In the words of the great singer-songwriter Warren Zevon, “Send money, guns, and lawyers — the shit has hit the fan.”

We can safely skip the guns, but the rest feels uncomfortably on-point this October. As The Association of Fundraising Professionalsm (AFP) celebrates Ethics Awareness Month —one of our sector’s largest digital intermediaries, GoFundMe, stands accused of crossing lines that would make even the most jaded  fundraiser blush.

The Setup: Scraping for Gold in the Name of Good

Earlier this fall, San Francisco Bay Area nonprofits started discovering something odd: GoFundMe had quietly created 1.4 million donation pages for U.S. charities — auto-generated from IRS and Candid data.  No one asked for permission. No onboarding call. No “click to consent.”  Just instant web pages bearing nonprofit names, ready to receive donations and of course platform fees.

It wasn’t a hack. It was policy.

When questioned by ABC7 News San Francisco, GoFundMe confirmed it “automatically creates” pages so every registered nonprofit “can easily receive donations.” Each page can be claimed, edited, or unpublished — but by default, it’s live.

The problem, as scores of organizations quickly realized, is that donors could find these pages before finding theirs. Search “Your Charity + Donate” and the first result might not be your site — it might be GoFundMe’s. And unless you’ve claimed it, you get no donor data, no control, and no warning.

Let’s be clear: scraping public information isn’t the sin here. ProPublica scrapes 990 data to create a clean, searchable record of every U.S. nonprofit as does Charity Navigator.  Those 990s are public by law, the way campaign finance data is public. Anyone can see them, analyze them, even monetize the metadata through advertising. The difference? They stop at information. They don’t set up a digital storefront in your name, open for business, and start collecting money from your donors before telling you the shop exists.

Nor is GoFundMe’s action  the same as peer-to-peer fundraising — when a volunteer sets up a birthday page or a 5K team fundraiser for their favorite charity. Those pages are acts of labor and love. The fundraiser knows they’re volunteering their own time and often money. The charity may not get every donor name, but it gets goodwill and reach it didn’t pay for. What GoFundMe did is different. There was no volunteer, no opt-in, no act of generosity behind it — just a script spinning out 1.4 million algorithmic replicas of trust.

The Math Behind the Muck

GoFundMe’s Year in Help 2024 report boasts 65 million donations averaging $77.  That’s roughly $5 billion in annual flows.  Apply their standard transaction structure — 2.5 percent + $0.30 per gift — and you get about $145 million in annual platform fees, before counting the optional “donor tip” slider—up to 16.5%— that pushes costs higher.

No one begrudges companies earning fair compensation for a service. But when that service is built atop scraped data, auto-generated pages, and donors’ unknowing trust, the phrase “Ethics Awareness Month” begins to sound like a dare.

Why did this happen? As I write this post GoFundMe hasn’t publicly  given any detailed reasons for its action.  Obviously, one reason has to be financial. GoFundMe is no longer a scrappy Silicon Valley-like success story — it’s a significant financial asset operating to satisfy  investor expectations . When outside capital enters a platform built on generosity, the incentives change. Venture investors don’t measure goodwill; they measure growth. And growth doesn’t have to be the slow, steady-as-you-go organic kind — not when algorithms can fabricate scale. One click, and suddenly 1.4 million new ‘giving opportunities’ appear, complete with transaction fees, tip sliders, and valuation metrics to impress investors in  the next funding round. In the world of fintech philanthropy, organic growth takes too long. Algorithmic growth delivers faster investor exits.

The Sector’s Backlash

Fundraisers are livid.   LinkedIn has turned into a digital mob armed with rhetorical and legitimately inquisitive pitchforks — nonprofit consultants, digital-fundraising directors, and small-charity execs posting screenshots of GoFundMe pages they never created. [ For a flavor of the concern and outrage see the LinkedIN posts and the comments triggered by George Weiner of WholeWhale.com  and  strategic consultant Pradnya Haldipur to name just two of dozens]

They’re asking basic questions:

• Where’s our donor data?
• Who authorized this?
• Why does this page rank above our own in search?
• What happens if a donor complains?

One Bay Area nonprofit director told reporters she learned of her “GoFundMe page” from a board member who stumbled on it while Googling donation links for a gala. Another said she felt like she’d been “listed without consent on a commercial stock exchange for generosity.”

For many organizations, especially small ones,  this isn’t theoretical. It’s existential. They survive on donor trust, not digital traffic arbitrage.

The Platform Parade

Before we cast GoFundMe as the sole villain, let’s widen the lens to the broader philanthropic middlemen — the fintech layer now siphoning a percentage from nearly every act of generosity.

• Classy — now a GoFundMe subsidiary — moved about $1.1 billion in 2024 donations.
• JustGiving, the UK-based behemoth owned by Blackbaud, boasts over £6 billion raised globally.
• Benevity, the corporate-giving platform, has processed $15 billion + cumulatively — much of it through Fortune 500 “social impact” portals.
• Givebutter, one of the few transparent players, reports $5 billion + cumulative volume and $16.4 million on a single GivingTuesday.
• Fundraise Up, the sleek, AI-driven upstart, recently secured $70 million in venture capital. It advertises a 4 % platform fee (5 % for crypto) and boasts that 82 % of donors cover the cost, making the “effective fee” < 2 %.

Collectively, these intermediaries handle tens of billions of charitable dollars each year — often without clear public reporting on where the money sits, when it’s disbursed, and who actually holds the precious donor data. However, the underlying  problem isn’t data or technology — it’s capital. When outside money gets involved, the purpose of a platform shifts from helping charities raise funds to helping investors raise multiples. That’s not philanthropy. That’s arbitrage. The force driving this isn’t greed in the classical sense — it’s the velocity of capital, the perpetual pressure to show new growth. Every algorithmically created page is another data point of valuation, another fraction of a percent toward a venture capitalist’s exit strategy.

A Legal Storm on the Horizon?

All of which raises a deliciously wicked question: Shouldn’t GoFundMe and maybe some other platforms be a bit worried about a class action lawsuit in federal court, with hundreds — maybe thousands — of nonprofits seeking damages for unauthorized fundraising?

Picture it.  On one side: GoFundMe, the $15 billion unicorn built on “helping.”  On the other: an army of plaintiff firms smelling contingency fees the way sharks smell blood.  The potential spectacle is chilling: the greed of platforms versus the greed of plaintiffs’ lawyers — a moral cage-match in which the first casualty would be “ethics,” and the only real winner would be discovery and further erosion of public trust.

But class action or not, the core issue remains: these companies are operating in the legal gray zone between fundraising counsel and commercial fundraiser, categories long regulated under state charity-solicitation laws.   In California, the AB 488 statute now governs online fundraising platforms, requiring registration, consent, and disclosure.   Other states — New York, Florida, Illinois, Texas — have similar frameworks.

The difference? Traditional fundraisers follow them. Some platforms act as if they’re exempt.

What’s at Stake

This isn’t a squabble just about fees. It’s about ownership of trust.  Nonprofits built the public’s confidence in giving.  Some platforms are now monetizing that trust — one transaction at a time.

When donors give through an auto-created page, they don’t see the nonprofit’s stewardship communications, its mission stories, its accountability reports.  They see the platform’s confirmation email.  They see its logo, its upsell language (“Tip GoFundMe so we can keep helping more people”), its processing timelines. Donors become the fine print.

The longer that continues, the more donor loyalty shifts from you to them.

What Fundraisers Should Demand

Let’s skip the panel discussions and craft a real Ethics Awareness Month Manifesto:

1. Consent before creation. Platforms must secure written opt-in from nonprofits before creating or publishing donation pages.
2. Disclosure at checkout. Donors should see — clearly — which portion goes to the platform and which to the charity.
3. Full donor data access. If a donor gives to your organization, you have the right to their name, contact info, and gift details.
4. Prompt, transparent disbursement. No “monthly batches,” no check delays. Funds raised must move swiftly to the intended charity.
5. Public annual reports. Every major giving platform should publish total donations processed, fees collected, and payout timelines.
6. Regulatory parity. Platforms should register as commercial fundraisers where required, subject to the same audits as everyone else.
7. Donor-first search integrity. Stop gaming SEO against the very charities that built the donor base.
8. Independent oversight. Sector associations (AFP, NAAG, BBB Wise Giving Alliance) should jointly establish an ethical code for digital intermediaries.

The Culture Shift

Fundraising, for all its data dashboards and predictive analytics, remains an act of human trust.  When that trust is automated, abstracted, and monetized, ethics becomes less about personal integrity and more about terms of service.   And that is how an industry loses its soul — not with one scandal, but with a thousand quiet checkboxes marked “I agree.”

The future of generosity shouldn’t belong to whoever owns the best API. It should belong to the people and organizations doing the work — the shelters, clinics, activists, teachers, advocates, and artists whose stories fuel the giving impulse in the first place.

So yes, send the money. Send the lawyers. But maybe, this time, send the regulators with subpoenas for the term sheets — the ones that show how philanthropy becomes a portfolio play. Because when the price of generosity is determined by venture returns, the shit doesn’t just hit the fan. It corrodes the soul of giving itself.

In this Ethics Awaremess Month, ethics isn’t a slogan. It’s a subpoena waiting to be written.

Roger