How to create a nonprofit membership form in WordPress

Need to create a nonprofit membership form on your WordPress website?

With the Gravity Forms plugin, you can easily create a membership form for any type of nonprofit.

In addition to fully customizing the form to your needs, you’ll be able to:

• Offer multiple membership/sponsorship tiers.
• Collect payments/donations directly from the form, including support for both one-time and recurring payments. Subscription memberships can be a great way to build recurring giving for your organization.
• Integrate with other services, such as subscribing people to a special members-only email newsletter or applying a tag in your customer relationship manager (CRM), such as Salesforce.

In this guide, we’ll show you step-by-step how to set up everything on WordPress using the Gravity Forms plugin.

Key features of the nonprofit membership form

Before we get into the full tutorial, let’s start with a quick summary of some of the key features that you’ll be able to access by following this guide:

• Start from a template – you can use the membership form template in Gravity Forms to save time and get started with a solid foundation for your form.
• Full drag-and-drop customization – you can fully customize everything about the template using a drag-and-drop editor.
• Built-in payment support – you can accept payments directly from your membership form, including support for multiple payment processors such as Square, Stripe, PayPal, and others.
• One-time or recurring subscription memberships – you can charge a one-time fee for membership or set up automatic recurring subscriptions that will automatically charge members on the schedule that you set. Or, you can offer both options from the same form.
• Integration with other services – you can connect to other services that your nonprofit uses, such as subscribing members to your newsletter, adding them to your CRM, and more.
• Multi-page layout – if your form is getting too long, you can easily divide it into multiple pages to make it easier for people to fill out.
• Conditional logic support – you can use conditional logic to show/hide certain form content or adjust other form behavior based on how people fill out the form.

You can also take advantage of all of the other features and integrations in Gravity Forms to enhance your form.

How to set up a WordPress nonprofit membership form with Gravity Forms

Now, let’s get into the full step-by-step guide on how to create your nonprofit membership form using Gravity Forms.

For this tutorial, we’ll focus on a specific example of a regional charity offering tiered annual memberships to supporters. However, you can easily adapt this tutorial to other use cases.

1. Install Gravity Forms and add-ons

To get started, install the core Gravity Forms plugin, if you haven’t done so already.

Along with the core plugin, you’ll also need to install add-ons for any extra features that you want to include.

At a minimum, you’ll want to install one of the Gravity Forms payment add-ons for the payment processor that you want to use to accept donations. 

For this tutorial, we’ll use the Square Add-On, but you’re free to use one of the other payment processors, such as Stripe, PayPal, or others. 

If you want to use Square, Gravity Forms has a special partnership that will give your organization zero transaction fees for the first $5,000 in payments during your first 180 days – just sign up for Square using this link.

Once you’ve activated the core plugin, here’s how you can install add-ons:

1. Go to Forms → Add-Ons in your WordPress dashboard.
2. Find the add-on that you want to install – for example, the Square Add-On for this tutorial.
3. Click the Install button.
4. Once the installation finishes, make sure to activate the add-on.

In addition to a payment add-on, you also might want to install add-ons for certain other features, such as an email subscribe option. We’ll cover these later in the tutorial – you can always come back later and install more add-ons as needed.

2. Connect Gravity Forms to Stripe (or other payment processor)

Before you set up the actual membership form, you’ll first need to connect Gravity Forms to your chosen payment processor. Again, we’re using Square, but the same basic steps apply to other payment processors that Gravity Forms supports.

Once you’ve registered for a Square account and installed the Gravity Forms Square Add-On, here are detailed instructions for how to connect Gravity Forms to Square:

1. Our ultimate guide to Gravity Forms and Square
2. Full Square Add-On documentation

Here’s the quick version of how to connect to Square:

1. Go to Forms → Settings in your WordPress dashboard.
2. Select the Square tab in the Gravity Forms settings.
3. Follow the prompts to connect your site to Square. We recommend connecting in Sandbox mode while you’re setting up your form, as it will let you test your fundraising registration form with dummy payments. When you’re ready to accept real payments, you just need to come back here and set up Live mode.

3. Create a new form using the membership form template

Now, you’re ready to get into creating your actual form.

To help you save time, you can use the premade membership form template that Gravity Forms offers.

While this template isn’t specifically focused on the nonprofit use case, it still includes many of the essential form fields that you’ll need and you can easily customize it using the drag-and-drop editor:

1. Go to Forms → New in the WordPress editor.
2. Find the Stripe Membership Form template in the list of available templates. You can easily swap out Stripe for Square if you want to use Square.
3. Hover over the template and click Use Template.
4. Give your form a name and optional description. Then, click Use Template again.

You should then be taken to the drag-and-drop form builder interface.

In the form builder, you’re free to fully edit the template, including all of the following:

• Adding new fields to collect additional information from your members.
• Editing existing fields in the template to adjust them to your use case.
• Deleting fields from the template if they don’t apply to your use case.

While you’re free to make any changes that you need, here are some areas that you might want to focus on when editing the form…

Adjust membership levels

By default, the template comes with three different membership levels:

• Bronze
• Silver
• Gold

You can adjust these as needed by editing the “Membership” Product field.

Remove the username and password fields

If you don’t need to create user accounts for members, you can remove these fields.

If you do want to create user accounts, you can do so by installing the Gravity Forms User Registration Add-On.

Switch Stripe field to Square field

If you’re using Square instead of Stripe, make sure to replace the Stripe field in the template with the Square field.

4. Create a Square feed (or other payment feed)

Your form’s Square feed (or other payment feed) controls how to process payments when someone submits the form.

For example, whether to process the payment as a one-time payment or set up an automatic recurring subscription.

To create a Square feed, go to Settings → Square inside the form editor. Then, click Add New:

This will take you to a new interface where you can set up the feed.

First, choose the Transaction Type:

• Products and Services – use this for a one-time membership fee.
• Subscription – use this if you want to set up an automatic recurring membership fee, such as a yearly or monthly fee.

Once you’ve made that choice, you’ll see some additional settings related to how to process the payment. For more details, check out the documentation on creating a Square feed.

Using conditional logic to offer multiple payment options

If it fits your use case, you can also create multiple payment feeds and use conditional logic rules to control when to execute each. This gives you the ability to offer multiple payment options to your members.

For example, you could let members choose between making a monthly, quarterly, and/or yearly donation/payment.

For these use cases, you might set it up like this:

• Add a field to your form that lets members choose between different payment options. E.g. Monthly or yearly.
• Create multiple payment feeds. For example, if you have a monthly and a yearly option, you would need to create two feeds.
• Add a conditional logic rule to each feed so that the feed only executes if the user chooses that option. For example, the monthly subscription feed would only execute if the person chooses the monthly option in the field that you add to the form.

5. Configure notifications and confirmations

Next, you’ll want to configure your form’s notifications and confirmations:

• Notifications – Notifications let you send emails that are triggered when someone submits the form. You can send emails to yourself, the person who submitted the form, your team, or anyone else.
• Confirmations – Confirmations let you control what a person sees after submitting the form. You can customize a message that appears or redirect them to a different page (such as a dedicated thank you page).

Notifications can help you create a more user-friendly experience for your members, along with helping you streamline your administrative processes.

For example, when someone submits the form, you might:

• Send yourself (or your team) an email that notifies you that a new member just signed up.
• Send an email to the new member that thanks them for joining and provides other relevant information. For example, details about membership perks, policies, etc.

Confirmations are also useful for creating a more user-friendly experience for members. You can use confirmations to thank members for joining and provide important information about their membership.

You can also add conditional logic rules to both notifications and confirmations, which lets you adjust their behavior based on conditions that you set, such as how the person filled out the form. Here are some guides:

• Notification conditional logic
• Confirmation conditional logic

You can set these up by going to Settings → Notifications and Settings → Confirmations from inside the form editor.

6. Set up other integrations and add-ons (optional)

This step is 100% optional.

However, another one of the big advantages of using Gravity Forms for your nonprofit membership form is that you can also leverage all of the other integrations and add-ons that are available for Gravity Forms.

This lets you enhance your form in a number of useful ways, including connecting with other services that your organization is using, saving time with automations, and more.

Here are some links to browse all of your options:

• Official integrations
• Official features
• Third-party add-ons

While we encourage you to explore all of your options, here are some of the most notable add-ons that you might want to consider for your form:

• Add members to your organization’s customer relationship management (CRM) software when they submit the form. In addition to syncing their details to the CRM, you can also apply tags, assign tasks, etc. 
• Give members an option to subscribe to your organization’s email newsletter. You could add a simple checkbox to your form that lets them opt in. If they check the box, you can automatically subscribe them to your list.
• Build workflow automations with the Gravity Flow plugin, which comes from the same team behind Gravity Forms. You can build multi-step workflows with 40+ different action steps, including things like assigning tasks, requiring approvals, generating PDFs, collecting payments at later parts of the process, sending emails, and more.

These integrations also open up some unique use cases.

For example, you could create a special email newsletter that’s only available to paying members, which can be a great way to encourage people to donate to your organization.

7. Embed and test your form

Once you’re happy with your form and integrations, you’re ready to embed the form on your site and test it out.

You can embed your nonprofit membership form anywhere on your site using the Gravity Forms block, shortcode, or PHP function.

If you use the block, you’ll also be able to style the form directly from the editor.

Once you’ve embedded the form, we recommend submitting a test form entry to make sure that everything is working as you want it to.

If you set up Stripe in Test mode, you can submit a test payment using one of Square’s card testing numbers.

If everything works properly, you’re ready to go live!

We’ll talk about how to view new membership registrations in a second. But first, let’s cover the last step.

8. Enable live payment processing

When you’re ready to start accepting real payments from your members, the last step in the process is to enable Live mode for Stripe:

1. Go to Forms → Settings → Stripe in your WordPress dashboard.
2. Change from Test mode to Live mode.
3. Repeat the same steps from earlier to connect to Stripe in Live mode.
4. Make sure to click Save Settings.

How to view new member registrations

To view new form submissions/member registrations, go to Forms → Entries in your WordPress dashboard and then select your nonprofit membership form from the drop-down.

You should see a list of all the registrations – you can also click the gear icon to customize which columns appear in the interface.

To view details for a specific entry, you can hover over it and click View.

In addition to letting you see all of the details from the membership form, you can also manage a member’s payment from this interface. For example, you could cancel their subscription or refund their payment.

You can also use Gravity Forms add-ons to configure other ways to view new member registrations.

For example, if you like working in Google Sheets, you can automatically sync new registrants to Google Sheets using Zapier and the Gravity Forms Zapier Add-On.

You can also use Zapier to connect to other apps. Or, for more technical users, you can use the Gravity Forms Webhooks Add-On to send a webhook request every time there’s a new registration.

Create your WordPress nonprofit membership form today

With Gravity Forms, you can easily create a WordPress nonprofit membership form for any type of use case.

You can collect donations directly from the form, choose between one-time and/or recurring donations, and integrate with all the other tools that your nonprofit is already using.

If your organization is a registered nonprofit, you can get started with all of the functionality in Gravity Forms by purchasing the Gravity Forms Nonprofit license.

For other organizations, you can purchase the Gravity Forms Pro or Elite license, depending on your needs.