Elijas klosteris is an interconfessional, 21st-century monastery taking shape in Lūžņa, an old Livonian village where the Baltic Sea meets the forests of northern Kurzeme. It is being built around a former railway station, as a place people come to for a week or a few months of silence. The site has one job: to explain why such a place matters, and to raise the money to build it.
A donation you can see
A donate button and a progress bar ask for money. They do not give anyone a reason to care. The monastery already had something better: a stained-glass window by Latvian artist Krista Vindberga, made for the central window of the chapel behind the altar, showing two hands holding the world up.
So the window is the fundraiser. On the site it is drawn as a mosaic of 6,620 pieces, and every 250 EUR donated lights up one of them. Larger gifts light more. The picture fills in as the community gives, and a visitor sees at a glance how much has already been done and how much is still dark.
Built to be trusted with money
Behind the artwork is our own WordPress plugin, working with a WooCommerce and Stripe checkout. A donor picks a preset amount or enters their own, pays, and their pieces light up.
Two people can donate at the same moment, so pieces are reserved as a checkout starts and no piece can ever be claimed twice. A cancelled payment hands its pieces back. Donors can be named on the pieces they lit, or stay anonymous. And because not every gift arrives through a card form, donations made by bank transfer can be added too, and light the window exactly as an online one does.
The monastery chooses from the admin the order the pieces reveal in: at random, from the centre outward, or from the edges in.
What the monastery got
A fundraising page that tells the story in the monastery’s own voice, in Latvian, and turns every gift into something visible. Supporters can come back and watch the window fill, which is the part of fundraising a progress bar never manages.
Stack: WordPress (Bedrock), custom theme, custom mosaic plugin, WooCommerce, Stripe, ACF Pro.