The short version
- The Offline Donations gateway shows a donor your payment instructions and creates a pending record. It does not move any money.
- The Manual Donations add-on lets an admin enter a donation after the fact. Give’s own documentation says it is not designed to charge donors’ cards.
- To actually capture a card in person, you add an in-person gateway to the Give setup you already have. Tap To Donate for Give by Jovvie does this on your existing donation forms, and the donations land in your normal Give reports.
You have a gala next month, a table at a community festival, or a tablet in your lobby. Your donation forms are already built in Give (formerly GiveWP), online giving works fine, and now you need to handle the donations that happen in the room.
So you go looking, and you find two features with encouraging names: the Offline Donations gateway and the Manual Donations add-on. Both are real, both are genuinely useful, and both do something slightly different from what most people expect when they first read the names. Neither one charges a card.
This article explains what each tool actually does, when it is the right choice, and what to add to your existing setup when you need to take a physical card from a donor and have that donation appear in Give automatically — without anyone typing it in afterward.
What the GiveWP Offline Donations gateway actually does
The Offline Donations gateway is built into Give. When you enable it, donors see an extra option on your form alongside your card and PayPal choices. Selecting it does three things:
- Creates a donation record in Give with a pending status.
- Displays your payment instructions — the text you configure telling the donor where to mail a check or how to make a bank transfer.
- Waits for a human to mark the donation complete once the money actually arrives.
That is exactly the right tool for some situations. If a donor prefers to mail a check, or your major gifts arrive by bank transfer, the Offline Donations gateway gives them a clean path and gives you a record to reconcile against.
Where people get caught out is the name. “Offline” describes where the payment happens, not a way to take payment offline. The gateway is an instructions screen attached to a pending record. Nothing is captured, nothing is authorized, and the record stays open until someone closes it by hand.
What the Manual Donations add-on actually does
The Manual Donations add-on approaches the same problem from the back office. Instead of the donor filling in a form, an administrator creates the donation record directly — choosing the donor, the form, the amount, and the date — and it flows into your reports like any other donation.
This is a useful piece of software, and most organizations need something like it. It is how you get cash from a collection plate, a stock gift, a donor-advised fund grant, or a stack of checks from a mailing into the same system as everything else.
Give’s documentation is direct about the boundary. The add-on, in their words:
“is not designed to actually charge donors’ cards/accounts but to add donations to reconcile donations that already exist elsewhere.”
In practice, that means if a donor pulls out a credit card at your event, Manual Donations is the tool you use after the fact. Someone writes the donation on a clipboard, the card gets charged somewhere else — a separate reader, a different app, a phone call to the office on Monday — and then a staff member keys it into Give from the paper list.
Where that leaves you when a donor wants to hand you a card
Put the two tools side by side and the division is clear:
| How the donation arrives | What handles it |
|---|---|
| Mailed check, bank transfer, pledge to be fulfilled later | Offline Donations gateway |
| Cash, stock gift, DAF grant, historical records | Manual Donations add-on |
| A card in someone’s hand, right now | An in-person gateway |
The cost of that last gap is not really the tapping. It is everything that happens afterward:
- Two systems that don’t talk to each other.
- A paper list that has to be transcribed while someone can still read the handwriting.
- Donor records that don’t match your Stripe payouts.
- Receipts that go out three days late, or never — because the person who ran the table was a volunteer who has gone back to their day job.
The fix is not to replace anything. Your forms, your donor records, your reporting, and your offline tools all stay exactly as they are. You add a gateway that can capture a card in the room.
What changes when the gateway captures the card in person
Tap To Donate for Give by Jovvie adds a payment option to the donation forms you have already built. A donor selects “Swipe, Insert or Tap,” the form hands off to a Stripe card reader or to Tap to Pay on a phone, the donor pays, and the form returns to your confirmation page. Jovvie is an official Stripe partner, and the money settles into your own Stripe account.
Four things follow from that, and the first one matters more than the hardware.
The donation record creates itself
The donation is processed through the gateway, so Give writes the record the moment it completes. The donor, the amount, the form, the campaign attribution — all of it lands in Give the same way an online donation does. There is no clipboard, and there is no Monday morning data entry session.
Receipts go out immediately
Because Give processes the donation as a normal donation, your existing receipt email fires straight away. The donor has their acknowledgment before they have finished walking away from the table, which is both better donor experience and one less thing to chase at year end.
Your Give reports match your Stripe payouts
In-person donations appear in your standard Give reports and donor records — not in a separate dashboard you have to cross-check. The donation is redirected to a terminal or to Tap to Pay for the actual card capture, but all of the donation information is stored back in Give. One set of records, one reconciliation, and a Stripe payout you can trace line by line.
You can start a recurring donation on the spot
This is the part most organizations do not realize is possible. A donor at your event can set up a monthly, quarterly, or annual recurring donation in person, on the reader, in the same interaction. No follow-up email, no “we’ll send you a link,” no hoping they remember.
Converting a one-time event donor into a recurring donor is the highest-value thing that can happen at a fundraising table, and it usually gets left to a follow-up campaign most people never open. Being able to do it while the conversation is still happening changes the economics of running the table at all.
OFFICIAL STRIPE PARTNER · BUILT FOR GIVE (FORMERLY GIVEWP)
Take donations in person. Keep everything in Give.
Tap To Donate adds swipe, insert, and Tap to Pay donations to the Give forms you already built. Every donation lands in your normal Give reports, automatically.
When you should still use Give’s offline tools
Adding in-person card payments does not retire anything. Most organizations end up running both, because donations genuinely arrive in different ways and each tool fits a different one. Keep using the Offline Donations gateway and Manual Donations for:
- Checks in the mail. The instructions screen and the pending record are exactly right.
- Cash. A collection plate or a jar on a counter still needs recording by hand, and that is fine.
- Bank transfers and pledges. Money committed now and paid later needs a record that waits.
- Stock gifts and donor-advised fund grants. These arrive through channels no gateway touches.
- Historical records. Anything you are importing from a previous system.
The clean way to think about it: offline tools for money that arrives without a card present, an in-person gateway for a card in someone’s hand.
What you need to take cards in person
- Give, already set up. Your existing donation forms work as they are. You are adding a payment option, not rebuilding anything.
- The Tap To Donate for Give by Jovvie plugin, free from WordPress.org.
- A free BizSwoop account to connect the gateway.
- Your own Stripe account. Donations settle directly into it, which also means an approved 501(c)(3) can use Stripe’s discounted nonprofit processing rate.
- Hardware you may already own. Tap to Pay on an NFC-capable iPhone or Android phone needs no additional equipment. If you would rather have a dedicated reader, the plugin supports the Stripe Reader M2, Stripe Reader S700, BBPOS WisePad 3, and BBPOS WisePOS E.
- An internet connection at the point of donation.
That last point is worth planning for rather than worrying about. Card payments are authorized in real time, so the device taking the donation needs to be online. Venue Wi-Fi is often unreliable, so most organizations running events do two simple things:
- Bring your own connection. A phone hotspot or a reader on a cellular connection beats trusting the building’s Wi-Fi.
- Test before the day. Check the signal where you will actually be standing when you visit the venue, and run a dry-run donation in Test Mode so you are not troubleshooting in front of a donor.
On cost: there is no monthly fee. Jovvie charges a 2% platform fee on in-person donations only — donations taken through your normal online forms are untouched — and that sits alongside Stripe’s own processing fee. We break the full picture down in our guide to what Give, Stripe, and Jovvie each charge.
How to set it up
The whole process runs about fifteen minutes if your Stripe account already exists:
- Install and activate the plugin.
- Connect the gateway under Give → Settings → Payment Gateways → Jovvie Payments.
- Create your free account and link Stripe.
- Add a location and register your reader. Stripe requires every terminal reader to belong to a location.
- Enable the gateway on your donation forms.
- Take a test donation, then a real one.
Our step-by-step setup guide for in-person donations with Jovvie and Give walks through every screen with short video clips, including registering each reader type and pairing Tap to Pay through the Jovvie app.
FAQs
Can GiveWP charge a card in person?
Not with the offline tools built into Give — those record donations rather than capture them. To charge a card in person you add an in-person payment gateway to your existing Give installation. Tap To Donate for Give by Jovvie does this using Stripe card readers or Tap to Pay on a phone, and the donations appear in your standard Give reports.
What is the difference between offline donations and manual donations in GiveWP?
The Offline Donations gateway is donor-facing: the donor selects it on your form and sees your payment instructions, and the donation sits pending until you mark it received. Manual Donations is admin-facing: a staff member enters a donation that already happened elsewhere. Neither one processes a payment.
How do I record cash and check donations in GiveWP?
Use the Offline Donations gateway for donors who choose to mail a check, since it gives them instructions and creates a record to reconcile. Use the Manual Donations add-on for cash you have already collected or checks that arrive without a matching form submission. Both are the correct tool for money that arrives without a card present.
Do I have to enter in-person donations by hand?
Only if the donation was not processed through a gateway. When a card is captured through an in-person gateway, Give creates the donation record automatically — donor, amount, form, and campaign attribution included — and sends the receipt immediately. Cash and checks still need recording by hand.
Can I set up a recurring donation in person?
Yes. A donor can start a monthly, quarterly, or annual recurring donation on the card reader during the same interaction, and it is managed in Give alongside every other subscription. This is one of the few things in-person giving can do that a follow-up email campaign generally cannot.
Can I refund an in-person donation?
Yes, and refunds are issued from your Stripe dashboard rather than from inside Give. Find the payment in Stripe, refund it there, and the money returns to the donor’s card. Worth knowing before you need it, so whoever handles your finances knows where to go.
Does this work without an internet connection?
No. Card payments are authorized in real time, so the device needs to be online when the donation is taken. At events where venue Wi-Fi is unreliable, a phone hotspot or a reader on a cellular connection is the usual answer. Check the signal where you will be standing before the day and run a Test Mode donation to confirm everything works.
Which countries are supported?
In-person donations are available in 25 countries where Stripe Terminal operates, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Mexico, and most of Western Europe.
READY WHEN YOU ARE
Set it up before your next event.
About fifteen minutes if your Stripe account already exists. Our guide walks through every screen with short video clips.
Stop entering event donations by hand
Give’s offline tools do their job well, and you should keep using them for checks, cash, and pledges. But if a donor is standing in front of you holding a card, there is no reason that donation should reach your database by way of a clipboard.
Your forms stay as they are. Your reporting stays as it is. You add one gateway, and the donations that happen in the room start behaving like the donations that happen on your website.
Read the setup guide for in-person donations with Give →
Or download Tap To Donate for Give by Jovvie from WordPress.org and see how it fits your forms.
