by Dr. Kevin Dean, President & CEO, Tennessee Nonprofit Network
You’ve probably heard about the GoFundMe fiasco happening right now that has set the nonprofit sector ablaze, but there’s a very good reason for how outraged the nonprofit sector has been: GoFundMe violated a basic nonprofit tenet: anything you build for a community should be created by the community. When GoFundMe unilaterally created over a million pages for charities—complete with their trademarked logos—and then sat back as the philanthropic sector erupted in anger, it revealed a fundamental chasm in understanding: the difference between helping and imposing.
GoFundMe’s recent debacle, in which it had to hastily backpedal and promise to remove logos and optional tips from “unclaimed pages,” was more than a mere public relations stumble. It was a massive, corporate-scale violation of the cardinal rule of community engagement: Did we ask for this? It was an act of profound philanthropic disrespect that threatened the very brand integrity and hard-won trust that nonprofits spend decades building.
The concept is simple, yet it is the foundation of effective social change. The worst betrayal and faux pas a nonprofit can make is to create a solution for a community that they neither asked for nor want. We learn this lesson early, often through hard experience or by watching a colleague crash and burn with a misguided idea. I recall a previous job, where a well-intentioned coworker decided that the low-income clients we served would “absolutely love” a community garden behind our building. She saw a vision of bucolic joy: clients planting, nurturing, and growing their own food. Funders, she was certain, would line up to support it because, on paper, community gardens were a trendy, feel-good indicator of community empowerment.
Thankfully, the staff intervened, convincing the executive director to shut the proposal down before a single shovel broke ground. And it was a terrible, dangerous idea. Our clients were low-income families, many living with chronic health conditions and struggling to make ends meet while juggling two or even three low-wage jobs. The idea was not only impractical; it was offensive.
When clients got wind of the plan, the anger was palpable. Their questions laid bare the arrogance of the well-meaning outsider: “Did we ask for this?” “Do you really want me to grow my own food when I work two jobs and still can’t pay my bills?” “Why don’t you use the money you’ll spend on a community garden on things we can actually use? Why don’t you invest in our economic mobility, our education, and our health?” they asked. The proposal became a symbol of how little the organization understood their reality. We all love community gardens. People love community gardens. But creating a community garden without community input is not “empowerment”—it is, well, just an unsolicited garden.
This is precisely the fundamental offense GoFundMe has committed against the nonprofit sector. It took a widely recognized, trusted brand—the nonprofit community—and decided, in a sweeping corporate gesture, that it knew best. The company claimed the information was pulled from publicly available data, with the stated intent of allowing its “vast global community an easy way to discover and donate to nonprofit organizations.” But in this act of benevolent paternalism, GoFundMe broke the cardinal rules of trust building.
The first sin was the violation of the Did we ask for this? principle. By setting up over one million pages and applying trademarked logos without the organizations’ knowledge or consent, GoFundMe was creating a “community garden” that the community not only didn’t ask for but was actively harmed by. The case of the small nonprofit Acquaint in Bellevue, Washington, is a perfect, infuriating illustration. According to a recent Nonprofit Times article, nonprofit co-founder Alex Szebenyi discovered that GoFundMe was using “HomeAgain VR,” their organization’s old name, and linking to the wrong social media accounts, including a suspended X account. This wasn’t just unsolicited help; it was unsolicited misrepresentation. In an era where brand identity and online reputation are everything, this action was a reckless threat to an organization’s credibility, a danger far outweighing any perceived benefit of ‘discovery.’
The second sin is that this unsolicited “help” requires nonprofits to do more work. Instead of a gift, this became a corporate mandate. To manage their own branding and assets, or even to remove the inaccurate and potentially damaging page, nonprofits must first “claim the page.” This involves an organization, already strapped for resources, having to navigate GoFundMe’s systems, agree to their Terms, and prohibit the use of GoFundMe trademarks in any way—an ironic stipulation considering the platform had just used the nonprofit’s intellectual property without permission. As Szebenyi noted, when he sought legal removal on the basis of unauthorized intellectual property use and misrepresentation, the response was a bureaucratic dead end: “claim the page, agree to the Terms, and consider the ‘benefits’ of using GoFundMe.” In effect, GoFundMe had built a labyrinth that forced the victims of its faux pas to expend valuable time and staff resources to fix the company’s mistake. “Helping” other people should never require them to do additional work for something they didn’t ask for in the first place.
GoFundMe has backpedaled, promising to remove logos from unclaimed pages and optional tips until consent is given. But the damage is done. The incident stands as a stark reminder that in the nonprofit world, there is no substitute for collaboration, consent, and respect for brand. Nonprofits are not data points to be monetized or brands to be borrowed; they are vital community-driven entities that must be partners, not pawns. The GoFundMe debacle is an essential wake-up call that the for-profit world must learn the fundamental lesson of the community garden: if you want to help, you start by asking. Anything else is just an imposition, no matter how shiny the platform is.