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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.
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.
> 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.
No, assuming you are focused on GoFundMe and the study is accurate, then for every crowdfunding success story, there are tens of failures.
"more than 90 percent of GoFundMe campaigns never meet their goal. For every crowdfunding success story, there are hundreds of failures." -- So around 9 failures, for every success story. How did we get to hundreds?
The problem is that so many people need money because the cost of medical care is beyond their reach. The problem is that we live in a society where the ability to continue living is something that you have to "earn". The problem is that so many people are callous and devoid of empathy until it turns into a problem for them. The problem is that we refuse to care for our fellow humans.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
FTFY
The problem is that so many people need money because the cost of medical care is beyond their reach. The problem is that we live in a country where the ability to continue living is something that you have to "earn". The problem is that so many people are callous and devoid of empathy until it turns into a problem for them. The problem is that we refuse to care for our fellow citizens.
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Shared by people that are firmly against the Government helping do exactly what they're wanting.
No, they're firmly against being forced, literally at the point of a gun with threat of jail time and having their possessions taken away, to be generous. Liberals LOVE to be generous with other people's money, and even more so when they can make people criminals if they're not generous in exactly the way that obeys their ideology. Asking for help from (and offering help to) like-minded people isn't even remotely the same as being forced on pain of imprisonment to do the same thing, after, of course, also being forced to pay for a huge body of government middle-men and their supporting infrastructure that do exactly nothing towards the actual expense (say, funding a surgery) being met.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
they already took out the folks just randomly asking for money. It's 90% of _medical_ campaigns that fail. But hey, you're uninformed rant probably made you feel better about not providing those 90% with life saving medical care and food/shelter while they're too sick to work, right?
The folks just randomly asking for money are part of the problem, even if you remove them from the study. I found out about them when I went to GoFundMe to give money to a valid cause. A person was injured while volunteering for an event that I was attending (which has a close-knit community) and was injured by an accident. Having a broken ankle and no medical insurance, he put up a GoFundMe to ask for help; it was a textbook example of what the site *should* be used for. I went there, and donated...and then in the course of that I saw just how much insanity there is. It definitely put me off...it didn't dissuade me from donating that time, because I knew about the person involved, knew what happened (I even saw them bringing him to the ambulance), and knew that it was 100% valid. But I also realized that there was absolutely no way to validate any of the other campaigns without that kind of personal connection. My rant is an indictment of GoFundMe in general, because we're talking about the model as a whole.
Which brings me to the issue that I raised but you didn't address: scams. There are tons of scams in GoFundMe, and while some (like those that use stock art for photos) can be uncovered relatively easily with a bit of detective work, I'm willing to be that there is a significant group that are less obvious. How does the study account for them? Looking through the GoFraudMe (I bet you didn't go there, Mr. "Uninformed Rant") site, you'll note that the majority of scams fall within the exact kind of funding campaigns that are the study's focus. And that comes full-circle to my point about funding methods that have some form of due diligence behind them. Yes, I know, you can't start up a non-profit agency just to get your medical bills covered...but there are many non-profit agencies that gather funds en masse and then dole them out for cases like these.
But let's not stop there. Let's put aside the scams, the fact that the whole model is fundamentally broken in that it begs abuse by people who feel entitled to game consoles and whatnot. Let's also include the fact that a significant number of the "medical" campaigns are for things like breast enhancement or bariatric surgery. Or this gem, which has exceeded it's $8,000 goal for hip surgery for a dog...but when I did a Google Image search of the picture, it turns out that the dog pictured belonged to Justin Bieber. How much searching did that take? I typed "surgery" into the search field on GoFundMe, hit return, picked the first item on the first page of results that had a picture rather than a video, and did an image search on the picture. What are the odds of that turning out to be a sign of a scam, if the vast majority of "surgery"-related campaigns are valid? And this case combines both the "this request is bullshit" and "this campaign is a scam" dimensions at the same time.
So...follow the pathway of a person visiting GoFundMe, going for a totally valid reason about which they have no doubts. Add the shocking, rampant, obvious snowflakery and the subsequent discovery of large-scale scamming that goes into the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per campaign. What do you think a potential donor is going to do? I think they'll do what I do...only give money to people they know, or give it to 501(c)(3) organizations because both cases involve a lot lower risk of the money going to a scumbag instead of a person who is deserving.
Oh, and in closing...fuck you very much for accusing that I actively deny medical care, food, and shelter to sick people and that I seek solace for trampling upon the poor. You don't know me, or anything about me, and I would bet a year's pay that I donate more to charitable causes than you do. Once you start donating money in a significant way, you start learning that not all causes are alike...and you learn to make good choices so that your donations will actually matter.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Just having the government do it imposes some fairness.
So, having the government require people to pay tens of thousands a year for insurance they can't use, plus taxes to fund health care to which they are not entitled, while they stare at a $20,000+ deductible before anything they've spend gets them a dime of services from a doctor every year ... that's the imposition of fairness, in your mind? The Democrats weren't the least interested in "fairness" when they rammed through the ACA on a 100% partisan basis, using a months-long campaign of deliberate, purposeful lying by Obama himself, Pelosi, Reid, and all of their proxies. It was all about vote buying through cash confiscation/distribution in a way favorable to their preferred demographic. They showed no interest (let alone action) in the area of actually reducing what it costs a doctor to provide services, or in allowing the market for insurance to escape the absurd 50-duplicate-markets silo imposed by law. They're too beholden to trial lawyer cash to have touched tort reform with a ten foot pole, and now they're back to saying that anybody who wants to face up to the fact that Obamacare was never sustainable and was doing incredible damage to people who can no longer afford to participate (but who must, by law) ... they're saying that anybody trying to make it sustainable is heartless and wants children to die, blah blah blah. Give me a break on the "fairness" bit. Please.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Once you start donating money in a significant way, you start learning that not all causes are alike...and you learn to make good choices so that your donations will actually matter.
Wouldn't it be great if there was some sort of clearing house that handled your "donations" and made sure they were applied correctly, to people who really need them for medical expenses.
Even better if the overhead was lower then any other comparable system.
We could call it Medicare, or something like that.
Cheap storage VM.