Liquid Web Acquires GiveWP

GiveWP, one of the most popular donation and fundraising plugins with more than 100,000 active installs, has been acquired by Liquid Web. The team behind the plugin will be joining Liquid Web as part of the asset sale, which includes the whole company, products, and leadership.

GiveWP made its debut in 2015 with a 0% commission approach, its major differentiator from other third-party funding tools at the time. Sites using the plugin can collect 100% of the donations given. Its creators aimed to empower causes and non-profits to host their own donation forms. They built out the plugin to become a full donation platform with reporting and donor management.

As of May 2021, GiveWP has helped its users raise more than $1 billion dollars in online fundraising.

“When we launched, we talked about forms with no reporting, or having to hack eCommerce tools to skip the cart and sales tax and shipping,” GiveWP co-founder and former COO Matt Cromwell said. “When users started basically saying exactly that back to us as the reasons they LOVED GiveWP, it was major validation – we’d built exactly what we wished we’d had when we were freelancing for nonprofits.”

The founders also found validation in their business ideas when large organizations like the Clinton Foundation or Habitat for Humanity reached out to GiveWP support and gave positive reports after receiving answers.

“It made us really amazed how we can bring solutions to organizations that are solving BIG world problems,” Cromwell said. “When we started having better telemetry and realized that we were literally helping organizations raise billions of dollars now…that was huge. It’s been very humbling to be part of something so much bigger than any one person in our organization.”

Cromwell said his team was not actively “shopping” the company, but were looking for ways to accelerate growth of the team and product.

“GiveWP sales have been increasing annually year over year every year since our launch,” he said. “We were not looking for ways to save this product; it’s been wildly successful.”

Devin Walker, GiveWP former-CEO and co-founder, said he appreciated Liquid Web’s history of acquiring strong WordPress brands while keeping their teams in place. He referenced the company’s 2017 acquisition of iThemes, and The Events Calendar acquisition in 2020.

“These two success stories gave us great confidence in Liquid Web and their desire to see GiveWP grow,” Walker said.

“Liquid Web is building a whole software part of their business, they’ve been acquiring WordPress shops for quite some time and they saw us as a good addition to their ‘Family of Brands,'” Cromwell commented on the sale. “They are also leaders in the managed WordPress space, and we’re already talking with them about opportunities for a more specifically nonprofit focused managed WordPress solution that includes GiveWP and all our addons.”

Cromwell said his team does not anticipate any branding or pricing changes in the future. Current users and customers who have questions or concerns are invited to attend the company’s virtual Town Hall meeting with Liquid Web CTO Joe Osterling on May 18, at 11am Pacific.