A Universal Desire to Help: How GoFundMe Reached 40 Million Donors
By Rob Solomon, GoFundMe CEO
GoFundMe may have started as an American company, but I’m proud to say we’re now an international movement, serving a global community brought together by the universal desire to help one another.
For proof, look no further than the ongoing Love Army for Somalia campaign. It doesn’t get any more global than this: Started by a French social media star and his friends from the U.S., UK, and Mexico, the Love Army united people from around the world to make a real difference for folks living through the famine in Somalia.
Even before this record-breaking campaign, we’ve seen how there’s a need that knows no borders for a platform that empowers people to help each other. For some time now, folks from across the globe were donating to and starting campaigns before we’d officially launched in their countries.
With this need in mind, GoFundMe has been expanding internationally, and we couldn’t be prouder about making our platform available to even more people who want to help. In fact, while we’ve been busy rolling out country-specific versions of GoFundMe to France, Spain, and the UK, we crossed a particularly remarkable milestone.
I’m happy to announce that there are now more than 40 million people who have donated to a GoFundMe, again making our giving community the largest in the world. It’s this global community that, earlier this year, helped us reach more than $4 billion raised. What’s more, one in six donations have come from outside of the US in the last few years.
Campaign organizers and donors in France, Spain, and the UK are already having an incredible impact. Spanish organizers have saved an LGBT bookstore, helped a 2-year-old on a breathing machine get physiotherapy, and created a fund to save retired service animals. In France, organizers are helping refugees, funding the dreams of an aspiring baker, and going on a volunteer trip to help Guatemalan children. And in the UK, a terminally ill climber just reached the summit of Mount Everest and a 25-year-old is working to adopt an orphan from Uganda.
Of course, we’re only getting started. People from nearly every country in the world have donated to a GoFundMe, and we want to reach as many people as possible with the best tools and customer service available to empower people to help even more. Over the next few months, GoFundMe will start to roll out additional features to even more countries, for a total of 18 countries by the end of summer.
Stay tuned—there’s a lot more to come.
