In an interview with the Global News (that’s up in Canada in case you were wondering), GoFundMe CEO Rob Solomon had something quite interesting to say about both fraudulent and unsuccessful GoFundMe campaigns, inexplicably conflating the two.
Let’s take a look:
“One-tenth of one per cent of our campaigns have some kind of issue related to fraud or bad actors,” Solomon says, also pointing to the fact that GoFundMe has a guarantee that will protect anyone who does donate, up to one thousand dollars.
Hi, hang on, allow me to interrupt here. I find it interesting that GoFundMe has grown in leaps and bounds as a personal crowdfunding platform over the last few years, yet that “one tenth of one percent” figure has remained exactly the same. Solomon said it took five years for the platform to reach the one billion dollars raised milestone; nine months later, it raised another billion, and eight months after that three billion dollars had been donated to causes on GoFundMe. With that kind of growth, especially in the last two years, and with people being what they are, how is it possible that the instance of fraud remains unchanged? Don’t answer that, rhetorical.
Anyhoo, back to the interview:
Solomon said there are ways to differentiate legitimate versus frivolous campaigns, including looking at who has donated to a particular cause.
“Whenever a campaign is started, the first people who give or the first people who see a campaign are those people who know something about the beneficiary, the person who’s going to receive the money.”
“So you’ll see causes that don’t really raise funds and those are the ones that may not be as worthy.”
We need to unpack that statement in its entirety, let’s do so now.
“Whenever a campaign is started, the first people who give or the first people who see a campaign are those people who know something about the beneficiary.”
In other words: people you know and trust.
Remember this?
After the GoFundMe guarantee was launched in early October, that language was tweaked just a notch. Now if you go to donate, you’ll see this on the right-hand side:
Wouldn’t that mean, then, that all donations to a campaign should be from people who know and trust the organizer? Again, rhetorical. We’re not stupid.
“So you’ll see causes that don’t really raise funds and those are the ones that may not be as worthy.”
Really, guy? Your site’s actual advice is to only give to people you know and trust, well what if someone is orphaned and their only friends are also hard up for money? WHAT ABOUT THEM?
OK, seriously. Why use GoFundMe at all, then, if you have all these people who know and trust you to help you out? Just hit them up directly and bum a few bucks, skip that 7.9% cut to the middlemen. No? And since when is GoFundMe supposed to weigh in on what causes are worthy or not? I thought that was our job.
He’s right that campaigns with no donations whatsoever are automatically kind of suspect, but that’s not something I expect the CEO of GoFundMe to actually say. And yet, he did. So there you have it.
