Overview
If you’ve ever done any type of fundraising, you know how powerful an incentive a progress meter can be. From physical manifestations like the office canned food drive’s barrel to digital solutions like GoFundMe’s progress meter, these tell your potential donators how much money you plan to raise and how close to the goal you currently are. Knowing the current progress of a project encourages people to donate and creates a feedback loop to keep those donations flowing.
We have built a plugin to add a progress meter to your Gravity Forms for tracking donations and form submissions. You set the goal and it will automatically track the number of submissions. If you collect payments via the form, it can track the amount of money collected. It can even count the quantity of products sold.

Styling for the progress meter is inspired by Gravity Forms 2.5. We love the look and feel of the new progress meter for multi-page forms, and we want to keep that experience consistent with our progress meter.
Using the Plugin
Prerequisites
Confirm that you have Gravity Forms installed and activated and that you’ve installed and activated the plugin.
Using the Shortcode
Gravity Forms Progress Meter adds additional parameters to the [gravityforms]
shortcode. Using these parameters, you can activate and customize the progress meter to meet your needs. Let’s step through the different configurations.
Progress Meter With Goal
Add the Progress Meter to your form by setting the action
parameter to meter
and adding a goal
value to the [gravityforms]
.
[gravityforms id="211" action="meter" goal="75"]
This will generate a progress meter at the top of your form with a goal of 75 form submissions.

Currency Goals
If your goal is a specific currency amount and your form collects payment using a Gravity Forms Add-On such as PayPal or Stripe, you can count the payment amount instead of the number of submissions by adding the field
parameter to the shortcode and setting its value to payment_amount
.
[gravityforms id="211" action="meter" field="payment_amount" goal="75"]
The progress meter will increment based on the amount spent after a payment has been processed. If the payment method has delayed processing, such as often the case with PayPal, then the count won’t increase until payment is finalized.
Custom Labels
Gravity Forms Progress Meter supports custom labels for both the submission count and the goal, using the count_label
and goal_label
parameters. Here’s an example where we replace both.
[gravityforms id="211" action="meter" count_label="Donations %d" goal_label="Goal %d" goal="75"]
Note the %d
within the parameter value. The plugin uses this know where to insert the submission count and goal count.

Combine with Currency Goals
If you combine custom labels with Currency Goals, you can track the amount spent and display it above your form, similar to what you see on Kickstarter and GoFundMe.
[gravityforms id="211" action="meter" field="2.3" goal="25"]
field
parameter. This targets the quantity input within a Product field.
[gravityforms id="211" action="meter" field="payment_amount" count_label="Donations $%d" goal_label="Goal $%d" goal="1000"]
Count Values in a Field
Instead of counting submissions, you can count the value of a field using the field
parameter. This is useful for counting the quantity of an item sold, or the amount of money spent. Below is an example where we count the quantity of a Product whose Field ID is 2.
[gravityforms id="211" action="meter" field="2.3" goal="25"]
field
parameter. This targets the quantity input within a Product field.Parameters
id integer required
The form ID that acts as the data source for the progress meter.
action string required
The action that will be performed. Use “meter” to add a progress meter.
goal integer required
Specify the goal amount for the progress meter.
field string optional
Specify a field ID to count the sum of this field’s submitted values. Use “payment_amount” to count currency.
count_label string optional
The label to display for the submission count. Must include %d to include the count.
goal_label string optional
The label to display for the goal amount. Must include %d to include the count.
Summary
We’re releasing this plugin today with the plans to build additional features in the future. Currently, here’s what we have on our to-do list:
- Support for different colors and themes.
- Live updates as new entries are submitted.
- Option to calculate by true form total rather than captured payments.
- Offer this functionality as a custom block for the Block Editor.
Let us know if you have any ideas for other features or options you’d like to see in the plugin. We’re eager to hear how you’d like to use it!
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Is it possible to count list entries and/or Nested Field entries?
Hi Andrew,
You could count the number of Nested Entries in a Number field and then target that with the progress meter.
It would be really useful if we could also add manual amounts (eg. donations received via cheque).
Hi Andrew,
You may want to check out this snippet, that allows you to edit the payment details on an entry. In this way, you could add the cheque payment manually to the entry which would then be reflected in the progress meter.
Best,