An educational nonprofit would like to put some recorded presentations behind a paywall and ask for donations to fund its next project and/or set up memberships in exchange for access…
I would like to use their WordPress website to announce these offerings and point folks to this hosted solution which matches the above criteria.
I am open to ideas and seeking guidance.
What software does this job well?
Wordpress can do this via e-commerce plugins. Not a WP developer so can’t remember specifics I’m afraid.
I believe Vimeo does all you need also. Certainly it’s easy to make videos private in Vimeo (paid version) as I do that all the time for my students. But I’m pretty sure you can set up payment systems also.
… and then there’s Patreon which a number of folks use. I don’t know all the details, but most folks I know who use Patreon set up a monthly membership program with payment.
You should check with your local regulations, as at least in Germany, a nonprofit organization has to fulfill certain regulations, and selling content via a “monetarization” would in a lot of cases be against those rules as it is not considered as a “Donation” if you do it this way.
A while ago I looked into Wordpress membership plugins and settled on Paid Memberships Pro. This is for a medium-sized organisation with about 400 members on a couple of tiers. The plugin is free and provides easy ways to put certain pages for certain membership tiers only. If you are handy with PHP then you can write your own plugins for it if what they have doesn’t quite suit your needs.
For video, we get recordings from Zoom of meetings and I transmux them and upload to Amazon S3 (sorry if that’s not the right word, I use ffmpeg to split them into tiny chunks for easy of scrollback in multiple resolutions then use a manifest file to bring them together). The page on the website displaying the video is then behind a members-only section. We don’t get a ton of views so S3 costing only costs us about £1 per month at most.
