Crowded Out: The Dark Side of Crowdfunding Healthcare and its Historical Precedents
Crowdfunding / New Works in the Field

Crowded Out: The Dark Side of Crowdfunding Healthcare and its Historical Precedents

Editors’ Note: The following is excerpted, with minor adaptations, from Crowded Out: The True Costs of Crowdfunding Healthcare by Nora Kenworthy. Reprinted with permission from The MIT Press. Copyright © 2024. When users consider starting a GoFundMe campaign, they are bombarded by messages of opportunity. The company has good reason to present crowdfunding as a marketplace of … Continue reading

The Complications of Crowdfunding: The Power of Unseen Intermediaries
Crowdfunding

The Complications of Crowdfunding: The Power of Unseen Intermediaries

Editors’ Note: Jeremy Snyder discusses the role of crowdfunding platforms as charitable intermediaries, based on his new book, Appealing to the Crowd: The Ethical, Political, and Practical Dimensions of Donation-Based Crowdfunding (Oxford University Press, 2023). After natural disasters, high profile tragedies, and other major news events, it is now commonplace to see a proliferation of … Continue reading

How did GoFundMe become “the Giving Layer of the Internet”?
Crowdfunding / New Works in the Field

How did GoFundMe become “the Giving Layer of the Internet”?

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 … Continue reading