How to use News Match Donation Shortcode

As part of INN's support for the 2017 News Match campaign, we've released two WordPress plugins to help sites convert readers. News Match Donation Shortcode provides a donation form for your site to ease donations through the News Revenue Hub as part of the News Match campaign.

Prefer a video walkthrough? Watch this tutorial on youtube.

Installing the plugin

On your WordPress site, click on "Plugins" in the Dashboard menu. If you see an "Add New" button at the top of the page, click that.

If you don't see the "Add New" button or the "Plugins" menu, your user might not have permission to manage plugins on the site; you should contact your technical support and ask them to install News Match Donation Shortcode for you. Your site might require downloading the plugin ZIPs and uploading them via FTP instead of using WordPress' built-in plugin installation tools.

Configuring the plugin

A screenshot of the plugin's locaiton in the wordpress settings menuThe plugin's settings are at Settings > News Match Shortcode in the WordPress admin.

When you first enable the plugin, you'll want to configure it with your organization's name, your News Revenue Hub ID, the default donation amount, and the live and staging URLs of your News Revenue Hub form.

The settings is where you configure the donation levels to match your organization's membership levels. While the plugin comes with 4 default donation levels, you can easily define your own labels and donation levels. The defaults are: $0-$5 Friend, $5-$50 Ally, $50-$500 Champion, and $500+ Ambassador. If you want fewer donation levels, set the third level's upper donation amount to a very high amount, such as your org's dream budget, and make sure that the fourth level is more than that.

A screenshot of the level 1 donation level settings.
Here's an example of non-default configuration of the first donation level out of four.

If you use Salesforce to track campaigns, you can set a default Salesforce campaign ID for the plugin in the plugin's settings. This can be overridden on a per-form basis by setting the sf_campaign_id attribute of the shortcode, like so: [newsmatch_donation_form sf_campaign_id="foo" amount="25"]

A screenshot of the WordPress admin dashboard shows the setting for the Salesforce Campaign ID
This is the Salesforce campaign ID setting in the plugin admin.

The shortcode in use

The default form of the shortcode uses buttons to select the donation level:

a screenshot of the donation form
[newsmatch_donation_form]
By adding type="select" to the shortcode, it appears like this:

a screenshot of the dropdown donation form
[newsmatch_donation_form type="select"]
A full list of shortcode arguments and examples can be found in the plugin's WordPress.org entry, but they're basically one-off overrides for your Salesforce campaign ID, your default donation amount, and the type of form.

The above screenshots use the plugin's default styles with non-default configuration. You can style the donation form using your site's theme's CSS, Jetpack’s Custom CSS Editor, or any other tool that allows you to define custom styles on your site. Guidance for these custom styles can be found in the FAQ section of the plugin's WordPress.org entry.

Need support?

If you have questions about this plugin and integrating it with your WordPress site, contact support@inn.org.

If you have questions about the News Revenue Hub, visit their contact page.

If you have questions about the News Match program, visit their website for donornonprofit and funding partner information.