Connecting online donors in Depaul’s fight against youth homelessness

Developing international homelessness charity Depaul's WordPress site with multilingual support and localized donations.

Project overview

Elementary Digital was engaged by Depaul to redevelop their existing websites. Depaul is an international charity organization based in Ireland that focuses on tackling youth homelessness and currently serves multiple countries across Europe, including Ukraine, Croatia, Hungary, France and the UK.

The brief

Depaul wanted to bring their individual sites inline with shared branding, while continuing to allow the charities to raise funds in their own region. This meant including the ability to accommodate different language requirements and to take donations in local currencies through both card and direct debit payments.

The solution

To meet Depaul’s requirements, we designed a bespoke solution based on the WordPress multisite network. To allow for flexible translations we extended WordPress’ existing translation capabilities with the WPML language plugin. WPML (WordPress Multilingual Plugin) is a plugin for WordPress that allows users to create multilingual websites. This allowed most content to be created once and easily translated into different languages.

Gravity Forms

Each site was also integrated with Gravity Forms to handle donations, contact forms, and newsletter signups. Gravity Forms is a popular choice for creating forms in WordPress because it is easy to use and integrates with a wide range of external services, which was essential because each charity used different platforms to manage their donations.

The challenge

One challenge we faced was integrating WordPress with Salesforce, as no existing solution could handle the combination of multiple currencies and payment options. Salesforce is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform that helps organizations manage their customer and donor data. To overcome this, we developed a bespoke Salesforce integration with WordPress based on the Salesforce API. This custom integration was able to handle multiple currencies and payment gateways, allowing each charity to continue using their existing payment integrations while also centralizing donor data in a single location across the organization.