Hi friends 👋🏻

Last week, I wrote about GoFundMe's ill-advised move to create new donation pages for 1.4 million nonprofit organizations without allowing orgs to opt-in first. View that email here. It was a mess.

This week, I want to suggest a lesson we can learn from a week of intense focus on GoFundMe about the importance of brand monitoring.

This wasn't the first time nonprofit organizations' data was used in bulk by another entity without consent, and it won't be the last either. It's unavoidable, so your best bet is to build workflows to spot when it's happening and respond quickly.

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What happened with GoFundMe?

Skip this if you've already read 1,000 outraged LinkedIn posts and newsletters about this 🤪

A summary in 4 steps:

1. GoFundMe scraped publicly available data on nonprofit organizations to create "donation pages" for 1.4 million orgs that to the casual user looked like they had been set up by the organization themselves. It seems the vast majority had NOT been claimed by organization staff.
2. The nonprofit community wasn't pleased. I was one of many alerting nonprofit staff that they should claim ownership of the page GoFundMe had created for their org and deactivate it if they didn't want to accept donations through that channel, or risk having the GoFundMe page outrank their own webpages.
3. GoFundMe's first post in response tried to justify the move as supportive of nonprofit fundraising efforts, while admitting communication about the rollout could have been better.
4. A day later GoFundMe issued a fuller apology and reversed course, limiting the donation pages to nonprofits that had opted in.

Overall a good outcome, but one that only came about because of a public outcry.

It's not just GoFundMe. This will probably happen again.

This has happened before and it will likely happen again. Here in the US, nonprofit organizations file annual reports to the IRS to maintain tax exempt status, and those 990 or 990-EZ forms contain lots of information, and they're publicly available.

You can view them on the IRS website, or on other nonprofit data aggregator websites like ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer.

Public data about nonprofit organizations is also scraped by charity rating organizations like Charity Navigator and Candid (formerly Guidestar), both of which are themselves nonprofit organizations! Charity Navigator even solicits donations on behalf of nonprofits, in a very similar way to GoFundMe's recent attempt, but seems to have dodged the outcry:

For profit companies have done this before and will likely do it again. PayPal did something similar to what GoFundMe did, almost a decade ago, and faced a lawsuit for creating donation pages and soliciting donations for nonprofits without their opt-in. PayPal still hosts "unclaimed" nonprofit donation pages, although with a more prominent disclaimer.

Why brand monitoring is so important

There's a learning opportunity for nonprofit leaders and comms professionals here.

When you run a nonprofit organization (or a business), you have a public presence and you can't prevent other entities from publishing information about you online.

Often you wouldn't want to! If someone published a list of the ten highest-impact organizations in your sector, with direct links to each org's donation page, that would be great. You probably wouldn't mind if that page received lots of a traffic, had a high ranking in the Google search results, and listed other information about your organization ... so long as that information was accurate.

But if that information was inaccurate, or if another entity started soliciting donations on your behalf without asking first, you would want to be aware of that, quickly, so that you could take action.

This is where brand monitoring comes in.

Broadly speaking, there are three categories of brand mentions to understand and monitor:

1. Brand mentions on a webpage with a link to your domain. These are relatively easy to pick up because that link is a "backlink" to your website. If that link drives any traffic to your site, you'll see it in your website analytics tool, and a backlink audit should pick it up.
2. Brand mentions on a webpage without a link. This is like someone mentioning Blue Hills Digital in a news story, but without providing a link to the website. These are trickier to track, but important to know about!
3. Social mentions. People mentioning your brand, or formally mentioning your @account on social platforms is another important category to track. Since most social platforms limit how easily brand monitoring tools can crawl their content, detailed tracking requires different tools.

Setting up brand monitoring

I don't have a perfect brand monitoring setup to recommend.

The right solution for your organization depends on your budget, and how much you want to automate the process.

Here are some options to consider (roughly ordered from free to expensive). I encourage you to experiment with each of these!

• Google! Starting super-basic: open up Google search in a private browsing window and search for your organization name inside " ". See what comes up! (Try the same thing with a few other variations like your org name without the " " and the word "donate")
• Your website analytics tool. Take a look at the referral traffic (the list of other websites that refer traffic to your website). Are there any surprises in there?
• Google Alerts. These used to be better. Now I find they're fairly useless. But it doesn't hurt to set up a few free Google Alerts for terms like your organization name or other key terms.
• Google Search Console. Use Search Console to ensure your organization has the #1 search ranking for your brand name. If you don't, you need to pay attention to who has crept into that #1 spot.
• AlertMouse. This is a brand new (literally launched this week) tool from marketing pro Rand Fishkin. I'm testing it out currently. The AlertMouse promise is a Google Alerts-type tool that will alert you to new brand mentions (linked or not) from across the web. It's a paid tool, but it's not too expensive, and it has an (unspecified) nonprofit discount if you email them.
• SEO tools like Semrush often include a brand monitoring component. Semrush can generate a brand monitoring report.
• SEO tools offer "backlink audits". Tools like Semrush or SE Ranking routinely include a backlink audit, which will alert you to new links pointing to your domain. The vast majority of these links will be spammy garbage, but they will catch the good stuff too.
• Dedicated brand monitoring tools like Awario or BuzzSumo are more pricey, and are focused specifically on tracking brand mentions. They may include social media integrations too.
• Social media monitoring tools are a whole additional category, with a wide choice and often significant costs. Your social media scheduling tool may come with some basic "social listening" features, and tools like BuzzSumo or Sprout Social can do much more, for a price.

Once you've assessed the landscape, what should you do?

You know how your comms team members are always trying to get you to "stay on message"?

That's what we're trying to do here, except the people you're trying to control (or at least influence) are not part of your team. So influence might be the best you can do.

Here are some of the actions you might consider taking:

• Claim ownership over "profiles" and edit them to be accurate and consistent. These might include profiles on sites like Charity Navigator, PayPal, Candid, etc. You may also have the opportunity to remove a profile.
• Request edits on pages you can't directly edit. An obvious example here is Wikipedia. You shouldn't attempt to directly edit the Wikipedia page, but you can request edits through the related "talk" message board. Similarly, you can reach out to the owners of other websites that mention your organization and request edits or links.
• Ensure accuracy and consistency. The more consistent your public-facing information is the better. That means ensuring all your accounts (from the website, across social channels, to profiles and even IRS filings) have identical logos, organization names, addresses, phone numbers, website URLs, etc.
• Take proactive steps to build a strong brand profile. This is where you get into digital PR, which hopefully is part of your marketing communications strategy. Every brand mention with a high authority website or media outlet helps build your moat, making it harder for new or non-consensual entrants from outranking your own webpages or owned channels.

The elephant in the room that I haven't mentioned here is AI tools. It's a topic for another day, but be aware that brand monitoring should extend into keeping an eye on how tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, etc. respond when asked about your brand.

At this point in time (and contrary to what many people seem to believe), these tools are largely reliant on what shows up in traditional search results. This means the approach I've suggested above – monitoring links and what shows up in search – will also influence the responses generated by AI tools. At least until the next time the AI companies raise billions more VC money to retrain their models...

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I'd love to hear what unexpected things you discover in your brand monitoring journeys! Feel free to reply and let me know what tools work for you.

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