events and easily manage bookings and event attendees. They offer a Pro upgrade for $75.00 that includes more robust event booking features, such as automated and customizable email reminders, attendee forms and payment gateways.
Multilingual Plugins
Sometimes a site needs to reach a non-English speaking audience. Thankfully, WordPress offers plugins that have the ability to configure an entire site to be multilingual.
WPML is an easy to-use multilingual plugin that helps translate a site into any desired language. They offer a free subscription to nonprofit organizations.
qTranslate X is a free multilingual plugin to help maintain dynamic multilingual content for a self-hosted WordPress site.
The resources we’ve listed here should give you a nice head start as you create a highly flexible, user-friendly and engaging WordPress site for your nonprofit. Do you have any other resources, tips or advice for using WordPress resources for nonprofits? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.
Casey, thank you for the mention.
You’re most welcome, Sinisa! And thanks to you guys for offering the discount for Nonprofits.
The grassroots.org link is directed to a site called MikeMann.com. I cannot find a website for grassroots.org or any information about that organization.
Hi Diana- Thank you for the comment and pointing that out. Our apologies for the bad link in the article. I just found a posting from Grassroots saying that they have closed their doors due to a lack of funding. It’s a bummer as they offered a very nice service to the Nonprofit community. I have amended the article to remove the link to Grassroots. And thanks again for pointing that out. Take care!