Backlash Grows as Charities Say GoFundMe’s Donation Pages Create Chaos

Alex Szebenyi saw a post on LinkedIn that said GoFundMe had created fundraising pages for 1.4 million nonprofits without their consent. His initial response wasn’t the outrage, anger, or even sense of violation that have percolated on social media over the past week. It was just curiosity. He searched for the page for Acquaint, the nonprofit he co-founded, on GoFundMe and then checked out what it said.

And that’s when the first hint of upset came. “The first thing I noticed was a lot of the information was wrong,” he says. It had the wrong mission — one that had been a pre-launch concept — not their actual mission of building stronger communities through human connection. And it also had inaccurate social-media accounts, including one that had been suspended.

“I can imagine a donor might be concerned if the nonprofit’s site listed was suspended,” Szebenyi says. “The LinkedIn account is also wrong. I don’t know where they got that from either. We’ve used the same LinkedIn page since we started.”

Then came anger and frustration. He had to fix it, but there wasn’t time in his schedule. “I’ve got a lot of other stuff to do,” he says.

Szebenyi is one of many nonprofit professionals upset over recent changes that propelled GoFundMePro’s nonprofit pages to start showing up in online searches. The company announced the pages earlier this year, saying it was an opportunity for nonprofits to be easily available to donors on GoFundMe.

What changed is that the company recently added search-engine optimization to those sites. That is causing the GoFundMe-created sites to appear high in results when donors search for a nonprofit they’re interested in giving to, says T. Clay Buck, founder of the consultancy Next River Fundraising Strategies.

“I know of a number of instances where the SEO of the GoFundMe page outranks the nonprofit,” he says. “So you Google that nonprofit, and you get the GoFundMe page. You don’t get their page.”

Margaret Richardson, chief marketing and corporate affairs officer for GoFundMe, says the company wants “to make sure that we are not in competition with organizations.”

But the common refrain among nonprofits upset by the pages is that while the company’s intentions might have been good, the impact hasn’t been. It’s been a difficult pill to swallow for folks like Szebenyi who feel betrayed by the company for creating and promoting these pages without asking first.

“Consent and trust are really at the heart of the impact space, and so by ignoring the facts that they created all these pages without consent, they’re really being very tone deaf,” Szebenyi says.

The Chronicle asked GoFundMe to respond to nonprofit professionals’ concerns. “Maintaining trust with nonprofits is our top priority,” Richardson said. “We continue to be in conversation with nonprofit leaders as we seek their input, and we are listening closely to their feedback.”

The uproar over the pages has spread like wildfire across sites like LinkedIn. GoFundMe has tried to stem the anger, offering substantial changes to the sites, including removing a pre-set tip to GoFundMe of 16.5 percent and removing nonprofit logos from the pages. But the company has stopped short of unpublishing sites that charities have not proactively opted into.

‘It’s About the Control of the Message’

GoFundMe says it created the pages with the goal of helping nonprofits. Many small organizations struggle with fundraising, and the company has pitched the dedicated pages as minimal-effort and no-cost opportunities for nonprofits. Organizations that claim their pages can get their donors’ contact information at no cost, Richardson says.

However, creating pages for 1.4 million charities based on third-party data led to errors. George Weiner is founder of the Whole Whale marketing firm and helps run the To Be Heard Foundation. Information on the GoFundMe-created site for the organization is incorrect, including a link to a YouTube channel that has nothing to do with the group.

GoFundMe has told nonprofits that once they claim their page, they can turn off SEO, correct mistakes, or completely remove the page. But Weiner’s foundation is run through a fiscal sponsor, and because of that structure, he is struggling to provide the information GoFundMe requires to claim the page in order to disable it, and it’s taking time to track that down.

Mark Dobosz is in a similar boat. He became vice president of philanthropy, major gifts, and planned giving at Mozaic Senior Life three weeks ago. Appalled when he heard pages had been created for nonprofits without asking, he searched for his organization and found two pages: not for the main organization but for its men’s club and women’s auxiliary.

That doesn’t fit in with the organization’s fundraising plan, and the pages don’t have the breadth of information Dobosz would like to offer donors online. Dobosz wants to take them down. But he doesn’t have time right now.

“I’ve not started the process yet; we have our gala tomorrow night,” he said Wednesday. “I didn’t create the problem. So why am I being punished, having to take time to go and fix a problem that they have created?”

Dobosz’s concern about the donor experience is something other nonprofits worry about, too, says Paul Yeghiayan, a senior consultant at the Benefactor Group, a fundraising consulting firm.

Many nonprofits “feel like they’re being potentially misrepresented by what GoFundMe is doing,” he says. “It’s really around the transparency to donors because a donor, if they see a page on GoFundMe, will likely think, ‘Oh, this is being managed and authorized by the nonprofit organization.’ And that may not be the case.”

Weiner agreed, arguing that the strong SEO and way the pages are structured could create confusion. “The way you package things matters, and what is happening now is causing increased amounts of chaos as we move into Q4, the heaviest giving season of the year,” he says.

Nonprofit pages initially included the organizations’ logos. After hearing from the community, GoFundMe made a statement on LinkedIn that it would remove all logos from unclaimed pages.

Nonprofit lawyer Jeffrey Tenenbaum says removing the logos was a good start. However, he’s concerned that unclaimed pages, as they existed Wednesday, could be viewed as implying an affiliation between GoFundMe and the nonprofit that doesn’t exist. Tenenbaum thinks it would help if GoFundMe added stronger disclaimer language to the pages, “making clear that they did this on their own, that the nonprofit is not participating in this or consenting to this.”

GoFundMe also explained in the LinkedIn statement how to claim the page and opt out of SEO. Richardson says GoFundMe will work with nonprofits that need additional support. “Our team is focused on ensuring that nonprofits have control over their pages,” she says.

However, there are some things GoFundMe won’t change. For example, an official at a nonprofit that did not want to share its name told the Chronicle that the organization was founded years ago and has an outdated term in its legal name (such as handicapped or retarded), but the group has long had an official “doing business as” name it uses for everything. The official said GoFundMe wouldn’t change the organization’s name. The Chronicle did not share the organization’s name with Richardson, but she confirmed that because of regulatory rules, GoFundMe must use an organization’s legal name.

This is part of the reason some nonprofits are so upset. “It’s about the control of the message,” Yeghiayan, at the Benefactor Group, says. “That’s probably the most important thing here, is that the nonprofits feel like they don’t have control over the message.”

What Nonprofits Can Do

If a nonprofit has a page on GoFundMe, it should take action, says Buck, the consultant at Next River. “I would be proactive,” he says. At the very least, organizations should see if they have a page — and what’s on it. Then they should claim it so they can decide if they want to hide it or use it.

Organizations with a dedicated fundraising team are likely going to want to get rid of the GoFundMe-created site, Yeghiayan says. His thinking: It’s not something groups have planned for, and managing it and updating data may take away time from other fundraising activities. However, smaller organizations run primarily by volunteers may find it valuable in the way GoFundMe intended.

“It’s really an individual decision that the organizations have to make,” Yeghiayan says. “If they use volunteer fundraisers, it might be an appropriate fit for them.”

There’s been a lot of online anger aimed at GoFundMe over the company’s actions. Buck takes a more measured view. He says that GoFundMe “has always been a great partner to the nonprofit sector” and that crowdfunding platforms are often popular among younger donors. There may be some nonprofits that “have found contributed dollars that they didn’t know existed because they hadn’t claimed the page,” Buck says.

Like so many others, though, he wishes the company had spent more time talking to nonprofits before launching the sites.

“Embracing the nature of these kinds of platforms is, I think, critical for where we are,” Buck says. “But can we do it together? If this had been done in cohesive, strategic partnership, wow! It could have been amazing.”