Artwork museums and different nonprofits have complete departments dedicated to fundraising that make use of seasoned specialists and deploy time-tested methods to fill their coffers, and museum administrators usually spend an excessive amount of their time cultivating the sorts of main donors whose names grace establishments’ partitions. So these organizations may very well be forgiven for being shocked when it emerged this fall that crowdfunding platform GoFundMe, higher recognized for serving to people and households increase cash for medical bills and different private causes, booted up some 1.6 million pages benefiting US nonprofits, together with dozens of main artwork museums, with out informing the establishments themselves or giving them the chance to choose out.
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GoFundMe arrange pages for museums nationwide, together with the Cleveland Museum of Artwork, the Baltimore Museum of Artwork, the Dallas Museum of Artwork, the Philadelphia Museum of Artwork, the San Francisco Museum of Fashionable Artwork, New York’s Museum of Artwork and Design, the Museum of Modern Artwork North Miami, and the Fashionable Artwork Museum of Fort Price.
These pages have been optimized for net searches and constructed to attract donors—which may simply draw potential donors away from the nonprofits’ personal web sites. GoFundMe fees a transaction payment, thus lessening the quantity of the donation to the museums, as NonProfit News Feed reported, noting additionally that there can be a further payment for recurring presents and that the pages had a default “tip” to GoFundMe.
For the reason that donated funds weren’t damaged down by kind of nonprofit, a spokesperson stated, GoFundMe couldn’t decide how a lot cash was donated to museums utilizing these pages.
“We weren’t conscious of this web page and might be instantly working to disable it,” stated Aschelle Morgan, director of exterior affairs on the Dallas Museum of Artwork, in an e-mail. “To our information, no funds have been raised, and now we have not collected something thus far. We’d not have moved ahead with a GoFundMe web page because it doesn’t align with our fundraising technique.”
A spokesperson for the Toledo Museum of Artwork stated in an e-mail that the establishment “did study {that a} GoFundMe web page had been created with out their information. Nevertheless, earlier than they’d the prospect to inquire or request its elimination, the web page was taken down by itself. No contributions have been made, and it has not reappeared since.”
By the point the museums have been knowledgeable of the pages by ARTnews, GoFundMe had rethought its method. By that point, a California ABC station had reported on the state of affairs, and every week later, GoFundMe had revealed a blog post headlined “Nonprofit Pages – We Listened and Made Adjustments.”
“We perceive clearly that our current efforts with Nonprofit Pages have precipitated confusion, concern, and distraction from the very important missions of the very nonprofits we intention to assist,” reads the put up. “We’re very sorry for this and take accountability for lacking the mark.”
In an e-mail to ARTnews, a GoFundMe spokesperson stated, “In 2024 alone, greater than 65,000 nonprofits obtained donations on GoFundMe from our neighborhood of over 200 million. We needed to lean into this habits and make it even simpler for folks to assist nonprofit causes.” The hope was that the nonprofit pages would assist join nonprofits with new donors.
“Day-after-day, we hear from our nonprofit companions how tough and costly donor acquisition will be at this time,” the GoFundMe spokesperson continued. “Nonprofit Pages allow organizations to achieve new audiences of potential supporters.” These pages at the moment are opt-in solely, and pages that weren’t claimed by their establishments have been eliminated.
Museums involved {that a} web page could have been created for them can search at GoFundMe’s “find your nonprofit” web page.
