How a PTA or booster club takes donations on the school website it already owns

Our PTA wants to take donations on our school website - what do we need?

Four things, and you probably have two of them already.

1. A WordPress site you control. WordPress 6.2 or newer, PHP 7.4 or newer, and HTTPS (the padlock). Most school-unit hosting meets this. If you are not sure, your host's control panel shows both versions.
2. A payment account in the organisation's name. A Stripe account or a PayPal business account registered to the PTA or booster club, using the unit's EIN and the unit's bank account. Not a personal account. Not the treasurer's personal PayPal. This one decision causes more handoff pain than anything else on this page.
3. A donation plugin. Donor Merchant is free and GPL with no feature gates and no platform fee, so the plugin itself is not a line item in your budget.
4. A page called Donate with the donation block or the shortcode dropped into it.

Turn on test mode first, run a fake donation through, confirm the receipt email arrives, then switch to live. The getting started walkthrough takes about twenty minutes end to end.

Can a booster club use WordPress to collect donations instead of a fundraising platform?

Yes, and for donations specifically it is usually the better arrangement. A hosted K-12 platform gives you a donate page on a domain you do not own, a donor list inside an account you do not own, and an export you have to remember to take. Your own WordPress site gives you a page on your own domain, records in your own database, and an export you can take at any time.

The honest limit is that donations are not the only thing a school platform does. More on that in the section on what this plugin does not do.

What happens to our donation records when the PTA treasurer changes each year?

This is the real question, and almost nobody in this category writes about it, because the platforms have no good answer.

The failure pattern is the same every time. A treasurer sets up a fundraising account four years ago using her personal email and her own login. She hands over the bank signature card and the binder. Nobody hands over the platform login, because nobody thinks of it as an asset. Two treasurers later the account is unrecoverable, the parent email list is gone, and the unit starts again from zero. A decade of giving history, recurring sustaining members and lapsed-donor records disappear because the records lived in someone's account rather than in the organisation's.

When the donation form runs on your own site, the handoff is a checklist rather than an archaeology project.

Donor management and CSV export are free, so the export is a two-minute job at every changeover. If you are coming off another plugin or a platform, the free CSV importer brings the old history in: see migrating a donation plugin without losing donor history.

How do we keep track of PTA money that parents gave for a specific thing, like field trips?

Use designations. A designation is a named fund the donor picks on the form, and it is stored on the donation record itself rather than in a note somewhere.

Typical PTA and booster set:

• General fund
• Field trips
• Playground / facilities
• 8th grade dance
• Teacher classroom grants
• Uniforms or equipment (booster clubs)
• Scholarship fund

The rule that matters for a treasurer: the designation the parent picked must survive into the CSV export. If it only exists in the thank-you email or in someone's memory, the restriction is not really tracked, and at audit time you cannot show that the field-trip money was spent on field trips. With designations and funds, the fund travels with the record into the export and into the reports dashboard, so you can total by fund without re-keying anything.

Money a parent gave for a stated purpose is restricted in the sense your board and your auditor care about, even for a small unit. The practical handling is covered in more depth in the campaigns feature and in our restricted-funds material; if your unit carries meaningful restricted balances, have your treasurer confirm the bookkeeping treatment with your state PTA or an accountant.

Most of our fundraising is cash. Does that go in too?

It has to, or you end up reconciling two sets of books.

Spirit night envelopes, the boot drive bucket, the cheque left in the front office, the $40 in a Ziploc from the bake sale. Offline donation entry lets you record those by hand against the same donor records and the same designations as the online gifts. One database, one export, one set of totals.

The alternative most units live with is a platform export for card gifts plus a spreadsheet for cash, and a treasurer trying to make the two agree at the end of the year. That is how a reconciliation takes a weekend instead of an hour. If you want the payout side of that story, see reconciling Stripe payouts with donation records.

Can a booster club give a tax receipt for a business sponsorship?

Carefully, and not with the same wording you use for a parent's gift.

When a local business pays $500 and gets a banner on the outfield fence, a logo in the programme, or a table at the pancake breakfast, the business has received something of value in return. The IRS calls that a quid pro quo contribution. For any payment over $75 where the donor receives goods or services, the charity must give a written statement saying that only the amount above the value of what they received is deductible, plus a good-faith estimate of that value. See the IRS page on quid pro quo contributions.

So a sponsorship receipt usually needs different language from a donation receipt, and the difference is not cosmetic. Talk to your state PTA or an accountant about the wording your unit should use, and about where simple recognition (a name listed with no advertising message) differs from advertising value.

On the practical side, you can model a sponsorship intake with the tools already in the plugin:

• Custom form fields for business name, contact name, sponsor tier, and how the business wants to be recognised (logo, name only, anonymous).
• A designation called Sponsorships so the money separates cleanly from parent giving in your reports.
• A campaign for the season or event the sponsorship supports.

Be clear about what this is: modelling sponsorships with fields and funds you already have, not a dedicated sponsorship product. It is enough for a booster club running a dozen fence banners. It is not an ad-sales system.

Does your PTA actually have its own 501(c)(3)?

Many units do not hold their own determination letter. National PTA and most state PTAs hold a group exemption that covers constituent local units, though the arrangement varies by state and in some states a unit must obtain exemption itself. Booster clubs are more varied still: some are independently exempt, some operate under a school district or a chartered organisation, some are simply unincorporated and not exempt at all.

This matters for one reason. A receipt must not claim deductibility your organisation cannot support. If the unit is not itself exempt and is not covered by a group exemption, the acknowledgement should thank the donor and state the amount without asserting that the gift is tax deductible. Ask your state PTA office or council for your unit's status and EIN before you write the receipt template - they answer this question constantly.

Once you know where you stand, PDF receipts and annual year-end statements are free and the templates are editable, so you can set the wording once and leave it correct for the next treasurer.

What Donor Merchant does not do

Put plainly, because a PTA deciding between this and a school platform deserves the comparison straight.

If ticketing or a spirit-wear store is your unit's main need, one of the K-12 platforms is genuinely the better buy for that job. The split most units land on: keep the platform for events and merchandise if you need it, and move plain donations onto your own site so the donor records and the recurring givers stay with the organisation.

The $10 a month sustaining member nobody sets up

School fundraising is overwhelmingly one-off and event-driven, which is why so many units start each September at zero. A standing monthly option changes the arithmetic: forty parents at $10 a month is $4,800 a year that arrives without a spirit night.

Recurring giving - monthly, quarterly or yearly - is free here through both Stripe subscriptions and PayPal subscriptions, with no paid tier required. For comparison, Charitable gates recurring donations behind its Plus plan at $99/yr (verify current pricing before quoting it to your board; checked September 2026).

Just as important for a volunteer treasurer: the donor portal uses a passwordless magic link, so a parent can see their giving history, download receipts, and change or cancel a monthly gift themselves. Nobody emails the treasurer at 10pm asking to be taken off the list.

What does this cost compared with a school fundraising platform?

Competitor pricing verified September 2026 - confirm current terms on each vendor's own site before presenting figures to your board. Two extras worth knowing: PayPal publishes a confirmed-charity rate of 1.99% + $0.49 per donation (versus 2.89% + $0.49 standard) for approved 501(c)(3) organisations, and Stripe operates a nonprofit programme with its own eligibility criteria rather than a published nonprofit percentage, so apply and see what you are quoted. The full breakdown is in what a WordPress donation plugin really costs, and if you want the no-platform-fee argument in one page, this one.

If your parents are fee-sensitive in the other direction, fee recovery lets a donor optionally cover the processing cost so the full $50 reaches the classroom.

A setup order that works for a volunteer

1. Open the Stripe or PayPal account in the organisation's name, with the org EIN, org bank account and a shared org email. Do this first, because verification can take a day or two.
2. Install the plugin and connect the gateway in test mode. See Stripe setup or PayPal setup.
3. Create your designations before you create the form: general fund, field trips, playground, 8th grade dance, teacher grants.
4. Add custom fields you actually need: student's grade or teacher, and for sponsorships the business name, tier and recognition preference. Keep the form short - every extra field costs you completions.
5. Build the Donate page, add the block or shortcode, set suggested amounts including a monthly option.
6. Run three test donations: a one-off card gift, a monthly gift, and one with a designation selected. Confirm the receipt wording matches your unit's actual exempt status.
7. Go live. Record your first cash envelope through offline entry so you see both sides in one export.
8. Put "export the donor CSV and transfer account ownership" on the officer transition checklist in your bylaws or standing rules.

Nothing here is tax or legal advice. Your unit's exempt status, receipt wording and restricted-fund handling should be confirmed with your state PTA, your council, or an accountant who works with school-support organisations.

More on the general approach in accepting donations on WordPress, and on form design in donation page best practices.