How to Add Recurring Donations to Your Website

The donor-value math (this is the whole argument)

One-time fundraising is a treadmill. Every month you start from zero and have to convince new people to give all over again. Recurring giving gets you off the treadmill, because last month's donors are still giving this month without you asking again.

Run the numbers on a small program and it gets obvious fast. Say you convert 40 people to a 20-dollar monthly gift. That is 800 a month, 9,600 a year, before you have raised a single one-time dollar. If even half of them stay for two years, you are looking at real, bankable income you can hire and plan against. A one-time campaign that raises 9,600 is over the day it ends. A monthly program that raises 9,600 a year tends to grow.

This is why people who run monthly giving programs get a little evangelical about them. For a deeper walkthrough of building one end to end, see how to create a monthly giving program.

The mechanics: a monthly option on your form

The core of recurring giving is small. It is a way for a donor to say "charge me every month instead of once." How you present that choice matters more than you would think.

The simple toggle

A clean switch or pair of buttons, "One time" / "Monthly", right at the top of the form. Clear, low pressure, lets the donor decide. This is the safe default and it works.

The "make this monthly" prompt

The donor picks an amount, and just below it you offer a gentle nudge: "Make this a monthly gift." Framing the recurring option around the amount they already chose lifts conversion, because the decision is now "monthly or not" rather than "how much."

Monthly-default campaigns

For a campaign that is specifically about sustained support, you can default the form to monthly and let people switch to one-time. Use this deliberately, not everywhere, but for a "join our monthly circle" page it makes sense. People often stick with the default that is presented to them.

For the full menu of placements and wording, setting up recurring donations for a nonprofit goes deeper.

What happens under the hood (Stripe subscriptions)

When a donor opts into monthly giving, you are not storing their card and charging it yourself, you should never do that. Underneath, the recurring charge runs on Stripe subscriptions.

Stripe takes the card once, stores it securely on its side, and creates a subscription that re-charges on the same day each month automatically. You do not run the billing, Stripe does. The donor gets charged, you get paid out on Stripe's normal schedule, and a receipt goes out each time. The processing fee is the same as a one-time gift, Stripe's standard 2.9% plus 30 cents, or the discounted 2.2% plus 30 cents if you have nonprofit pricing approved.

The practical upshot: any donation tool worth using sits on top of Stripe subscriptions for this. You are not building billing infrastructure. You are turning on a feature that already exists and presenting it well.

Failed payments and retries (the unglamorous part)

Cards expire. Banks decline charges for no good reason. A monthly program that ignores this leaks donors silently, you just see the income drift down and never know why.

The fix is mostly handled for you if you are on Stripe, but you need to know it exists. Stripe has retry logic, often called Smart Retries, that automatically re-attempts a failed charge over the following days at times more likely to succeed. It also supports dunning emails that ask the donor to update an expired card. Turn these on. They quietly recover a meaningful slice of monthly revenue that would otherwise just vanish.

• Enable automatic retries on failed subscription charges.
• Enable the email that prompts donors to update a failing card.
• Decide what happens after repeated failures, usually the subscription cancels, and have a friendly "we'd love to have you back" follow-up ready.

None of this requires code. It is configuration. But it is the difference between a monthly program that compounds and one that slowly bleeds.

Keeping monthly donors (stewardship)

Acquiring a monthly donor is the start, not the finish. The whole value of recurring giving comes from people staying, so a little attention goes a long way.

You do not need a fancy program. A warm welcome the moment someone joins, an occasional note showing what their monthly gift actually did, and an easy way to manage or pause their gift will keep most people around. Ironically, making it easy to cancel builds trust and reduces the number of people who cancel out of frustration, the donors who feel trapped are the ones who leave angry.

Send the impact updates to your monthly donors specifically. They opted into a relationship. Treat them like it, and they will fund your work for years.

Where one-time gifts still win

None of this means you ditch one-time giving. That would be a mistake. One-time gifts still matter, and in some moments they win outright.

• Disaster and urgent appeals. When something just happened and people want to help right now, a fast one-time gift is the natural response. Asking for a monthly commitment in a crisis can feel off.
• First-time givers. Plenty of donors are not ready to commit monthly the first time they meet you. A good one-time experience now is how you earn the monthly ask later.
• Memorial and tribute gifts. These are inherently one-time and deeply personal.

The right setup is not monthly instead of one-time, it is both, with the monthly option offered clearly every time someone gives. The form should make recurring easy without ever blocking the person who just wants to give once and move on. A modern tool like KindLumen builds both into the same form, so the donor picks and you do not have to choose for them.