Milo Subscriptions is now compatible with Donation Platform for WooCommerce

Recurring donations are really just subscriptions, so Milo and a good donation plugin should work well together. As of today, they do. We’ve released a small, free connector that joins Milo Subscriptions with the Donation Platform for WooCommerce (WCDP) plugin, so you can take recurring donations that bill what the donor actually pledged.

What it looks like

A supporter opens your donation form, chooses “monthly,” and pledges £50. From then on that’s exactly what they give: £50 a month, on schedule, charged automatically. They can manage the gift themselves from My Account, and every renewal counts toward your fundraising goal. WCDP gives you the donation form, the suggested amounts, and the receipts. Milo runs the recurring billing behind it. The connector ties the two together, so the amount and frequency a donor picks carry through on every renewal, at whatever cadence you offer: weekly, monthly, or yearly.

What you get

Donors get a giving experience that reads like giving rather than a shop checkout. The form, the suggested amounts, and the receipts come from WCDP, while Milo looks after the recurring billing and gives each donor a place in My Account to see and manage their gift. The wording follows suit, so a donor sees “Recurring Donations” instead of “Subscriptions,” a “Donate” button instead of “Add to cart,” and a short note under the form letting them know the gift will repeat. If you run ordinary subscriptions alongside your donations, you can turn that donation wording off and keep the standard labels.

For you, it stays out of the way. A donation and a regular subscription can sit in the same cart without affecting each other, and there’s nothing extra to maintain. If you ever switch one of the two plugins off, the connector simply steps aside.

Setting it up

1. Install and activate WooCommerce, Milo Subscriptions (with a recurring-capable gateway like Milo Payments), and Donation Platform for WooCommerce.
2. Install and activate the connector. If either parent plugin is missing, it just shows a notice and stays inactive.
3. Create a Variable subscription product (a Milo product type), for example, “Recurring Donation.”
4. Add a Frequency attribute with values Weekly / Monthly / Yearly, and create one subscription variation per value with its billing period set.
5. Mark the product as a Donation Product (the WCDP checkbox) and set suggested amounts like £10 / £50 / £100, and allow custom amounts if you like.
6. Drop the WCDP donation form on the page. Donors pick a frequency and an amount, and the connector handles the rest.

A couple of things to know

Fundraising goals just work. Recurring renewals count toward your goal automatically once the renewal order reaches “completed.” Make the donation product Virtual so renewals auto-complete. One caveat that isn’t ours: WCDP caches goal totals for up to six hours, so the progress bar can lag a little.

Receipts and thank-you certificates fire on renewals too, handled natively by WCDP. As with one-off donations, that part needs the WooCommerce PDF Invoices and Packing Slips plugin.

Gateways: anything Milo can charge on a schedule will work, because renewals are billed against a stored token. That means Milo Payments (PayPal, Stripe, Mollie, Square) or the Any Gateway add-on. Most one-time-only donation gateways won’t do recurring.

Which platform should we connect next?

What are you running your donations or memberships through, and what would you most like to see Milo connect to next? If it isn’t WCDP, tell us what it is. We’d like to know what to prioritise.