Friends of the San Bruno Public Library discovered that GoFundMe created a donation page for it to “claim” without notifying the nonprofit. The site made 1.4 million such placeholder pages, which need to be manually unpublished by each charity.
As KGO’s 7 On Your Side reports, Dave Dornlas, who’s Treasurer of the Friends of the San Bruno Public Library and President of the San Bruno Amateur Radio Club, first became aware of the nonprofit’s phantom GoFundMe page when a patron wanting to make a donation contacted him to make sure it was legitimate.
Dornlas told 7 On Your Side he was nonplussed that GoFundMe neglected to get the nonprofit’s permission prior to creating the page. He also said he had a challenging time getting in touch with the company, which only responded once the news outlet got involved. “The fact that they would just on their own build pages for nonprofits that they’ve never spoken to is a problem,” he said. “I’m a believer in opt-in, not opt-out.”
Per 7 on Your Side, GoFundMe mined the public IRS data of 1.4 million 501C-3 organizations, along with information collected from “trusted partners,” which it turned into charity pages. Krista Lamp, Senior director of Non-Profit Communications at GoFundMe, told the outlet that when nonprofits claim the page, they gain “full visibility over donor data, donor stewardship branding, and how they choose to leverage their page.”
According to the company, per 7 on Your Side, “this allows individuals across GoFundMe’s 200 million-strong global community to easily discover and donate to nonprofit organizations, helping them support causes and charitable missions they care about, even if the organization hasn’t actively created a GoFundMe campaign.”
Dornlas was also unhappy about the fact that GoFundMe includes a suggested tip for each donation, which is set at 16.5% but can be adjusted by the donor. Although 7 on Your Side says that the company also charges a 2.2% transaction fee, plus $0.30 per donation on top of the suggested tip, that didn’t appear to be the case when SFist looked at one of their charity pages.
7 on Your Side reports that nonprofits wishing to opt out of their GoFundMe pages can “unpublish” them through the site.
According to a 2019 TechCrunch article, the company announced it would be launching its Charity Pages in November of that year.
Image: GoFundMe