For the past 15 years, GoFundMe has done incredible work as a conduit for philanthropy. No matter how small or large the cause, the platform allowed us to channel our empathy into action. It democratized and decentralized giving – allowing anyone to give to just about any cause at any time, whether towards a nonprofit organization or an individual in need. Its mission and purpose were to be a means to channel energy – money really – towards worthy causes.

Over the past year, GoFundMe took that passion, combined it with publicly available data and automation, and created more than a million donation pages for nonprofit organizations across the United States. I imagine this was a moment where GoFundMe sawn an opportunity to combine its reach and technical powers and deliver a massive expansion of the good it does in the world.

That was not how it was received.

Quite a few organizations suddenly recognized a GoFundMe donation form listed above their own. Others who do not solicit individual donations now had an unexpected financial and policy issue to reconcile. Some recoiled at brand assets being used without consent. Few had consented to be a part of this massive experiment.

GoFundMe took its core mission – supercharged it to its logical extreme and turned all that good into something … not good.

Today, GoFundMe recognized the mistake it had made. It reversed course and will no longer offer donation forms to all organizations. It will, instead, offer organizations a chance to opt-in to their services.

GoFundMe will also:

• Remove any unclaimed pages. It has been a scramble for our firm and those like us that manage nonprofit technology for our clients. GoFundMe will pull these pages back without anyone having to spend any more time or energy to bring them down.
• Pages will have SEO turned off by default. GoFundMe appears to recognize that it should not be competing directly with those orgs it provides services for. Rather, it will again become a valuable added fundraising channel.
• Continue to provide nonprofit listings. As it has for many years, GoFundMe will provide a searchable directory of nonprofit organizations. It will continue to channel its millions of visitors toward worthy causes.

Ultimately, this is the dilemma that many of us in the tech industry confront: just because we can do something, doesn’t mean we should. With huge volumes of widely accessible data, virtually unlimited automation and artificial intelligence tools – the technology is no longer a barrier.

The only guardrails out there are our values – to decide not to do what is possible.

GoFundMe took, what I believe, were the best intentions and made a mistake in scale. When they realized that mistake – corrected it. I hope we all take something from this.

It is not the first and won’t be the last time we are overwhelmed by the power of technology.

But it might mark the first time I have seen a technology platform make a mistake, own it and correct it.

Humility might be the value we need most in this moment.

Here is the full announcement: https://pro.gofundme.com/c/blog/nonprofit-pages-announcement-2025/