Hi friends 👋🏻

This week, news about an annoying new headache created for nonprofit development and comms teams created by GoFundMe. There's an action item here so please read (and if you're a consultant to nonprofits, please share forward this to your clients).

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GoFundMe creates 1.4 million nonprofit donation pages without asking

Over the weekend, a news story popped up in one of my feeds reporting that GoFundMe created a jaw-dropping 1.4 million "donation pages" for nonprofits without consent 🤯
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Apparently they did this by scraping publicly available data from Guidestar (and potentially other sources?), and creating web pages that in many cases look like they have been customized by the nonprofit, allowing unsuspecting members of the public to make donations to the organization WITHOUT any prior contact between GoFundMe and the nonprofit.

I ran 10+ of my clients through the GoFundMe nonprofits search and every one has a new "donation page" courtesy of this move-fast-and-break-things approach.

What exactly is happening here?

Before I get to what you should do about this, let's look at an example so we're clear on what's happening.

After a No Kings-type weekend, the power of our votes is on my mind, so let's look at Vote.org as an example. (No affiliation, and they're not a client.)

Starting at the GoFundMe nonprofits search page, I can quickly find the page they created for Vote.org. It looks like them:

• I recognize the logo
• The page links to their social media accounts
• It includes their mailing address
• it includes the EIN

You wouldn't blame your average visitor for assuming this page had been created by Vote.org.

But no. Down at the bottom of the page (highlighted in red) is a box that reads:

"Affiliated with Vote.org? Claim this page to track donations, access key insights, and get a verified badge"

That box is the tell. This tells you the content on this page is not currently being managed by anyone at the nonprofit organization it claims to represent.

What happens when someone donates?

If you click to donate on a page that has not been claimed by the nonprofit organization it represents, GoFundMe suggests a whopping 16.5% optional tip, and the donation is actually processed and sent to the PayPal Giving Fund. PayPal is then responsible for attempting to grant the money to the nonprofit organization, within 15-45 days. It will only reach the organization if they have established a relationship with PayPal.

So say goodbye to any opportunity to quickly thank your donors, or ensure their information enters your CRM quickly and easily (a process you've probably spent far more time trying to perfect than you'd like to admit).

The only way the process operates smoothly is if you happen to have already established a relationship with GoFundMe, in which case the payment is processed by "GoFundMe Pay" (the new name for "Classy Pay", which is the company's white labelled payment processing service that is built on top of Stripe).

What should you do?

Ironically, the only mechanism GoFundMe offers to opt out of this (at the time of writing) is to claim the nonprofit page they created for you without asking, which involves an identity verification process that takes at least a few business days.

The details of this process are located here, with the relevant info buried in the FAQs (screenshot below):

Unfortunately, I think going through the verification process with GoFundMe is the fastest and most direct way to get the page taken down, although I know others are sharing templates for legal "take-down" demand letters.

There is more detailed guidance about this process in this GoFundMe support article.

Once you get access to the page, the "Discoverability and fundraising" settings allow you to uncheck two "page discovery" settings, which apparently will hide the page from search engine results and from the nonprofit search functionality on the GoFundMe website.

Who is most impacted by this?

In my opinion, small, community-based organizations are those most likely to be harmed by GoFundMe's behavior. Because the GoFundMe pages are set to be indexed by search engines by default, if an organization doesn't already have a strong presence in Google search results, there's a good chance the GoFundMe page will show up first if someone google's "donate to [ORG NAME]".

In several cases, I've searched similar phrases for some of my smallest clients and the GoFundMe pages are showing up second or third in the results, right below their own website's donation page. And these for clients who have worked with a professional web developer.

Nonprofit automations pro Rachel Bearbower even shared an example yesterday of an organization getting outranked by the GoFundMe page in Google Search results:

Larger organizations with a communications team and $$$ to spend on professional web and SEO support *should* have a strong enough search presence to retain the top search rankings. It's the small orgs, without a robust SEO presence, that have the most to lose here.

AND, they're also the orgs that are least likely to have the staff bandwidth to jump through GoFundMe's absurd administrative hoops to claim their account simply to get the page taken down.

Closing thoughts

As I said in my LinkedIn post about this yesterday, I'd love to hear something from the folks that work at GoFundMe (and Classy, recently acquired and turned into "GoFundMePro") about why they thought this was an acceptable thing to do!

While I don't have any connection to GoFundMe, I've helped clients work with Classy many times over the years, and I've experienced it to be a robust and powerful (if pricey) platform. It's disappointing to see that reputation get burned by an action that really feels like a large company strong-arming nonprofits large and small into having a business relationship with them, whether they want it or not.

Finally, Kyle Curry commented on that LinkedIn post to share an eight-year-old news story about what happened to PayPal in the aftermath of setting up the PayPal Giving Fund, which faced similar blowback from the nonprofit community. It culminated in a class-action lawsuit 😬 History has lessons to share!

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