The influencer Spanish Nicole Jenes created a campaign in November to raise money and “keep the hearts of people in Gaza warm.” She has raised almost half a million euros and the campaign is still open. on the GoFundMe microdonation platform: “I have a textile factory in Egypt and I decided to make winter jackets and send them with the Egyptian Red Crescent,” Jenes explains on the page. It is no longer cold in Gaza, but he says he continues to send trucks, which he shows on TikTok, where he has 1.5 million followers.
Jenes’ campaign is the largest in the history of GoFundMe in Spain, where the website arrived in 2017. “There is a lot of activity, especially in Europe, for these campaigns. There are about 20,000 on Gaza around the world and they have generated 125 million euros,” says Tim Cadogan, executive president of GoFundMe, in an interview with EL PAÍS in Madrid. In Spain the platform is growing like never before this year and Cadogan went through the country to see it up close: donations have risen 90% since January and in these six years Spaniards have donated 55 million euros in one million donations, always according to Company data. Of these 55 million, eight were raised through 130,000 donations from the Latin American diaspora to send money to friends and family in their countries of origin.
GoFundMe, which means “come fund me,” is a micro-donation platform focused on personal goals: a pet in need, a funeral, an operation, a trip. “The concept is that I can ask for help for myself or for someone else. Campaigns for animals are very popular. There are also many medical collections, but some are quite specific, especially in Spain, for the adaptation of a car or house for people with disabilities,” says Cadogan.
For Gaza, most of the 800 launched from Spain are from families who want to leave the region or receive help while they must remain there. “Getting a person out costs 5,000 dollars,” says Motasem Abuharbid, a 32-year-old refugee who arrived in Spain in 2019, and who has earned 2,115 euros with his GoFundMe campaign for his parents and nine brothers. Now he hasn’t received money for weeks: “I don’t know where I can share my link anymore,” says Abuharbid. “I reached the limit of sharing, I was sharing it with friends, they have supported me and sent others. I only have three Spanish friends, they have helped me a lot. They have put it on their Facebook. “I always have my Facebook and my Instagram.”
Popularity is key
The importance of community is basic. It is easier to raise money for someone with influence in networks. Rocío Cano has 30,000 followers on Instagram and has raised 11,000 euros for Zidan, a 20-year-old Palestinian “who has been orphaned and is there alone, malnourished and sick,” writes Cano.
This growth of GoFundMe and his individual charity raises questions about the ability of influencers or people with success in networks to make more money. “For the most part, the people who donate are your friends, your family, your community, people who know you,” says Cadogan. “We are not the responsibility of NGOs, it is not the same money, we have hardly heard any complaints from that world, perhaps if we grow more,” he adds.
There are those, however, who believe that it is better for platforms like GoFundMe not to grow as much, at least in some sectors. Nora Kenworthy, a researcher at the University of Washington Bothell, just published a book on the “true cost of healthcare crowdfunding”. A scientific paper from the University of Rochester found that in the United States the most successful projects were medical and funeral projects.
“I think that he crowdfunding “Charitable is part of a broader desire to be able to donate directly to causes and people, and see the results of their donations immediately,” says Kenworthy. “It is also a very reactionary, rather than preventive, way of giving. It comes when someone is already sick or has had a crisis, rather than intervening in prevention,” she adds.
The popularity of the affected person or its cause is also key. There are many campaigns that barely get off the ground due to a lack of contacts, family or community, which for Kenworthy is a problematic example of this system: “Platforms like GoFundMe further reinforce individualism, the dynamics of the free market and selective deserving based on merit. and popularity. “They are truly antithetical to the values of a universal social safety net, based on the idea that everyone deserves help when they need it.”
The dangers of campaigns
“Since this genocide began, I have always been very in favor and I have been very pro-Palestine,” Cano explains to this newspaper. That made people from Gaza write to him privately to set up a campaign: “Every day about 15 people write to me to help them, it is terrible not to be able to help them all.” GoFundMe only allows you to launch campaigns from 20 countries, almost all of them Western and none from the Middle East. “The genocide had killed this boy’s entire family, bombed and burned his house in Khan Younis. He was alone, he had no one and he asked me, please, if I could do the donation campaign with my bank and my account,” explains Cano.
The objective is to pay the Egyptian company that takes people out of Gaza at speculative prices, including a long waiting list of weeks. Cano has had to verify his identity and bank details and has had to send to GoFundMe “a huge sketch of how all that money was going to be moved to get it to Zidan.” GoFundMe has several layers to avoid scams, according to Cadogan: one, the thousands of common patterns that are repeated in legitimate campaigns and that can raise an alert if they go wrong; two, an internal security team and, three, the security of the banks with which they collaborate.
In any case, fraud can always sneak in and the company reserves the option of canceling campaigns that it believes have a dubious objective. Cano also established his own criteria for who he helped. “Of the dozens of people who contacted me, in two I did detect that it was a scam, that they were outside of Gaza. You have to check it. It’s not that complicated either, they give you your passport, you make some video calls, they show you some videos and you see the images of destroyed Gaza,” says Cano. EL PAÍS sent messages to five Palestinian campaigns that had raised tens of thousands of euros. Only Cano responded. Two others responded to the messages, but never answered the questions. Motasem Abuharbid’s contact was provided by GoFundMe.
Unlike other platforms, GoFundMe allows you to start withdrawing money as it arrives. You do not have to exceed any minimum amount or threshold to be able to collect it. The maximum donation allowed is 50,000 euros: in February, Taylor Swift made two donations of $50,000 to the family of a shooting victim in Kansas. The platform has even used to the singer as a model of donations. GoFundMe makes money by charging a 2.9% fee plus $0.3 per transaction, and also accepts donations from campaign organizers.
Arrival in Mexico
Mexico has been the last country from which GoFundMe campaigns can be launched. It is the first in Latin America. Cadogan gives the reasons for this jump: “We saw a lot of people in Mexico searching on GoFundMe. We also saw people, particularly in the US, but also here in Europe, helping people in Mexico with the Hurricane Otis campaign in October. A lot of money flowed. So far it’s going well, we’ve barely reached $1 million in donations,” says Cadogan.
Medical causes are also the main campaign in Mexico, followed by environmental issues. “It’s what people need help with, there are many things in our world that are not ideal, there is no utopia, so our job is to be here for whatever you need help with. And then try to make you as successful as possible,” says Cadogan.
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