Giving Gone Wild
In Sunday’s Fashion & Style section of The New York Times, essayist Judith Newman penned a critique of GoFundMe, which also included an overall indictment of crowdfunding titled GoFundMe Gone Wild.
Guilty as charged.
GoFundMe has in fact gone wild. In the past year alone, one million campaigners around the world raised one billion dollars on our website for causes that are deeply important to them. During this same time, over twelve million donors gave to GoFundMe campaigns. These numbers are more than doubling year over year — going wild, I guess you’d say.
We are entering a new phase of philanthropy. Let’s call it “Giving Gone Wild”, where friction is removed, transparency is enhanced and causes around the globe will receive billions of dollars in a bottoms up model where people will choose who to give to, how much to give, and share that giving within their social circles. This giving is also different from the old established models in that it all happens online, via credit or debit cards, and in relatively small dollar amounts.
Ms. Newman suggests this might be a bad thing. She questions whether “social media made our craving for attention and validation overwhelm all other considerations”.
I think she’s missing the point. I don’t think the growth of our site is about people grabbing for attention or validation at all. I think it’s about the world embracing a new way of giving that doesn’t fit neatly into established norms.
Much like critics condemned the viability of sharing a ride in a stranger’s car or staying in a room at someone else’s home, Ms. Newman questions why we should consider funding personal causes versus giving to traditional charities like the Red Cross.
The answer of course is easy — we should give because millions of people need help. People should give to traditional charities AND to the personal causes that exist within their social network. “Giving Gone Wild” will not only provide new channels for individuals to raise funds, but will also increase the velocity by which connected consumers around the globe give to traditional charities.
GoFundMe exists to allow friends, family and community to come together to assist when life hits hard. Life is amazing. Life is brutal. Life is tragic. Life breeds hope. Life is fantastic. Life is weird, wacky and WILD. When life brings a circumstance that requires you to ask for help, GoFundMe makes it possible to deal with opportunities and challenges in the most efficient way possible.
The point of our site is not to stand behind every one of our campaigns. Rather, it’s to match causes to donors. If we continue to do that right, individuals will be the arbiter of what is worthy and vote with their wallets. To question whether an individual cause on GoFundMe — as Ms. Newman did in her essay — is as worthy as the old-fashioned giving paradigm, completely misses the spirit of why GoFundMe has gone wild. Can she be the arbiter of what is a worthy cause? Absolutely, but she discounts the power of the people and their social connections. In fact, it is this power that will judge the worthiness of a cause. Part of the character of the site is that the rare silly request for fundraising can coexist with the deadly serious. The key is everyone has equal access and the most compelling ideas win out.
Just this week, it was the nation coming together to donate $445,000 to help four children who became orphans on Halloween night when a compassionate Georgia trooper who cared for them until their grandmother arrived started a campaign to ease the financial hardship from their loss. It is helping to buy a plane ticket to fly a friend home to Kenya for the first time in 12 years. And it’s the New Beginnings Church of Chicago raising nearly $10,000 on their path to feed 5,000 families on Thanksgiving. These are just three examples of 100,000 new campaigns on GoFundMe every month. Are some frivolous? Of course. But each is evaluated in the clearest terms possible — donations.
Every meaningful platform that has become part of the zeitgeist and social fabric in the Internet era has gone through the same cycle. A few short years ago the drums beat loudly, filled with a pejorative rat-a-tat-tat criticizing the now ubiquitous leaders. Uber is unsafe. AirBnB is not viable. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram & Snapchat are all a waste of time. Now Ms. Newman is pounding on GoFundMe & Kickstarter with a virtual piñata bat, and I say THANK YOU. Elevating the dialogue to the virtuous columns of the venerable New York Times suggests to me that the world is changing and with that change we will see everyone becoming a philanthropist. Dollar by dollar, cause by cause, when the people, connected, help each other out, the world will only become a better place. GoFundMe represents the future of giving and it will in fact be WILD.
