GoFundMe Review

Pros

• World’s largest charitable crowdfunding site
• No platform fee
• Nonprofit crowdfunding is also available
• Can collect funds without meeting your funding goal

Cons

• Poor customer support
• Must give your SSN to withdraw funds
• Some campaigners have trouble withdrawing funds

GoFundMe Overview

GoFundMe is the largest charitable crowdfunding site. GoFundMe is best known for medical and need-based crowdfunding, but you may not know that GoFundMe can also be used to raise funds for businesses.

Unlike crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter and Patreon, GoFundMe doesn’t charge a platform fee. However, as with any fundraising site, ~3% of what you raise will still go to the payment processor.

Read on for the full story on GoFundMe.

Services Offered

GoFundMe provides a platform for users to solicit money from friends, family, social media followers, and anybody who might be moved to action by their campaign.

When you sign up with GoFundMe to set up a crowdfunding campaign, you’ll find that you can fundraise for the following purposes:

• Medical
• Memorial
• Emergency
• Nonprofit
• Education
• Animals
• Business
• Community
• Competition
• Creative
• Event
• Faith
• Family
• Sports
• Travel
• Volunteer
• Wishes

As long as you don’t encroach on GoFundMe’s forbidden territory (see below), your campaign has a place on the site. You might note that the majority of categories given have to do with need-based causes. However, businesses and entrepreneurs can use GoFundMe for crowdfunding as well.

Numerous examples can be found in GoFundMe’s campaign lists of successful business project campaigns, from a San Francisco restaurant that raised $50K to get out of debt to a veteran who raised $2K to start a motorcycle repair shop. Considering the nature of GoFundMe, it helps to have a compelling story to tell (overcoming hardship, extenuating circumstances, and the like) when conducting business crowdfunding.

Business Qualifications

GoFundMe is deliberately permissive regarding the sorts of campaigns it supports. That said, there are a number of terms a campaign must comply with:

• No illegal activity
• Nothing fraudulent or misleading
• No controlled substances or related paraphernalia
• No weapons
• Nothing to do with investments, equity contracts, money service businesses, debt collection, or cryptocurrencies
• No gambling
• No promoting hate, violence, harassment, discrimination, terrorism, or intolerance
• No dealing with entities under US sanctions
• No human trafficking/ransom/exploitation
• No porn
• No “offensive, graphic, perverse or sensitive content”
• Nothing in defense of or in support of anyone alleged to be involved in criminal activity
• No offering monetary rewards/gift cards
• No transactions for the sale of items before the seller has control or possession of the item
• No collection of payments on behalf of merchants
• No credit repair or debt settlement services

Additionally, to launch a campaign on GoFundMe, you must be a citizen of one of the following countries:

• United States (unfortunately, residents of Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the US Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands cannot host a GoFundMe campaign)
• Canada
• United Kingdom
• Australia
• Austria
• Belgium
• Ireland
• Denmark
• Finland
• France
• Netherlands
• Norway
• Germany
• Luxembourg
• Portugal
• Spain
• Sweden
• Switzerland
• Italy

Note: You don’t need to be in one of these countries to donate to a GoFundMe campaign. You can donate from nearly any country, with a few notable exceptions (China, Cuba, Iran, Sudan, Syria, and North Korea).

GoFundMe Terms & Fees

Here are the terms and fees for GoFundMe’s crowdfunding campaigns:

GoFundMe crowdfunding campaigns don’t prompt you to set a funding period. Instead, you are prompted to set a funding goal, but you’ll get to keep whatever you raise, no matter how much or how little that ends up being. You can keep your campaign active indefinitely and continue raising money even after you surpass your funding goal. There’s no limit to the amount of money you can raise, either.

On the backer/donor end, GoFundMe pledges that, unlike other crowdfunding sites, it will not charge your donors anything besides the payment processing fee. In place of a platform fee, GoFundMe offers a “tipping” option to all donation pages. These tips to GoFundMe are entirely voluntary — donors can choose “Other” in the tipping drop-down menu and enter $0 as the tip, and the donation will still go through.

Note that GoFundMe actually hosts two different kinds of fundraising campaigns. The campaigns we’ve been discussing are individual campaigns, which include everything from personal causes to business fundraisers to raising money for a beneficiary. GoFundMe also hosts nonprofit funding campaigns, which are fundamentally different.

GoFundMe lets you set up a fundraising campaign for your certified nonprofit. Unlike donations to individual campaigns, contributions to nonprofit campaigns are processed through the PayPal Giving Fund, a 501(c)(3) public charity. Donors will get a tax-deductible receipt when they donate, and the Campaign Organizer doesn’t even have to touch the money.

This raises an important point that donors can miss: A donation to an ordinary GoFundMe campaign is not tax-deductible, as GoFundMe itself is not a nonprofit entity.

Application Process

Setting up a fundraising campaign with GoFundMe is simple and self-explanatory. You just enter the details of your campaign, your fundraising goal, and you can get your campaign live within the hour.

One thing I wasn’t thrilled with is that GoFundMe repeatedly and aggressively prompts you to connect your campaign to your Facebook page and sign up using your Facebook account. In fact, to have your campaign appear in the Public Search Directory, you have to sign up using your Facebook account. That means if you want your campaign to be publicly featured on GoFundMe’s site — and you almost certainly do — you’re required to have a Facebook account.

Sales & Advertising Transparency

Though some users have complained about the fees taken by GoFundMe or about having their campaigns removed from the site for violating the terms and conditions, GoFundMe’s site does disclose this information. It could be displayed in a more accessible way, though — particularly the conditions a campaign must meet to qualify for receiving funds.

Customer Service & Technical Support

GoFundMe doesn’t list a phone number to call for immediate support, but it does provide a contact form for getting in touch with customer service. GoFundMe touts its five-minute support guarantee — the company promises to respond to your queries within five minutes, which is a faster response time than many rivals provide. Unfortunately, there is no live chat.

Beyond that, the site answers some basic questions about the service on its help pages, though you can only find a lot of pertinent information on GoFundMe’s terms page.

GoFundMe Reviews

Negative GoFundMe Reviews & Complaints

Reviewers and users of GoFundMe have reported several serious issues with the company. A PCMag review of GoFundMe noted that to withdraw the funds you’ve raised, GoFundMe makes you provide your full social security number. Given the near-daily revelations of massive data breaches targeting our personal information, this is a major point of concern.

Perhaps more concerning are the numerous reports from people who have found it nearly impossible to collect the funds they’ve raised via their GoFundMe campaigns. Some say that when they go to withdraw funds, GoFundMe just responds with repeated requests for more information and that customer service is inadequate to resolve the situation. Other users have reported problems with WePay, GoFundMe’s payment processor.

These complaints, and others, go a long way toward explaining why GoFundMe currently gets an average rating of 1.5 out of 5 on Trustpilot, based on over 20,000 reviews.

Other dangers may not be apparent to GoFundMe users at first glance. Some campaigners have even found that their GoFundMe campaigns endangered their SSI eligibility. This isn’t a problem with GoFundMe per se (though the company should attempt to make people aware of such hazards), but it shows how GoFundMe isn’t necessarily a panacea for helping those in need.

Positive GoFundMe Reviews & Testimonials

Reviewers have taken note of the positive aspects of GoFundMe as well. That PCMag review mentioned earlier praised GoFundMe’s policy of allowing people to keep what they raise regardless of whether they meet their funding goal, along with the platform’s user-friendliness and social media integration.

Feedback on GoFundMe from users includes positive experiences as well. Many campaigners have found GoFundMe to have been of great help to them personally.

The company also generally tries to address complaints against it in a timely fashion. GoFundMe currently retains an A+ rating with the BBB.

Final Verdict

GoFundMe has grand ambitions, and it has proven an invaluable resource for those helped by its particular conception of crowdfunding. Businesses may find GoFundMe’s lack of a platform fee quite tempting. However, for the entrepreneurs reading this, know that Kickstarter may be a more suitable platform for tech and creative projects due to that company’s higher level of support and a pool of backers more inclined to fund business projects.

Of course, Kickstarter is famously selective in deciding what business projects it allows — an entrepreneur rejected by Kickstarter may well sign up with GoFundMe and have a successful campaign.

GoFundMe is far from a comprehensive solution to making access to medical care affordable. I would be remiss, however, if I didn’t acknowledge that for those who have used GoFundMe successfully to cover the costs of emergencies and tragedies, the platform has been a godsend. Plus, the lack of a platform fee is commendable. However, as some of the horror stories show, GoFundMe could be a bit more attentive to those forced by difficult circumstances to rely on its crowdfunding platform to cope with the unthinkable.

If, after reading this, you’re considering other crowdfunding platforms for your business needs, have a look at our best GoFundMe alternatives for small business funding, while nonprofits considering their crowdfunding options should check out our rundown of the top crowdfunding sites for nonprofits.

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