DST Donate

DST Donate is a free, lightweight donation plugin that lets your WordPress site accept payments through Paystack. Add a donation form to any page in minutes with a shortcode, a block, or an Elementor widget, and see every gift from your dashboard. It is built for nonprofits, churches, schools, and community projects, with African currencies and Paystack at its core.

Donors pay on Paystack’s secure, hosted checkout, so card details never touch your website and your PCI scope stays small. Every payment is confirmed two ways, by a signature-verified webhook and an independent server-side check, so a donor who closes the tab still has their gift recorded.

The plugin takes no cut of your donations. You keep your own Paystack account, your own payouts, and your own donor data.

Features

• A donation form placed three ways: the [dst_donate] shortcode, the “DST Donate Form” block, or the “DST Donate” Elementor widget.
• One-time donations in Naira (NGN), Cedi (GHS), Shilling (KES), Rand (ZAR), and US Dollar (USD).
• Suggested amount buttons plus a custom amount field that formats thousands as the donor types.
• Collects the donor’s name and (optionally) phone, and always the email for the receipt.
• A clear donations log of successful, pending, and failed gifts, with search, status filtering, and a running total raised.
• Paystack secret keys stored encrypted in your database.
• Keys verified with Paystack the moment you save them, with an admin-only warning, and the effect on donations, if a key is wrong.
• A signature-verified webhook plus independent verification, so a confirmed payment is never lost.
• Test mode, so you can set everything up and try a donation before going live.
• Lightweight and translation-ready, with no bloat and no adverts in your dashboard.

Do more with DST Donate Pro

A separate Pro add-on extends the free plugin with multiple donation forms, form customisation (your own colours and corner radius per form, plus custom CSS), recurring (weekly, monthly, yearly) donations, an optional fee-recovery checkbox, custom donor fields, automated thank-you and follow-up emails, PDF receipts, donor analytics with CSV export, bring-your-own-key SMS and WhatsApp messaging, a fundraising goal bar, and offline donation recording. The free plugin works fully on its own, and never expires or nags beyond a single upgrade notice.

External services

This plugin connects to Paystack, a third-party payment gateway, to process donations. Paystack is required for the plugin to work: donations are charged through your own Paystack account, and the plugin cannot take payments without it.

The plugin communicates with the Paystack API (https://api.paystack.co) in these situations:

• When an administrator saves the plugin’s settings, it makes one request to Paystack to verify that the entered API keys are valid.
• When a visitor starts a donation, it sends the donation amount and currency and the donor’s name, email address and (if you choose to collect it) phone number to Paystack to create the transaction. The donor then completes payment on Paystack’s own hosted checkout page.
• After payment, it sends the transaction reference to Paystack to confirm the payment (this also happens when Paystack calls back to your site’s webhook).

Your Paystack secret key is sent with these requests to authenticate them. No data is sent to Paystack at any other time, and the plugin sends data to no other external service.

Paystack is a service of Paystack Payments Limited. By using this plugin you agree to Paystack’s terms and policies:

• Website: https://paystack.com
• Terms of Service and Privacy & Cookie Policy: https://paystack.com/terms