How to collect membership dues online with WordPress
You can collect membership dues online through WordPress for free using the Nonprofit Manager plugin. The free version takes a payment and you mark the member active at that level. Nonprofit Manager Pro goes further and auto-bills a fee the moment someone joins a tier, on a schedule, with no manual renewal step. Here’s exactly how both work.
The manual setup (free)
- Install Nonprofit Manager free and create your membership levels (Individual, Family, Student, whatever fits your club).
- Add a payment form for the dues amount, connected to PayPal, Venmo, or Stripe.
- When someone pays, add them as a member at the matching level.
- Send renewal reminders through the newsletter when a membership year is coming up.
The automatic setup (Pro)
- In Nonprofit Manager Pro’s Membership Dues screen, set a price and billing frequency (monthly, quarterly, or yearly) on each level.
- Publish the public join form on your site using the built-in shortcode.
- A new member picks a level, pays through Stripe, and their subscription starts automatically from that point on. No one has to add them manually.
- Set a failed-payment threshold, three attempts by default. If it’s reached, the member automatically drops to a fallback level you choose, instead of staying active on a card that stopped working.
Be clear on what this is and isn’t
Even with Pro’s auto-billing turned on, this isn’t the same as tiered content-gating that locks and unlocks pages the moment a payment status changes, the way a dedicated membership-commerce plugin works. Nonprofit Manager tracks who’s a member and bills them, whether manually in the free version or automatically with Nonprofit Manager Pro, but it doesn’t paywall pages or courses behind a level. For a club or association collecting dues, that’s normally exactly enough.
If you need content locked behind a membership level
If your club genuinely needs a payment to instantly unlock a members-only area or content the moment it clears, a plugin built around that, like MemberPress, is the better fit. Nonprofit Manager Pro auto-bills dues but doesn’t paywall pages. See our best membership plugin guide for that comparison.
Get started
Install Nonprofit Manager free and start collecting dues today. It’s part of the all-in-one plugin for small nonprofits, compared with the field in our best plugin for clubs and associations guide.