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thewayneOn the surface, this seems like a nice thing, right? The non-profit gets a fund-raising page for free!
Oh, there are many things wrong with this.
This is completely a ploy by GFM. They built the pages with old information, so potential donors are reading outdated and potentially inaccurate info about the non-profit group. No bueno at all. Apparently the information was scraped mainly from the IRS' publicly-available 501C3 information, and because the IRS is such a well-funded department of the government, the information is not up-to-date.
But the big deal?
GFM takes a slice of every transaction. Every single donation processed through Go Fund Me has a transaction fee of 2.2%. And a suggested tip to GFM of 14.5%, just because of how nice they were to set up these pages for people for free. Without asking or telling them. Oh, and there's an additional $0.30 taken.
So if I give $20 to a non-profit through GFM, there's going to be a $0.22 transaction fee, the automatic $0.30 automatic whateveritis, and let's say I click the tip for GFM because I think that's sweet. That tip is $2.90 at 14.5%. That's $3.42 that I just gave GFM, and $16.58 that went to the charity. The charity got 82.9% of what I wanted to give them. And it might be reduced slightly further from credit card or other processing fees.
Oh, and when a Bay-area TV news team went investigating this, they found the tip slider was set to 16.5% for some non-profits.
Whereas if I went and gave that $20 to them directly, they'd get $20, less any possible credit card or other processing fees, though it's possible that those fees are waived for registered 501(c)3s. Guaranteed higher percentage as you're not going to have people tipping that 14-16.5% to GFM!
THIS is the big problem. GoFundMe is skimming 2.2-17%+ of the donations to these non-profits, converting them straight into corporate profits! And their effort in this? Bot scraping a couple of web sites then programmatically setting up web pages, plus minimal work possibly tweaking these pages, plus hosting.
I'm really in the wrong line of work. Alas, I have morals.
Really, it's very much like Humble Bundle book purchases. Every purchase is split between HB, the publisher, and a charity. That's pretty cool. But the amount that goes to the charity isn't that big. You can adjust the sliders manually if you pay attention, so I divvy it up into as close of thirds as I can.
https://abc7news.com/post/gofundme-created-14-million-donation-pages-nonprofits-bay-area-organizations-had-no-clue/18013410/
https://slashdot.org/story/25/11/02/1728231/gofundme-created-14-million-donation-pages-for-nonprofits-without-their-consent
Oh, there are many things wrong with this.
This is completely a ploy by GFM. They built the pages with old information, so potential donors are reading outdated and potentially inaccurate info about the non-profit group. No bueno at all. Apparently the information was scraped mainly from the IRS' publicly-available 501C3 information, and because the IRS is such a well-funded department of the government, the information is not up-to-date.
But the big deal?
GFM takes a slice of every transaction. Every single donation processed through Go Fund Me has a transaction fee of 2.2%. And a suggested tip to GFM of 14.5%, just because of how nice they were to set up these pages for people for free. Without asking or telling them. Oh, and there's an additional $0.30 taken.
So if I give $20 to a non-profit through GFM, there's going to be a $0.22 transaction fee, the automatic $0.30 automatic whateveritis, and let's say I click the tip for GFM because I think that's sweet. That tip is $2.90 at 14.5%. That's $3.42 that I just gave GFM, and $16.58 that went to the charity. The charity got 82.9% of what I wanted to give them. And it might be reduced slightly further from credit card or other processing fees.
Oh, and when a Bay-area TV news team went investigating this, they found the tip slider was set to 16.5% for some non-profits.
Whereas if I went and gave that $20 to them directly, they'd get $20, less any possible credit card or other processing fees, though it's possible that those fees are waived for registered 501(c)3s. Guaranteed higher percentage as you're not going to have people tipping that 14-16.5% to GFM!
THIS is the big problem. GoFundMe is skimming 2.2-17%+ of the donations to these non-profits, converting them straight into corporate profits! And their effort in this? Bot scraping a couple of web sites then programmatically setting up web pages, plus minimal work possibly tweaking these pages, plus hosting.
I'm really in the wrong line of work. Alas, I have morals.
Really, it's very much like Humble Bundle book purchases. Every purchase is split between HB, the publisher, and a charity. That's pretty cool. But the amount that goes to the charity isn't that big. You can adjust the sliders manually if you pay attention, so I divvy it up into as close of thirds as I can.
https://abc7news.com/post/gofundme-created-14-million-donation-pages-nonprofits-bay-area-organizations-had-no-clue/18013410/
https://slashdot.org/story/25/11/02/1728231/gofundme-created-14-million-donation-pages-for-nonprofits-without-their-consent
no subject
Date: 2025-11-14 05:40 pm (UTC)And yes, even if they apologize, the fact that they set things up in this way without asking for consent, and without providing, essentially, a one-click "remove" option, says that they're not actually sorry, and they probably consider donations made to the organizations as incidental, or something to use as cover, rather than a genuine desire to offer a new funnel for charities to get donations.