Cori Jackson — a single mom living in Indiana — took in her two young nieces to keep them out of foster care this summer. It hasn’t been easy.

One surprising thing

The sheer scope of just how many fundraisers fail still blows my mind. The top 5 percent of campaigns get about half of all donations — those are the ones that we normally see on our For You page — while the vast majority of fundraisers fail.

The youngest still isn’t potty-trained. The oldest isn’t used to having food in the fridge so, sometimes, she eats so much it makes her sick. The radiator and head gasket of Jackson’s car went out at just the wrong time. And the recliner in her living room, where she has been sleeping so the girls can have her bed, is on “its very last leg.”

Jackson, who is 38 years old, has been doing the best she can. She works full-time for a travel agency, earning a steady income for her and her 10-year-old son, but hardly enough for a family of four. She qualifies for food stamps now, but they won’t kick in until the end of the month. With nowhere else to turn, a friend helped her do the only thing left to do: start a GoFundMe.

“When you’re getting to the point of a GoFundMe, it is desperation,” said Jackson. GoFundMe, the world’s most popular crowdfunding site, acts as the internet’s collective beggar’s cup, filled to the brim with people like Jackson pleading for help. The kids need back-to-school clothes and she just needs a bump of support — her goal is $2,200 — to pay for food, diapers, and repairs while she adjusts. A month in, and she’s only raised $75.

Why?

You will never find Jackson among the scores of fundraisers on GoFundMe’s discovery page, a cross-section of today’s major crises. If you scroll through the site, you’ll see a clickable catalog of mothers buckling under medical debt, Palestinians in Gaza pleading for aid, researchers recouping lost federal grants, and coworkers desperate to help friends in ICE custody.

All the world’s in crisis, and we are merely fundraisers. And in this moment of mass need, with foreign aid running low and our attention more divided than ever, it’s hard not to feel overwhelmed by all the options in front of us.

In a little over a decade, the rise of online crowdfunding has entirely reshaped what it means to donate your money — and the contours of who receives it. In some ways, that’s a great thing: Sites like GoFundMe have democratized access to support for people left behind by charities and governments. And donors get to feel good too, because giving to someone after reading their story on GoFundMe often feels more intimate and immediately impactful than a monthly donation to a nonprofit might.

But like anything else powered by algorithms and social media, the crowdfunding campaigners who thrive are the ones who can most deftly communicate their needs and their trauma. Those with the right social media acumen, follower count, and wealthy connections are much more likely to reach their fundraising goals, research shows, while close to 90 percent of fundraisers fail.

That means there are a lot of people who aren’t getting the help they need. Of the over 2 million people and organizations that fundraised on GoFundMe for the first time last year, up to 1.8 million of them probably did not get the help they needed.

“The kids deserve better,” said Jackson, who’s tried to spruce up her fundraising page but to little avail. It bothers her when she sees other campaigns on GoFundMe’s discovery page raising thousands of dollars for, say, a sports competition or a family vacation.

There’s nothing wrong with asking your friends, or strangers on the internet, for help. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that we’re all passing around the same $20 back and forth, just one unexpected medical fee away from turning our trauma into fundraising content ourselves, all while navigating an almost endless and inescapable barrage of bad news.

Many of us feel the urge to do something — really, anything — to stem the flow. The good news is there is so much you can do and no shortage of places to give. It’s just a matter of finding the right way to give it.

Crowdfunding, explained

If it feels like GoFundMe is everywhere these days, it’s because it is. People used the platform at the mind-boggling pace of two donations every second in 2024.

And even as the number of Americans who donate to charity dwindles each year, the gravitational pull of GoFundMe has only gotten stronger. The company has raised $40 billion since its founding in 2010. About $30 billion was raised in the past five years alone.

GoFundMe has become so popular, trusted, and user-friendly that nonprofits have started plopping their fundraisers on the platform too. Many do so in the hopes of connecting with young people who prefer to give to whoever’s tackling the issues they care about rather than to a specific organization enmeshed in the so-called nonprofit industrial complex.

But back in 2010, GoFundMe was just a nascent crowdfunding website; one of many, like Indiegogo and Kickstarter, to emerge just after the Great Recession and the internet’s coming-of-age.

Nora Kenworthy, author of Crowded Out: The True Costs of Crowdfunding Healthcare, remembers stumbling upon a tear-off flyer for a GoFundMe while on a stroll through her neighborhood back then. “Is this helping to connect people to sources of support that they wouldn’t otherwise have?” she asked herself. “Or is this a kind of desperation politics on display?”

The question sent her down a 15-year rabbit hole of research into the efficacy and ethics of digital crowdfunding. The answer: probably a little bit of both.

“Part of the reason that this is so popular — despite the fact that a lot of us have somewhat icky feelings about it — is that it also provides meaningful support to people,” said Kenworthy. At the same time, she says, “it’s really not doing anything to avoid people having to crowdfund in the first place. It really doesn’t solve any of those problems.”

Why I reported this story

I’ve always tried to be the kind of person who keeps a couple of extra dollars in cash on hand for when someone asks me for money on the street.

But social media has taken that idea to a whole new level, with my friends and friends........

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