The Delaware Alliance for Nonprofit Advancement is raising awareness in Delaware about recent unauthorized donation pages for nonprofits on GoFundMe.
It was recently discovered that GoFundMe created donation pages for 1.4 million charitable nonprofits without their approval or consent.
It was also not apparent how the nonprofits could take control of the GoFundMe charity pages.
Sheila Bravo is DANA’s President and CEO.
"So, I think they may have started with good intentions trying to raise the visibility of nonprofits, but no one should ever represent a nonprofit or promote a nonprofit and try to raise money without that organization's permission. And particularly in this case, they were also charging a pretty high fee,” said Bravo. “So, for a donor to come in there and see perhaps a GoFundMe page being created for that organization and that organization didn't even know and they had already created their own, it can create confusion."
Bravo says thanks to the significant concerns raised by nonprofits and partner organizations like the National Council of Nonprofits the issue was resolved quickly.
GoFundMe announced late last week it changed its nonprofit pages policy to make them opt-in only, and it removed and de-indexed unclaimed pages while turning search engine optimization off by default.
Bravo commends GoFundMe for quickly changing its policy when the issue was brought to their attention.
"We were really pleased that once they were made aware of these concerns that they changed their methodology and created an opt-in versus an opt out method for these organizations," said Bravo.
Bravo adds that nonprofits unsure whether their organization had an unauthorized GoFundMe charity page created for them should visit the GoFundMe website.
