The People GoFundMe Leaves Behind (theoutline.com)

citadrianne shares a report from The Outline: President Donald Trump's proposed budget seeks to slash $54 billion from social services including programs like Medicaid and Meals on Wheels. As these resources dry up, crowdfunding websites will further entrench themselves as extra-governmental welfare providers in order to fill the gap. For a lucky few, these sites are a lifeline. For most people, they are worthless. Crowdfunding's fatal flaw is that not every campaign ends up getting the money it needs. A recent study published in the journal Social Science & Medicine found that more than 90 percent of GoFundMe campaigns never meet their goal. For every crowdfunding success story, there are hundreds of failures. "As many happy stories as there are in charitable crowdfunding, there are a lot of really worthy causes when you browse these platforms that nobody has given a cent to," Rob Gleasure, professor at the business school of the National University of Ireland, Cork told The Outline. "People haven't come across them." Feller and Gleasure's report highlighted how fickle crowdfunding can be. Of all the Razoo campaigns started in 2013, they found, more than a third didn't receive any funding at all. According to their report, donors are more likely to give to campaigns that feature lots of pictures and accompanying text.

Comments

90% don't get funded? That's a good thing.

[Shoten]

I assume that the mentality of the person who did the study was to compare it to conventional non-profits and the way they do fundraising. This is an important distinction because, under that model, there's a certain filtering process. If you've ever looked at a grant application, you'll see that the very nature of any of them tends to point out to you that there needs to be a valid reason for your request for funding. GoFundMe has no such filter, and as a result you get people like these three assholes or this snowflake. And those two are just what I came across by searching "Nintendo" on their site and seeing what came up in the first full set of results.

And then there's the other thing that the filtering process does...which is help reduce the level of scamming. GoFundMe also lacks any means to do this; you see a picture and a nice bit of text but there is absolutely nothing done to validate that either are true. As a result, scams are rampant, to such a degree that there's a whole site dedicated to uncovering the scams.

So, in short...I don't think there's anything wrong with the majority of GoFundMe campaigns failing to reach their goals. Most of them are just fucking ridiculous. And yes, I'm quite sure that some valid campaigns don't get funded as well...but 1, I would put some of the blame on the lack of any vetting process around the campaigns, and 2, that happens in the world of legitimate fundraising too. Posting a picture and type a few paragraphs describing your plight does not automatically guarantee you money...whether you are deserving or not...and that's just how life goes.

Re:failure is a feature not a problem

[ranton]

Failure of a croudsource project is a feature, it indicates the lack of a market so that people don't start a company and commit to expenses when there is not a market for their product.

At least read the summary. This is for crowdfunding the cost of insulin, surgery or chemotherapy, not starting company.

Re:GoFundMe isn't the problem.

[queazocotal]

" but not through the wasteful and inefficient institution of government." I am confused by what other manner it can be done.

I caught an unfortunate virus when I was 12. It was not through anything particular that I did.
I have never been able to work, and progressive relapses have taken me from struggling part time through university, to being almost bedbound.

Due to struggling to keep educating myself in hopes of being able to work, and the difficulty of keeping up with a peer group, I am utterly isolated at the moment.

In addition, I live in a rural poor area, with no church or nearby large social organisations.

Precisely who am I supposed to appeal to for support?

Or are you advocating that those without a close family, who have lost friends due to being able to keep up with them, who are not a member of a church or similar organisation should simply die?

Re:'Murican Health Care

[ScentCone]

I'll take that over Conservatives, who want to make people criminals for being generous by giving out food and shelter to the homeless

The only people obsessed with punishing charity are the liberals. They can't STAND the idea of someone helping another person without a government employee making six figures (after union dues that fund liberal politicians) playing the middleman. The only places where me feeding a homeless person is a crime are where liberals run the legislatures. Does it physically hurt to get everything so exactly backwards? You sound like a laughably lame Russian propagandist or perhaps Saddam's spokesman. Asserting an alternate reality doesn't actually cause that to be real. You know that, right?