Today on Decoder<\/em>, I\u2019m talking with Tim Cadogan, the CEO of GoFundMe. You know GoFundMe \u2014 it\u2019s a major fundraising platform where you can donate to help people with everything from medical expenses to little league uniforms to starting a new business.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Tim took over as CEO in March 2020 \u2014 a fascinating and chaotic moment in the United States, and the moment, you\u2019ll hear me argue, I think GoFundMe became a load-bearing part of American culture.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Verge<\/em> subscribers, don\u2019t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder<\/em> wherever you get your podcasts. Head here<\/a>. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n It wasn\u2019t just the pandemic that changed the nature of fundraising platforms like GoFundMe. 2020 was a major turning point in the history of political unrest in the US, and GoFundMe has become a central player in many contentious news events since \u2014 not just in the US, but all over the world.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The platform is also now a kind of proxy for the broken healthcare system<\/a> \u2014 medical expenses are the most popular category of fundraising on GoFundMe. You might be surprised to hear Tim say this is not just in America, but in every market GoFundMe operates in.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n All of this means GoFundMe sits inside a ton of big, messy ideas: wealth distribution, geopolitical conflict<\/a>, the holes in the social safety net. And that\u2019s also in direct tension with the platform being a for-profit company, collecting fees and tips and feeling the pressure to grow as a business.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n So you can imagine I had a lot of questions for Tim: how he thinks about all this, and how he makes some very tough decisions about what money to make and what money not to make. To his credit, he was game to go there and talked about it all pretty openly.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Okay: Tim Cadogan, CEO of GoFundMe. Here we go.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. <\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Tim Cadogan, you\u2019re the CEO of GoFundMe. Welcome to <\/strong>Decoder<\/em><\/strong>.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Hey, thank you very much for having me, Nilay.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I am very excited to talk to you. GoFundMe occupies an incredibly unique place, I think, in our culture, particularly in American culture and American society. It\u2019s a for-profit company, and I have a lot of questions about how you think about its place in our culture and the need to grow and deliver returns.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I was also doing the research. You joined this company in the pandemic, in the heart of the pandemic, when it felt like everything changed. Now, we\u2019re six years later; maybe things have settled, maybe they haven\u2019t. <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n But I actually just want to start there. You became the CEO when the idea that the public health system \u2014 how we think about healthcare in America \u2014 got flipped upside down. I know that healthcare expenses are, I think, the single biggest category on GoFundMe. How do you think about the platform, and how do you think about that path from 2020 to now?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Well, yes, there\u2019s a lot in there. So I started on March the 2nd, 2020, which was about a week before it became very clear in the US that the pandemic was going to have major implications, but it was already becoming clear in other parts of the world.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n We operate in 20 countries, and we did back then. For instance, Italy is an important country for us, and that was probably the first European country that experienced a big impact. So it was just becoming evident; in fact, by the end of the first week, we went remote. Things came at us, all of us in the world, very quickly. It certainly came very quickly for me, trying to figure out a new company, a new space, and all this stuff happening.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The root of what we do is extremely simple. We help people help each other. And we are there to help people in whatever situation they need help. Sometimes those are the most consequential, the most significant thing that is happening in someone\u2019s life and has ever happened in their life. And sometimes they\u2019re very lighthearted and fun and forward-looking, like going to college or sending your kids\u2019 sports team on tour because they\u2019ve made the state championships, you name it. Everything in between: if someone thinks they need help, we\u2019re here to help them mobilize support from friends, family, and networks.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n So when you talk about the pandemic, that is a time when millions of people needed a lot of help. In some cases, for medical situations and everything related to that, some cases because they weren\u2019t able to work anymore. Or we had a phenomenon that was not expected \u2014 and we could not have anticipated this \u2014 when hundreds of thousands of small businesses were shutting down: restaurants, bars, music venues. They were all having to shut down for a while and didn\u2019t know how long they had to furlough employees.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n We had tens of thousands of fundraisers that were often being set up by really loyal customers who said, \u201cI love my local restaurant. I really feel bad for the wait staff and the kitchen staff. I want to set up a GoFundMe for them.\u201d And we had so many of those, and it was such a different use case that it was a struggle to figure out how we handle the volume.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n For example, when you raise money into a fundraiser, to take the money out, you have to go through a [know your customer] process to verify that you\u2019re the right person. If you\u2019re a business, you have to go through a KYB process. And that\u2019s different and more complicated. It means you need paperwork. And if people are no longer at their place of business, how do you get the paperwork?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n So, we and our payment processors who we work with \u2014 all money goes through our third-party payment processors, not through us \u2014 had to figure out how to get through this huge amount of new fundraisers to navigate the situation. Those are a couple of examples of this kind of thing, but it goes back to helping people help each other in whatever situation they\u2019re dealing with.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I think the reason I wanted to start there, and you can disagree with me on this, is because that feels, to me, like the moment when GoFundMe became a load-bearing part of American culture in very specific ways. The same way that Zoom maybe became a load-bearing part of American business for five minutes. <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Everything changed, and what are the resources, what is the infrastructure, and what are the tools? And GoFundMe emerged as one of those things. Obviously, you were the new CEO at the moment, so maybe you just had to react and put one foot in front of the other. But I\u2019m wondering if you feel the same way about what GoFundMe has become after that time.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Yeah. I think your phrase there, which I haven\u2019t heard before, but I think is a really interesting part of it, is [calling GoFundMe] load-bearing. We definitely were used by more people. Awareness was already reasonably high, but it has increased. To give you a sense, our unaided awareness was sort of in the mid-30s. It\u2019s now about 70 percent. Aided awareness is in the low 90s.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n So almost everyone has heard of GoFundMe. And yes, I do think that along with a lot of digital services in that time period, the awareness and usage elevated and has continued to grow since then. I think, well, more than a third of American adults have used GoFundMe now.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Also, I think it\u2019s not just America, though. So we\u2019re in 20 other countries: the UK, Ireland, Italy, France, all the European countries, Australia, Canada. A similar thing has happened there, where doing a GoFundMe has become an expression in the vernacular. And it\u2019s become something that people definitely relate to. It\u2019s like, that is a way that I can do something.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I\u2019ll give you a personal example. I was telling your producer before we got on. We were talking about where we are in the country. I\u2019m in Altadena, as I mentioned. In January last year, our town burned down: 6,000 homes, and about two-thirds of the population displaced. GoFundMe was an incredibly important part of the response. The response involved many things: national agencies, local agencies, and nonprofit organizations. GoFundMe was the way that over 10,000 families here in the Palisades could mobilize support and love from friends and family immediately. That\u2019s one part of the response.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n As I mentioned, there are many parts, but the thing that I think maybe people don\u2019t realize until you\u2019re doing a GoFundMe is that it is actually about a lot more than the money. The money is obviously important, critical, but what comes with that is the expression of support. So when you\u2019re dealing with a tough situation, many times people feel alone.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When you do a fundraiser, or someone does one on your behalf, suddenly you start to see, here are all these people, some of whom I know really well, some of them are friends I might not have seen for a few years, who are like, \u201cHang on a minute. I want to help. I\u2019m thinking of you, Nilay. Here\u2019s $50, but more importantly, I\u2019m thinking of you, and I\u2019m hoping you get through that.\u201d So it\u2019s that \u2014 the sense that a GoFundMe can be the catalyst for that. Yes, you are right. That has become much more significant.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I\u2019m curious about that dynamic. I think there are a lot of different ways I want to come at it through the course of this conversation. But just to make the comparison to Zoom, for example, another service that sort of exploded in use during that time and became a phenomenon. Zoom is business software. The idea that a bunch of businesses needed to use Zoom so that everybody could talk to each other. And then that became consumer software because we\u2019re, I don\u2019t know, going to run elementary schools over Zoom.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The idea that Zoom is a for-profit business that expanded its market and then that changed, that feels simple in one specific way. This is enterprise software for businesses that people are going to use in different ways, and they\u2019re going to charge you money too. The thing you\u2019re describing with GoFundMe is far more cultural. It echoes deep into how society is structured.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n How should our communities help one another? What is the expression of that help? How should you feel about asking for that help? That echoes differently through time, through situations, through our politics. <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n You\u2019ve mentioned several times that GoFundMe operates in different countries. Different countries have different social safety nets. They have different cultures. They have different attitudes toward asking and receiving help from the government, and from one another. How has that changed? Because that feels like maybe the most important part of a for-profit service where you\u2019re taking fees from people who are sending money to one another, but the mission you\u2019re describing is more of a social good mission.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I mean, look, there are a couple of things. One, help is part of what makes us human. We are a social species. We\u2019ve always lived together in groups, starting with little villages and on up. Anything great that we create, we do it together. So the help is timeless; it\u2019s inherent. To your point, it\u2019s universal.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n So what I have found \u2014 I\u2019ve been to 10 or more of our countries, a bunch of them even just over the last year \u2014 is the patterns. What\u2019s fascinating is that every country you go to, whether it\u2019s Australia, Italy, Germany, Canada, or the UK, everyone asks, \u201cWhat\u2019s different about us?\u201d And also, you go within those countries to diaspora populations. It can be Nepalis in Australia or the Turkish community in Germany, or you name it. And everyone\u2019s like, \u201cThe similarities are actually a lot stronger than the differences.\u201d One, everyone finds it hard to ask for help. I haven\u2019t met anyone yet who said, \u201cThat was easy for me to ask for help.\u201d The paradox is that help is so powerful, but it\u2019s difficult and takes courage to open the door. And I want to come back to that.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But you\u2019re asking me about what it means to do this work, but to do it as a business? So a couple of things. One, how does the business work? We\u2019ve thought very carefully about this. Our goal is to get as much help to the recipient as possible. So how do we structure the business? When you give money, the only fees that we take are the transaction processing fees, which in the US for our consumer fundraiser are 2.9 percent, 30 cents per transaction.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That\u2019s the same as when you use a credit card or a debit card anywhere in the world, pumping gas, going to the supermarket. All of those businesses have those fees. That\u2019s it. We have to do that because we have to use third-party payment processors to make sure that money flows in the right way, as verified, and so on.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n After that, we ask the donor if they want to give us a voluntary contribution, a tip. Totally up to them. Make a suggestion; people change it. A good chunk of people do give us a tip, a good chunk of donors. I think last year, 15 to 20 million people didn\u2019t give us anything, which is fine because the donor is the person in this equation who\u2019s bringing the financial resources. And we want to leave it up to them whether they want to compensate us for the service or not. That\u2019s it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n So we feel that that\u2019s very well aligned. Now, the reason that we ask for a contribution is that we have 850 people here working extremely hard. They\u2019re running servers, building the websites, doing the marketing, doing the trust and safety, running the company, running the organization that enabled 80 million people last year to donate and has generated over $40 billion of help over the last 10 to 15 years.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That takes real work. Those people need to be compensated, and the third-party services that we use, whether it be AWS and so on, OpenAI, those cost money. And we need that, but we make it, and I think it\u2019s very unusual; we give people the choice of how much they want to pay us. It\u2019s really powerful.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Is that a stable line of revenue? It\u2019s a for-profit company. I imagine at some point you have to go in front of a board of directors and say the revenue line is going up.<\/strong> Are voluntary donations a stable line of revenue? Is it growing?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Yeah, it\u2019s highly variable at the individual level. But at the scale that we\u2019re talking about, tens of millions of donations, it aggregates to a fairly steady average. And our growth comes from helping more people help each other. Everything we focus on is: how do we generate more help in the world?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I mean, it\u2019s literally my True North objective. I start every meeting with that. It\u2019s like if we\u2019re making a decision, the first dimension of making that decision is: Will this thing that we\u2019re thinking about doing help more people help each other? If it does, let\u2019s lean into it. If it doesn\u2019t, probably not as important as something that does.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Can I just sit in the idea that it aggregates out to a pretty steady percentage across the tens of millions of people? That is a huge insight. On the individual level, it varies. I\u2019m sure most people listening to this have participated in GoFundMe and decided whether or not to donate, and whether to click the box or not.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n To everyone listening who has, thank you for the help. And if you\u2019ve contributed to us, thank you for that.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n There\u2019s a part of that where you\u2019re saying, if you can get to tens of millions of people, there will be a steady state of donations, and there will be an amount of revenue that will track linearly with the growth of the platform overall. We can come to how the platform might grow in the future, but you\u2019re saying that there\u2019s something predictable there that lets you grow and generate profit in return.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n What is the mechanism that goes from an individual decision to donate or not, to \u201cin the aggregate it\u2019s steady\u201d? Because that feels like a big insight, almost like a bet \u2014 that the company would\u2019ve had to make at some point, that it would aggregate over time at scale \u2014 which doesn\u2019t seem intuitive to me, at least.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I mean, it\u2019s the aggregate average behavior. You can see that as more and more people use any feature, your ability to predict how that feature will be used gets more precise. Essentially, your path to statistical significance gets improved. This is the same for anything about what we design that more and more people use.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n As you get more people, you run more people in the experiment, you start to see, okay, the volatility of usage is going down, and we can now see that we think it\u2019s going to settle in here even though there are large variations. So it\u2019s really a law of large numbers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n What is the average donation that people give when they participate in the platform?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n So today I was looking at that, and it\u2019s between $80 and $100. I say that because it\u2019s moved in interesting ways over the last year. It varies a lot based on the category, and it varies a bit by country as well. But somewhere in the $80 to $100 range. For personal fundraising, it varies a little bit more.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Another side of our business is called GoFundMe Pro. We offer fundraising software to nonprofit organizations. These are folks like World Central Kitchen, Salvation Army, the Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, and so on. And there are two different kinds of donations. There\u2019s a one-time donation, which is somewhat similar, sometimes higher. And there\u2019s a recurring donation, which is much lower. That\u2019s someone committing to give monthly.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That\u2019s a very important source of revenue to nonprofits, one that we\u2019re spending a lot of time investing in because it gives those nonprofits predictable revenue. And that\u2019s more in the sort of $25 to $30 range. But if you think personal fundraising, roughly $80 to $100 is what people are contributing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Are they contributing to one another or contributing to GoFundMe? <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Oh, I\u2019m sorry. This is a donation to the person or cause that they\u2019re helping.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I\u2019m curious about that too. That\u2019s a fascinating number. I\u2019m asking more specifically when they choose to pay GoFundMe for the services. \u201cPlease pay us.\u201d How much are they paying you?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s just a few dollars typically, if they\u2019re choosing. And a lot of people are choosing not to. That\u2019s fine. For the folks that are, it\u2019d be a few bucks, depending.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The law of large numbers part is really interesting to me. I look at other big services that take percentages of payments over time. I\u2019ll just pick on <\/strong>Candy Crush<\/em><\/strong> because I love picking on <\/strong>Candy Crush<\/em><\/strong>. <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Apple makes a lot of service revenue, and probably some huge amount of it is from <\/strong>Candy Crush<\/em><\/strong> whales. People who spend tens of thousands of dollars buying loot boxes in Candy Crush, and Apple just collects 30 percent. There\u2019s a long tail of the rest of us who understand that it\u2019s a 30 percent fee to do an app purchase, and maybe we do one or two a month, and that\u2019s it. There\u2019s some enormous disparity between who generates the bulk of the fees and the sort of long tail. Do you have that same disparity?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Is there a class of people that pays more money?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n No, no. Ours is much more in the center of the bell curve because most donations sit in that area. And unsurprisingly, when people are donating more, if they choose to contribute to us to tip us, they do much less as a percentage. So people are definitely looking at that and saying, \u201cHey, what\u2019s a reasonable number to give to GoFundMe?\u201d They\u2019re making those choices.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I\u2019m guessing there\u2019s a lot of software design in there. You can dark-pattern yourself into getting more money if you wanted to. You could write more heart-pulling copy to say, \u201cGoFundMe won\u2019t survive unless you pay us some money along the way.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n What\u2019s the pull there? I mean, it seems that if you want to optimize a business result, there are a lot of levers to pull around the check-box that says give us some money.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Well, we\u2019ve gone in exactly the opposite direction from anything like that. When I came in, the tipping experience was a stepper. It\u2019s like a little thing saying, \u201cHere\u2019s the suggestion.\u201d And if you wanted to change it, it was a couple of clicks. I was like, \u201cI want us to be far more transparent than that.\u201d So we tested our way into what we now use, which is the slider. It\u2019s right there; it has a suggested amount, and it just went \u201cboom.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Obviously, people are mostly doing it on their phones. You can move [the slider] without any clicks, in less than two seconds. It\u2019s right there, and it\u2019s called out. It\u2019s called out in the main experience. It\u2019s called out as you\u2019re checking out. It\u2019s called out in your receipt. Multiple ways to do it. So it\u2019s super clear, super transparent, and that gives people choice and control.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I\u2019m asking about the revenue side and the ability to optimize that revenue because these are the pressures every for-profit company faces. The number has to go up. And the idea that you can layer in dark patterns, you can do what my friend Corey Doctorow calls enshitfification and collect more fees along the way. That pull exists when you are a for-profit company.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Why be structured that way and have all of those bad incentives exist as opposed to being a nonprofit, a B Corp, or any of these other kinds of structures that might reduce that pressure?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Because as a company, we can invest a lot more, very simply. We work for some very significant nonprofits, some of the biggest in the world, but the biggest doesn\u2019t have a technology team of more than about 50 or 60 people. And to do what we are doing, at the scale we\u2019re doing it in a big chunk of the world, you need more technology, you need more people, and you need the capacity to be able to innovate, which is what we have done.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n To do that, you need to be able to run as a company. It\u2019s really hard to do that as a nonprofit. So that\u2019s the biggest reason. And it is elegant in the sense that our objective is 100 percent aligned with what our customers are trying to achieve. We are trying to make it easier for more people to ask for help and then more people to come in response to that help.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That takes a lot of thought, a lot of innovation, a lot of software development. We\u2019ll talk about the [AI] coach and the things that we\u2019re doing there. And therefore, it is us who have done this. We invented this thing. We have scaled it. We have helped now many, many tens of millions of people, actually hundreds of millions of people, to help each other, and we\u2019re continuing to do that. So it is working. The way we think about growth is directly linked to how to help more people mobilize support for each other right now.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Customer is a really interesting word there. You\u2019ve kind of brought me to the <\/strong>Decoder<\/em><\/strong> questions quite naturally. Well done. But I want to just ask about customers. I understand that on the pro side, the customers are big nonprofits, and that probably feels more like a traditional SaaS business in some way. But on the consumer side and the individual side, who\u2019s the customer? Is it the person raising the funds? Is the person paying the money? How do you evaluate that?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Both. They are both our customers. We start with the person asking for help because they are the source of everything. The paradox of help is that it\u2019s really hard to ask for help. And helping feels great. So I do a thing when I\u2019m talking at a conference; sometimes I\u2019ll ask a little question. I\u2019ll say, \u201cHey, who in the room likes helping? Everyone\u2019s hand gets up.\u201d I say, \u201cWho here likes asking for help?\u201d And usually less than 10 percent of the room put their hand up. Then I say, \u201cThat\u2019s awesome. Who of you likes asking for help in public?\u201d Most of those people put their hands down.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n We don\u2019t like it. This is not a cultural thing. It\u2019s a human thing. We don\u2019t like asking for help, but the paradox is that for help to flow, someone has to ask. Because we\u2019ve also been in that situation where we think our friend needs some help \u2014 or a relative, or a child, heaven forbid \u2014 and say, \u201cI want to help you with this,\u201d but they haven\u2019t asked. Often it doesn\u2019t work. It\u2019s awkward. It can be resisted.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But when someone has asked for help and had the courage to do that, they open this door, and then the goodness flows in, and then the experience flows. So we start with: how do we help people? We know there are so many people who are considering asking for help, but they are inhibited by many emotional and societal factors. The sense of, like, \u201cCan I do this? How would I do this? I\u2019ve never done this before. What will my friends think of me?\u201d All of these different things.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n A lot of our work and the software, the smart fundraising coach, is geared to help with those problems. So that\u2019s the first set of things. And then it\u2019s like, okay, how do we give them a great experience? Then, how do we give the people who want to come in and help a great experience of helping their friend, their family member, or their local nonprofit? And then also give them other experiences on top, like, \u201cHey, you did a great thing here, and that felt great. Would you like to do more? How do we connect you into other experiences where maybe the friend of a friend, or maybe there\u2019s another local nonprofit or fundraiser in your area that you would like to help with?\u201d Doing more on that. So we think of both as customers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I\u2019m curious about that. I want to push on the sort of redistribution aspect that you\u2019re describing. There might be more people to help. That\u2019s a fascinating concept. You mentioned that GoFundMe has 850 people. How is that structured?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Yeah. So as I mentioned, we have one mission, two approaches. We are here to help people fundraise successfully and get help. We do that for consumers, and we do that for nonprofit organizations. The latter is called Pro. Our company is organized, largely, functionally. So about half the company is in product technology, design, and data science. That\u2019s the biggest chunk.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Then the rest of the company is focused on how we support the people using our platform. So that\u2019s customer care, trust and safety, risk and compliance, making sure the money is moving in the right way. And then operations. Of course, we have our go-to-market team, which is our relatively small sales team reaching out to nonprofits, and marketing. And a really important part for us is our communications team. Because a lot of what we do, which is very unusual, is that we invest heavily in taking our customers\u2019 stories and getting them attention in the local, national, and international media.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That\u2019s a very important part of the service we provide to them. And it also builds awareness of GoFundMe because what we\u2019re trying to do is show more and more people that you can do this too. That help works, and this is a powerful way to do it in the digital world. So that\u2019s roughly how we\u2019re structured.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That communications piece is really interesting to me. It sort of tracks intuitively that if you start a GoFundMe, you want a lot of people to see it.<\/strong> There\u2019s some fractional percentage of all the people who have ever seen your GoFundMe who will donate. If you just increase the total number, you\u2019re going to get a larger number in the end.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n That communications piece, there\u2019s an element that is curated by you. You\u2019re going to pick the ones that are the most heartwarming that might play in the local media the best. Then there\u2019s a sort of platform aspect to it. You can write a GoFundMe that\u2019s going to go the most viral on Facebook. Somewhere in there is your AI coach.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The new tool. I was playing with it today. I almost just started a GoFundMe for the fun of it today. I was right at the end, about to click on the last button. But the tool writes you a GoFundMe campaign. You say, \u201cI\u2019m starting whatever, a shelter for puppies. Help me write the copy for the GoFundMe,\u201d and it will just do it for you. <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n There\u2019s something about AI in that context and then having a human comms team in the other context that seems like the same idea, pointing at the same goal. But the AI might, because it is sort of the average of every successful GoFundMe, pull everyone in the same direction, while your human comms team is trying to show how different everything is. Does that track? There\u2019s something in there that I find particularly interesting.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Yeah, so the most important thing about creating and running a GoFundMe is that you can\u2019t just put it on the platform and expect people to come to it. You, as the fundraiser, have to tell people about it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n So on our coach, we\u2019re doing two things. We break it into two main chunks. There is creating the fundraiser, which is what you just went through, and then there is managing it. So, when creating it, there are a lot of big decisions when you create a GoFundMe. First, am I going to do this a lot? Second, how exactly do I want to write my story? What do I want the title of that story to be? What do I want the pictures to be, particularly the hero image? What do I want the goal to be? Every one of those decisions is a point at which people drop off because I\u2019ve written my story, but not the title.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n You\u2019re a journalist, right? Title writing is hard. That\u2019s why media organizations have title writing departments. So we identified all of these very difficult blockers. We think, \u201cHow do we make that easier?\u201d The way we started a couple of years ago is helping with those components. We would say, \u201cOkay, we see the people are getting stuck with titles. Let\u2019s take what they\u2019ve created and suggest three titles. If they like them, pick one, modify one, run with it.\u201d It turns out a lot of people use that. In fact, we\u2019ve had over 90 million uses of these different components. The same is true of goals.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Where we moved to this year\u2026 Earlier this year, we launched Smart Fundraising Coach, which said, \u201cActually, you can choose to have an agentic experience, a chat experience of creating your GoFundMe that\u2019s going to do all of those things with you holistically in the creation process.\u201d The key is that it\u2019s you, your story, that we\u2019re helping you put together.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Let me give you an example. We do a lot of checking people\u2019s experience and looking at sample flow. We had a lady whose close friend\u2019s son had passed away, and she wanted to create a GoFundMe for her. She was so emotionally affected that, in the interaction, she was struggling to string together coherent sentences and was just talking about how stressed she was. And the coach could interact with her to take the substance of what she was trying to say in this very difficult time, put it together, and explain what she felt about her friend, about the son, what he\u2019d been about, what they were trying to do; it was this very particular difficult situation. And she was able, with the assistance of the coach, to create that. That\u2019s what we\u2019re talking about.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n For a GoFundMe to work, it has to be you. It has to be your situation because most people that you fundraise from are your friends and family. Over 80 percent of the donors are people who know you, first-degree connections. And then yes, there are friends of friends and so on. So people know that GoFundMe is a coherent point for that.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n So the coach is helping people get through these steps. Another example would be picking the goal. Most people haven\u2019t ever fundraised before. Do I pick a big number, a little number? Do I start low? Does it grow over time? So those are the kinds of choices. And then you get to manage, which is the part that you\u2019re asking about, communications.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n A lot of that is like, how do you share? Who do you share with? When do you share? How often? So, for example, we know that the most effective way is to reach out to people one-on-one. Text them or WhatsApp them. One-on-one, not groups, because it\u2019s easier to sort of go quiet in the group. Much harder not to engage. If you text me, \u201cTim, I was inspired. I set up the GoFundMe that I was talking about.\u201d You\u2019re texting me directly, and I\u2019m going to say, \u201cOkay.\u201d Whereas if you text a group, it\u2019s like, \u201cAh, someone else will do that.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But that coaching will create prompts based on your fundraiser: \u201cHere\u2019s a quick little snippet. Here\u2019s the URL that\u2019s done for you.\u201d You can modify it and send it to your 10 best friends first, get momentum, and then start reaching out and then start posting on social media.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n So the model we have now is sort of a daily plan. It\u2019s a program: \u201cOkay. It\u2019s day one. Here\u2019s what you do. Find 10 people, get it going, get momentum. Day two, you got three donations. Great. Follow it with the other seven. Do this, do this, do this, and we\u2019ll do pieces for you.\u201d And then our comms is a sort of umbrella on top of that. But the most important thing is to empower and enable the thousands of people starting every day to have a successful fundraiser.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I want to ask the other <\/strong>Decoder <\/em><\/strong>question here because I think it\u2019s going to flow into everything else. You have a lot of decisions to make. Those decisions can go in a lot of different directions with a platform like this. How do you make decisions? What\u2019s your framework?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I love the fact that you used the word framework because there are two really important things that I focus on. The first is that before we make a decision, we try to frame the decision. This is so critical because what we\u2019re trying to do \u2014 what any of the tech companies you\u2019re talking to are trying to do \u2014 is create a future that doesn\u2019t exist, by definition.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I think a lot of them are just trying to make money, but I\u2019ll grant you that. Fair enough.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n In our case, we\u2019re trying to help people do something that is ancient, but do it in a new way and have more people do it. And that doesn\u2019t exist right now. So that\u2019s what I\u2019m trying to do.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When you\u2019re trying to innovate and create something new, the questions from the future are murky. It isn\u2019t like in business school where you can say, \u201cHey, there was this challenge.\u201d You have to think very carefully to distill what the question is.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n For example, should we deploy a more sophisticated recurring giving program on our personal fundraisers? That\u2019s a clear question with an answer. So part one is to frame the question because what I find is that when we don\u2019t frame the question, and it\u2019s sort of like we\u2019re talking about a topic, you get mushy decision-making because you have a mushy question or no question at all. That\u2019s one. Two, how do we make decisions? First thing, will this generate more help in the world?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When you say help, does that mean money? I just want to be very clear about that.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Yes. I focus on help because help is the thing that we\u2019re doing, and there is so much more around the experience than the money. Yes, we count it by looking at the money. It\u2019s a simple, easy way, but the implications of that \u2014 the emotional and societal consequences \u2014 are far bigger.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I\u2019ll give you an example. I went to Liverpool in the UK because they were the most generous city in the UK. About two years ago, there were a bunch of riots in reaction to a murder, and there were riots around immigration, and so on. A bunch of things in Liverpool were destroyed. One was a local library called Spellow Lane, and it was ransacked, burned, severely damaged, and left unusable. A local woman, a local mom, named Alex McCormick set up a fundraiser<\/a>: \u201cI just want to do something. I want to raise \u00a3500.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/platform.theverge.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/chorus\/uploads\/chorus_asset\/file\/24792604\/The_Verge_Decoder_Tileart.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100\")
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