Editors’ Note: Matt Wade recounts the growth of GoFundMe as the world’s largest giving platform, as analyzed in his recent article in the Journal of Philanthropy and Marketing.

Despite their enormous success in introducing millions of people to the extraordinary potential of peer-to-peer fundraising, GoFundMe has lately been having a difficult time. There is accumulating evidence that success rates for campaigns are declining, as well as evidence of significant racial and gender disparities among those that do succeed. Meanwhile, crowdfunding platforms have become proxies for wider ideological struggles, with GoFundMe finding itself entangled in contentious political debates. GoFundMe’s own employees, for instance, expressed frustrations with being a potential party to building the Trump border wall with Mexico, and tentative plans for an IPO appear on indefinite hold.

Both the current and former CEOs, Tim Cadogan and Rob Solomon, respectively, have publicly lamented how GoFundMe has become the default safety net during times of personal crisis. Cadogan even hopes that GoFundMe might somehow return to its early days of more “positive” campaigns, such as funding local soccer teams, honeymoons, baby showers, and local community projects.

Which all leads to the question: what is GoFundMe actually for? What do its leaders envision as their purpose in societies beset by growing wealth inequality and receding welfare states? How can they avoid being exploited as a means of sowing division? How should they reconcile their potential complicity in harms with their legitimacy as an open platform, accommodative of a wide range of worldviews? Contending with these dilemmas has not resulted in a reduction in GoFundMe’s ambition. Rather, in the face of these challenges, GoFundMe still seeks to become the singular “giving layer of the internet.”

As I discuss in a recent paper for the Journal of Philanthropy and Marketing, GoFundMe – founded in 2010 – did not initially have such grand aspirations, but was developed as more of a humble ‘wishing well’, broadly similar to online gift registries today. Co-founders Brad Damphousse and Andrew Ballester’s early visions for the company – initially called ‘Coin Piggy’ and later ‘Create-a-Fund’ – were motivated by the idea of ‘social saving’, wherein well-wishers could contribute to a small fund, usually for a celebratory or recreational occasion, or perhaps a vocational endeavor. Of course, GoFundMe is still used for these purposes, though such campaigns are now occasionally mocked as self-indulgent and frivolous. This is likely due to the overwhelming proportion of more gravely serious campaigns effecting a normative shift in the platform’s perceived core purpose.

In other words, we’ve come a long way from the once light-hearted and utopian hopes of online, peer-to-peer, social cause-based crowdfunding. The ‘origin story’ of such giving practices, in most accounts, usually begins in 1997 when fans of rock band Marillion assisted the group in fundraising for a tour through online donations. For the next decade cause-based crowdfunding would primarily be associated with artistic ventures of this kind, funded by small contributions from enthusiastic supporters, and hosted on platforms like ArtistShare and Sellaband. Among other startups, the founding of Indiegogo in 2008 and Kickstarter in 2009 marked the broader popularization of crowdfunding, aided by favorable legislation (e.g. the 2012 JOBS Act) and more user-friendly payment services (e.g. PayPal). We perhaps easily forget that achieving fast, secure, user-friendly peer-to-peer online transactions was an ongoing challenge throughout the 2000s. Social cause crowdfunding relies on rapidly converting interest to action, hence snappy payment options were a crucial requirement. 

Moreover, cause-based crowdfunding required converting everyday citizens into fundraisers. By circumventing traditional charitable organizations and non-profits, crowdfunding arguably marked a return to older models of giving based on peer-to-peer appeals. Likewise significant in stoking enthusiasm for crowdfunding was the evangelizing of the ‘sharing economy’, sold not merely on the promise of circulating capital more efficiently, but for its democratizing, enfranchising, and even emancipatory potential. In a post-Global Financial Crisis world—characterized by drastic austerity measures and diminishing faith in political institutions—the promise of new forms of solidarity offered tantalizing hope that willing citizens could innovate their way towards more liveable, sustainable, and inclusive worlds. In the words of Indiegogo co-founder Danae Ringelmann, peer-to-peer fundraising platforms could “put the power back in the hands of the people to decide which ideas came to life.”

Sadly, in a grim reflection of contemporary life, the mass uptake of crowdfunding was not primarily driven by creative arts projects, exciting entrepreneurial ventures, or grassroots political campaigns. Rather, it was crowdfunding during times of personal crisis, especially for medical expenses. In 2011, GoFundMe hosted approximately 8,000 campaigns per year related to medical causes. By 2020, this had risen to around 200,000 each year in the United States alone. Such hardships offered an attractive business opportunity. As Rob Solomon argued, GoFundMe could serve a practically limitless market, for there “may be a limited amount of good ideas for product-based campaigns at any given time, but there will always be people with causes or needs.”

Meanwhile, some established charities were quick to recognize the significance of online peer-to-peer crowdfunding, particularly in rapidly responding to humanitarian crises. The Red Cross, for example, partnered with both IndieGoGo and Crowdrise in response to Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Major charities also sought faster and more user-friendly payment transaction services—which startups like Crowdrise and Pledgeling could provide. The hope was that, by getting “the best and brightest data scientists and engineers […] leveraging technology to create a whole new way of doing something,” our moral economies could be reinvigorated through user-friendly tools that enable ordinary folks to become more proactive civic contributors.

Social cause crowdfunding now easily eclipses all other forms and has become a key intermediary in charitable donations. By 2016, GoFundMe had already accumulated twice as many contributions as the next-largest platform, Kickstarter, and was predicted to become one of the next Silicon Valley ‘unicorns.’ In 2021 Time declared GoFundMe one of the world’s 100 most influential companies and an industry “disruptor.” In a curious effort to draw an equivalency between peer-to-peer fundraising platforms and philanthropic organizations, Rob Solomon even anticipated that GoFundMe would “soon be the largest giving organization in the world, larger than the Gates Foundation.”

This ethically delicate task of normalizing for-profit social cause crowdfunding and expressly drawing parallels with more traditional forms of philanthropy was achieved via typically upbeat Silicon Valley ‘solutionism.’ GoFundMe claimed crowdfunding offered “an entirely new way for people to respond to the needs around them,” thus reducing “friction” in our altruism and more quickly shifting “compassion into action.” In short, crowdfunding was the fastest means to turn one’s social capital into liquid cash. Meanwhile, the platforms that fostered these exchanges could skim revenue, either from each monetary transaction, or by exploiting collected data.

Crowdfunding also came with promises of “radical transparency” because, YouCaring claimed, “donors know exactly where their money is going instead of writing a check for a big charity and not necessarily knowing the impact that donation makes.” As GoFundMe grew Rob Solomon asserted that their “digital safety net” was now “part of the social fabric in many countries,” demonstrating “what Silicon Valley can do and making the world a much better place.” Thus GoFundMe is arguably the exemplary form of “caring capitalism.” Coined and critiqued by Emily Barman, caring capitalism promises “a new more caring version of the market where corporations pursue both money and vision.”

Of course, one can find countless examples of philanthrocapitalist claims that charities should be more “businesslike” (and, inversely, that for-profits can achieve comparatively better outcomes in advancing philanthropic causes than non-profits). What distinguished GoFundMe, however, were the externalities and economies of scale afforded under “platform capitalism.” By tasking the beneficiaries themselves with crafting appeals for support, restricting those forms of support solely to money, and deferring responsibility to donors to assess the legitimacy of appeals, GoFundMe could eschew the responsibilities normally expected of charities and philanthropic organizations, and instead simply pursue growth. By fostering, in the words of Rob Solomon, “a marketplace for causes” GoFundMe could therefore emulate other tech giants of platform capitalism:

“When I looked at GoFundMe, I saw this global potential to do for the giving space what LinkedIn did for the jobs space, what Amazon has done for e-commerce, what Facebook and Twitter have done for communications, what Netflix has done for entertainment. So I think there is a gigantic opportunity to not only create a special internet company, but an internet company that has a positive impact on the world.”

Alongside these techno-utopian visions, however, were conspicuous efforts to link crowdfunding with older, romantic ideals. Analogies of barn-raising, passing the hat around, and “harnessing the power of the internet … to enable a very, very age-old practice” were commonly invoked. One popular anecdote used by early crowdfunding advocates recalls the base of the Statue of Liberty, which was funded through small contributions following a public appeal from Joseph Pulitzer.

Stories of this kind were used to sell the idea of crowdfunding as a means of asserting collective values, but stories are also the very currency of social cause crowdfunding. Reduced to their most basic functions, crowdfunding platforms are simply micro-blogging services with basic cross-platform integration and easy payment processing. The real source of differentiation, argued Rob Solomon, is the affecting content produced by those who bring heartfelt appeals to the platform:

“When you dig into GoFundMe, it’s a human-interest goldmine. There are tens of thousands of compelling stories. That is what GoFundMe really is; a storytelling platform but more importantly a story-changing platform.”

The implicit promise here is that an authentic and well-crafted appeal has the potential to effect life-changing outcomes. Campaign organizers are thus frequently advised that while “making yourself vulnerable can be scary, writing your fundraiser story honestly and thoroughly will help people connect to your cause.” This unique selling point was commonly contrasted with impersonal encounters when engaging with major institutional charities.

However, most GoFundMe campaigns established during times of personal crisis do not achieve wondrous life-changing outcomes. While observers noted that through “magic-seeming intercessions, GoFundMe has acquired a wishing-well mystique,” the growing realization was that most people could not rely on ‘the crowd’ in times of need. Feel good fundraising stories still abounded, but academic research began to expose the stark gap between aspirations and actualities. Initially, GoFundMe employed a defence that could described as positive precarization, wherein we are urged to proactively embrace our vulnerability—regardless of its structural causes—and adopt an unyieldingly upbeat determination to find individual solutions by better utilizing all our human capital. We must become “sympathy entrepreneurs,” telling stories that resonate with the “imagined audience,” and be willing to compromise on our usual “privacy calculus.” 

Meanwhile, criticisms grew around GoFundMe’s for-profit model, perceived as unjust enrichment from the suffering of others. GoFundMe was also steadily attracting more ethically sensitive and politically divisive campaigns, which added further complexity. Ideological opportunists recognized that crowdfunding can capitalize on topical issues, connecting the giving of donations to expressions of democratic enfranchisement. This offers an immediacy of citizenship-in-action hard to find elsewhere, but lends itself to virality-driven divisiveness where money buys voice, attention, and airtime. For example, in 2015 conservative media outlets publicly supported a GoFundMe campaign for Memories Pizza, whose owners were met with opprobrium after they declared they would refuse to cater a same-sex wedding. The campaign quickly raised over $800,000, among the biggest in GoFundMe’s history at the time. In defending their decision not to remove the campaign, a GoFundMe spokesperson stated, “At the end of the day we’re a neutral platform …GoFundMe allows us to be agents of change in our own communities; it democratizes empathy.” GoFundMe also pointed to progressive causes they hosted, arguing that GoFundMe “will continue to be a safe space for LGBT campaigns.” However, the irony and hypocrisy were clear, for despite insisting that GoFundMe is an inclusive space for all, one of its most successful campaigns was petitioning for the right to deny basic freedoms to others.

A concurrent issue were fundraisers for persons charged with violent crimes, especially in cases of alleged racially motivated police brutality. For example, in 2014 police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri (leading to the Ferguson Riots, a catalyst for the growing Black Lives Matter movement). Two GoFundMe campaigns were established to support the officer, Wilson, raising over $235,000 and $197,000. These campaigns attracted extreme racist vitriol, with donors referring to Brown as a “feral ape” and “common street thug.” Though they removed offensive posts, GoFundMe did not refund any accompanying transactions (thus profiting from racial hatred, given their revenue model included taking a 5% cut of all donations). By this stage, GoFundMe’s appeals to ‘neutrality’ were unconvincing, and in practice there is no such thing as a ‘neutral’ platform. Through either diligence or dereliction, platforms ‘choose’ what content they are willing to host. GoFundMe’s insistently ‘neutral’ stance had enabled it to become a tool not only for defending, but actively financing intolerance.

Eventually, GoFundMe recognized that more considered policies to reduce complicity in harms was a duty they could not shirk. Policy changes met with broad support included banning campaigns raising funds for legal defence of violent crimes, along with fundraisers for unproven cancer treatments (deemed to be exploiting people in desperate circumstances). However, far more controversial was GoFundMe’s decision to ban campaigns raising funds for an abortion, which remained in place from September 2014 until June 2016. Critics described such policies as a “flippant dismissal of those in need of important and imperative health care” and a cruel perpetuation of “shame and stigma.” GoFundMe eventually removed the ban and began lending their support to reproductive justice causes (though they have been noticeably quiet on the matter since the overturning of Roe v. Wade last year). 

Ultimately, GoFundMe’s once standard appeal to utopian disruption shifted toward reputational repair, and then an eventual reckoning with the impossibility of being a ‘neutral’ platform without risking complicity in significant harms. I explore this reckoning in my recent study, outlining GoFundMe’s major policy changes, discursive shifts, and strategic pivots. In the space of a decade GoFundMe completely upended our giving practices and rationales, compelling many traditional fundraising organizations into radically rethinking their approaches. There is little reason to believe the next decade in the “giving layer of the internet” won’t prove equally disruptive.

-Matt Wade

Matt Wade is a Lecturer in Social Inquiry and Discipline Lead for Sociology at La Trobe University, Melbourne.