GoFundMe has become the largest crowdfunding platform in the world— 50 million people gave more than $5 billion on the site through 2017, the last year fundraising totals were released. The company used to take 5 percent of each donation, but two years ago, when Facebook eliminated some charges for fundraisers, GoFundMe announced that it would do the same and just ask donors for tips. (Company officials wouldn’t say whether this model is profitable, though the site does have other sources of revenue, such as selling its online tools to nonprofits; the “grand ambition,” Solomon told me, is to have all internet charity, whether initiated by individuals or large organizations, flow through GoFundMe.)
The spectacularly fruitful GoFundMes are the ones that make the news—$24 million for Time’s Up, Hollywood’s legal-defense fund to fight sexual harassment; $7.8 million for the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando—but most efforts fizzle without coming close to their financial goals. Comparing the hits and misses reveals a lot about what matters most to us, our divisions and our connections, our generosity and our pettiness. And even the blockbuster successes, the stories that make the valedictory lap that is GoFundMe’s homepage, are much more complicated than any viral marketer would care to admit. (...)
Gofundme campaigns that go viral tend to follow a template similar to Chauncy’s Chance: A relatively well-off person stumbles upon a downtrodden but deserving “other” and shares his or her story; good-hearted strangers are moved to donate a few dollars, and thus, in the relentlessly optimistic language of GoFundMe, “transform a life.” The call-and-response between the have-nots and the haves poignantly testifies to the holes in our safety net—and to the ways people have jerry-rigged community to fill them. In an era when membership in churches, labor unions, and other civic organizations has flatlined, GoFundMe offers a way to help and be helped by your figurative neighbor.
What doesn’t fit neatly into GoFundMe’s salvation narratives are the limits of private efforts like Matt White’s. GoFundMe campaigns blend the well-intentioned with the cringeworthy, and not infrequently bring to mind the “White Savior Industrial Complex”—the writer Teju Cole’s phrase for the way sentimental stories of uplift can hide underlying structural problems. “The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice,” Cole wrote in 2012. “It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.” (...)
Search the GoFundMe site for cancer or bills or tuition or accident or operation and you’ll find pages of campaigns with a couple thousand, or a couple hundred, or zero dollars in contributions. While the platform can be a stopgap solution for families on the financial brink—one study estimated that it prevented about 500 bankruptcies from medical-related debt a year, the most common reason for bankruptcy in the U.S.—the average campaign earns less than $2,000 from a couple dozen donors; the majority don’t meet their stated goal. (...)
Part of the allure of GoFundMe is that it’s a meritocratic way to allocate resources—the wisdom of the crowd can identify and reward those who most need help. But researchers analyzing medical crowdfunding have concluded that one of the major factors in a campaign’s success is who you are—and who you know. Which sounds a lot like getting into Yale. Most donor pools are made up of friends, family, and acquaintances, giving an advantage to relatively affluent people with large, well-resourced networks. A recent Canadian study found that people crowdfunding for health reasons tend to live in high-income, high-education, and high-homeownership zip codes, as opposed to areas with greater need. As a result, the authors wrote, medical crowdfunding can “entrench or exacerbate socioeconomic inequality.” Solomon calls this “hogwash.” The researchers made assumptions based on “limited data sets,” he said, adding that GoFundMe could not give them better information, because of privacy concerns.
The Roys did not have a robust social-media network, or real-life one, for that matter. A native of England, Richard has no family nearby, and his wife’s only relatives are her aging mother and a sister. Laila had deleted her Facebook account not long after her twins’ premature birth, a tense, precarious time when vague well wishes and “likes” from acquaintances only made her feel more alone. Richard worked from home and had only a couple hundred Facebook friends. “Maybe if he worked for a large local company and I worked for a large local company, maybe if we were churchgoers—that’s another network. But I don’t go to church, and he doesn’t either,” Laila said. “I have been told explicitly by social workers that you should go to church just to network. But I try not to be a hypocrite.”
What’s wrong with you also influences whether you score big with medical crowdfunding, according to the University of Washington at Bothell medical anthropologist Nora Kenworthy and the media scholar Lauren Berliner, who have been studying the subject since 2013. Successful campaigns tend to focus on onetime fixes (a new prosthetic, say) rather than chronic, complicated diagnoses like Laila’s. Terminal cases and geriatric care are also tough to fundraise for, as are stigmatized conditions such as HIV and addiction- or obesity-related problems.
“It’s not difficult to imagine that people who are traditionally portrayed as more deserving, who benefit from the legacies of racial and social hierarchies in the U.S., are going to be seen as more legitimate and have better success,” Kenworthy told me. At the same time, the ubiquity of medical crowdfunding “normalizes” the idea that not everyone deserves health care just because they’re sick, she said. “It undermines the sense of a right to health care in the U.S. and replaces it with people competing for what are essentially scraps.”
by Rachel Monroe, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Akasha Rabut
The spectacularly fruitful GoFundMes are the ones that make the news—$24 million for Time’s Up, Hollywood’s legal-defense fund to fight sexual harassment; $7.8 million for the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando—but most efforts fizzle without coming close to their financial goals. Comparing the hits and misses reveals a lot about what matters most to us, our divisions and our connections, our generosity and our pettiness. And even the blockbuster successes, the stories that make the valedictory lap that is GoFundMe’s homepage, are much more complicated than any viral marketer would care to admit. (...)
Gofundme campaigns that go viral tend to follow a template similar to Chauncy’s Chance: A relatively well-off person stumbles upon a downtrodden but deserving “other” and shares his or her story; good-hearted strangers are moved to donate a few dollars, and thus, in the relentlessly optimistic language of GoFundMe, “transform a life.” The call-and-response between the have-nots and the haves poignantly testifies to the holes in our safety net—and to the ways people have jerry-rigged community to fill them. In an era when membership in churches, labor unions, and other civic organizations has flatlined, GoFundMe offers a way to help and be helped by your figurative neighbor.What doesn’t fit neatly into GoFundMe’s salvation narratives are the limits of private efforts like Matt White’s. GoFundMe campaigns blend the well-intentioned with the cringeworthy, and not infrequently bring to mind the “White Savior Industrial Complex”—the writer Teju Cole’s phrase for the way sentimental stories of uplift can hide underlying structural problems. “The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice,” Cole wrote in 2012. “It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.” (...)
Search the GoFundMe site for cancer or bills or tuition or accident or operation and you’ll find pages of campaigns with a couple thousand, or a couple hundred, or zero dollars in contributions. While the platform can be a stopgap solution for families on the financial brink—one study estimated that it prevented about 500 bankruptcies from medical-related debt a year, the most common reason for bankruptcy in the U.S.—the average campaign earns less than $2,000 from a couple dozen donors; the majority don’t meet their stated goal. (...)
Part of the allure of GoFundMe is that it’s a meritocratic way to allocate resources—the wisdom of the crowd can identify and reward those who most need help. But researchers analyzing medical crowdfunding have concluded that one of the major factors in a campaign’s success is who you are—and who you know. Which sounds a lot like getting into Yale. Most donor pools are made up of friends, family, and acquaintances, giving an advantage to relatively affluent people with large, well-resourced networks. A recent Canadian study found that people crowdfunding for health reasons tend to live in high-income, high-education, and high-homeownership zip codes, as opposed to areas with greater need. As a result, the authors wrote, medical crowdfunding can “entrench or exacerbate socioeconomic inequality.” Solomon calls this “hogwash.” The researchers made assumptions based on “limited data sets,” he said, adding that GoFundMe could not give them better information, because of privacy concerns.
The Roys did not have a robust social-media network, or real-life one, for that matter. A native of England, Richard has no family nearby, and his wife’s only relatives are her aging mother and a sister. Laila had deleted her Facebook account not long after her twins’ premature birth, a tense, precarious time when vague well wishes and “likes” from acquaintances only made her feel more alone. Richard worked from home and had only a couple hundred Facebook friends. “Maybe if he worked for a large local company and I worked for a large local company, maybe if we were churchgoers—that’s another network. But I don’t go to church, and he doesn’t either,” Laila said. “I have been told explicitly by social workers that you should go to church just to network. But I try not to be a hypocrite.”
What’s wrong with you also influences whether you score big with medical crowdfunding, according to the University of Washington at Bothell medical anthropologist Nora Kenworthy and the media scholar Lauren Berliner, who have been studying the subject since 2013. Successful campaigns tend to focus on onetime fixes (a new prosthetic, say) rather than chronic, complicated diagnoses like Laila’s. Terminal cases and geriatric care are also tough to fundraise for, as are stigmatized conditions such as HIV and addiction- or obesity-related problems.
“It’s not difficult to imagine that people who are traditionally portrayed as more deserving, who benefit from the legacies of racial and social hierarchies in the U.S., are going to be seen as more legitimate and have better success,” Kenworthy told me. At the same time, the ubiquity of medical crowdfunding “normalizes” the idea that not everyone deserves health care just because they’re sick, she said. “It undermines the sense of a right to health care in the U.S. and replaces it with people competing for what are essentially scraps.”
by Rachel Monroe, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Akasha Rabut
