GoFundMe created unauthorized donation pages for more than one million organizations on its website, a move that is raising eyebrows.
The move impacted thousands of organizations in Pennsylvania that are already dealing with challenges of the state budget impasse and the federal government shutdown. One organization left scrambling was Pittsburgh Community Services, a community action agency that offers services like a food pantry and housing assistance.
“It’s just a lot, and we’re trying very hard to do our best for all of the customers that we serve, and we’re able to maintain that high level of service, but distractions like this make it frustrating,” said Sarah Cook, the agency’s executive director.
The new issue was that GoFundMe created a page for the non-profit organization without prior approval or notification.
“GoFundMe, even if it was intended to support nonprofits across the country, was really shortsighted in its lack of communication around this effort,” Cook said.
Cook didn’t know about it until she saw an email from Anne Gingerich, executive director of the Pennsylvania Association of Nonprofit Organizations. Gingerich said they only just got the news on Wednesday that GoFundMe took public information from 1.4 million nonprofits in the U.S. and used it to make a donation page for each one.
As of Thursday morning, a Google search revealed multiple unauthorized pages for Pittsburgh-area nonprofits.
“There are some concerns about who ultimately would end up with the custody of the donations that would come in,” Gingerich said.
The thing is, when you donate to a GoFundMe page, there is a processing fee that goes to the company. In a statement, GoFundMe said, in part, that its “recent efforts with Nonprofit Pages have caused confusion, concern, and distraction from the vital missions of the very nonprofits we aim to support.”
“I hope that moving forward, big efforts like this would involve the very nonprofits that they’re hoping to assist,” Cook said.
After the concerns shared by nonprofits, GoFundMe announced on Thursday morning it would take steps to remedy the problem by saying pages “that have not been claimed and verified will be removed” and “unclaimed nonprofit pages will be de-indexed… so they no longer appear in search engine results.”