Please note: Some fundraisers in Italy and Canada may not have recurring donations as an option. Thank you for your patience as we work to bring this feature to all of our customers.
Recurring donations are a great way to receive sustainable, long-term support. If supporters choose recurring donations, they pay a fee of 5% per donation to help make this feature possible for our community. In this article, we’ll address:
- What are recurring donations?
- Understanding the recurring donation fee
- Managing recurring donors
- Running a fundraiser for a nonprofit with recurring donations
- Asking supporters to become recurring donors
- Keeping recurring donors engaged
What are recurring donations?
Recurring donations are an opt-in feature for your supporters to automatically donate to you on a monthly basis. New fundraisers allow both single and recurring donations, but you can also choose to only allow one-time or monthly donations within your fundraiser settings.
Follow these steps to edit what types of donations your fundraiser can receive:
- From your “Today” page, choose the “Fundraiser” tab
- Then choose “Change fundraiser settings”
- You’ll see the option to “Allow donations”
- With “Allow donations” toggled on, you can then choose between “Monthly and one-time,” “One-time only,” and “Monthly only”
- Choose the setting you’d like for your GoFundMe and then click “Save”
If you choose to allow both donation types on your GoFundMe, you can also choose your default donation type under “Default donation type.” This setting controls which option will be pre-selected for supporters when they click “Donate” from your fundraiser. We suggest using our “Smart default” option, as we use supporter data to automatically pre-set the best option for them, but you can also manually set one-time or monthly as your default.
We recommend, and all fundraisers will default to, having one time and monthly donations turned on. Check out this article for other common questions about recurring donations.
Understanding the recurring donation fee
Recurring donations are a way for supporters to contribute to fundraisers on an ongoing basis. This feature allows donors to make automatic monthly contributions, providing fundraisers with steady, long-term support.
Unlike one-time donations, which have a one-time processing fee of 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction (varies by country, check out our pricing page for your country's fee), recurring donations have an additional 5% fee that repeats with each monthly payment. This additional donor-paid fee helps cover the costs of maintaining and managing this feature, including:
- Automated payment processing – Ensuring secure and seamless transactions every month.
- Improved support for fundraisers - Helping fundraisers engage with recurring donors more effectively.
- Sustained platform improvements – Continuing to build tools that make fundraising easier and more impactful.
Supporters opt-in to recurring donations and the 5% fee when they donate, and this fee won't affect funds received by the fundraiser. By opting into recurring donations, supporters help fundraisers gain reliable, ongoing contributions that make a lasting difference.
Managing recurring donors
If you allow recurring donations on your fundraiser, you can check in on those supporters from the “Supporters” tab of your GoFundMe account.
From this tab you can filter to just view monthly donors so you can see how many times they’ve contributed and send them messages.
Running a fundraiser for a nonprofit with recurring donations
If you start a fundraiser for a nonprofit on GoFundMe, the nonprofit may have control over what kind of donations they accept – one-time or monthly donations. You can still fundraise for them as you normally would, but you won’t be able to edit the donation settings like you would on a personal fundraiser.
Asking supporters to become recurring donors
Recurring donations are great for fundraisers that have an ongoing need. To encourage supporters to opt in to monthly donations, you’ll want to clearly explain how funds will continue to be used over time. For example, if you’re raising funds to pay for schooling, we suggest adding a breakdown and timeline for why funds will be needed more than just once.
Ex: “I’ll use next month’s recurring donations to buy books for my next semester of classes. I’ll also put some of the donations aside to continue saving for my new laptop. With three more months of recurring donations, I’ll be able to purchase it!”
You can also ask supporters to become recurring donors in these additional ways:
- You can include the ask in your fundraiser story. This will make clear to everyone who visits your fundraiser page that you have a long-term cause they can continue to contribute to. You might include a line in your story like:
“Please consider opting in to monthly donations to my fundraiser. I would truly appreciate the continued support, and even just $5 or $10 on a monthly basis can really make a difference.”
- Reach out directly to people you know personally. Your closest friends and family will likely be thrilled by the opportunity to support you on an ongoing basis. We suggest texting or calling them to tell them about your fundraiser and how their monthly support would make a difference to you.
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Ask donors to become monthly supporters in updates. Updates will remain publicly on your fundraiser page, and it’s a chance to highlight your recurring donation request to make sure it isn’t lost in the content of your fundraiser story. Here’s an example of how you might ask visitors to your page to become recurring supporters:
“Thank you so much for taking a moment to read about my fundraiser for my classroom! I wanted to share with visitors to my page that my fundraiser accepts monthly donations as well, and I’d love for you to consider becoming a monthly supporter. Monthly supporters will help fund field trips, school fairs, and other monthly activities for the students. And if you aren’t able to contribute right now, please still consider sharing my fundraiser with your social networks to help spread the word. Thank you!”
Keeping recurring donors engaged
Running a fundraiser is never a ‘set it and forget it’ affair, but you’ll want to be particularly purposeful about keeping your fundraiser up-to-date with recurring supporters, because they’re providing ongoing support. You can keep recurring supporters engaged by posting updates, sharing new photos in your story, posting a video about your progress, and more.
Your recurring supporters want to know they’re continuing to make a difference, so here are some ideas for keeping them engaged:
- Draft a personalized thank you just for your recurring supporters. Whenever a recurring donation comes in for the month, be sure to thank them for their continued support, and share a little bit about how you’ve used their funds.
- Shout out your recurring supporters in an update. YouTubers and podcasters will often read off the names of their monthly donors at the end of an episode, and you can do something similar with a monthly shout out in the form of an update to your fundraiser page. All subscribed donors receive an email when you post an update, so it will be a nice gesture of your gratitude.
- Ask your recurring supporters to leave comments and include a blurb about why they choose to donate monthly. This could encourage other donors to opt in to monthly donations as well.
- Take to social media to thank your monthly supporters if you're already friends with them on socials. Be sure to tag them in your post, and ask them to share it as well to reach their social networks, too.
There are so many ways you can make the most of recurring donations, and we’re excited to see how our organizers rally their supporters and communities around this feature. To see if you've had any recurring donations and see a list of their names, you can filter by “Monthly donors” in the “Supporters” page of your fundraiser dashboard.