Cori Jackson — a single mom living in Indiana — took in her two young nieces to keep them out of foster care this summer. It hasn’t been easy. One surprising thingThe sheer scope of just how many fundraisers fail still blows my mind. The top 5 percent of campaigns get about half of all donations — those are the ones that we normally see on our For You page — while the vast majority of fundraisers fail.The youngest still isn’t potty-trained. The oldest isn’t used to having food in the fridge so, sometimes, she eats so much it makes her sick. The radiator and head gasket of Jackson’s car went out at just the wrong time. And the recliner in her living room, where she has been sleeping so the girls can have her bed, is on “its very last leg.” Jackson, who is 38 years old, has been doing the best she can. She works full-time for a travel agency, earning a steady income for her and her 10-year-old son, but hardly enough for a family of four. She qualifies for food stamps now, but they won’t kick in until the end of the month. With nowhere else to turn, a friend helped her do the only thing left to do: start a GoFundMe. “When you’re getting to the point of a GoFundMe, it is desperation,” said Jackson. GoFundMe, the world’s most popular crowdfunding site, acts as the internet’s collective beggar’s cup, filled to the brim with people like Jackson pleading for help. The kids need back-to-school clothes and she just needs a bump of support — her goal is $2,200 — to pay for food, diapers, and repairs while she adjusts. A month in, and she’s only raised $75. Why?You will never find Jackson among the scores of fundraisers on GoFundMe’s discovery page, a cross-section of today’s major crises. If you scroll through the site, you’ll see a clickable catalog of mothers buckling under medical debt, Palestinians in Gaza pleading for aid, researchers recouping lost federal grants, and coworkers desperate to help friends in ICE custody.All the world’s in crisis, and we are merely fundraisers. And in this moment of mass need, with foreign aid running low and our attention more divided than ever, it’s hard not to feel overwhelmed by all the options in front of us. In a little over a decade, the rise of online crowdfunding has entirely reshaped what it means to donate your money — and the contours of who receives it. In some ways, that’s a great thing: Sites like GoFundMe have democratized access to support for people left behind by charities and governments. And donors get to feel good too, because giving to someone after reading their story on GoFundMe often feels more intimate and immediately impactful than a monthly donation to a nonprofit might. But like anything else powered by algorithms and social media, the crowdfunding campaigners who thrive are the ones who can most deftly communicate their needs and their trauma. Those with the right social media acumen, follower count, and wealthy connections are much more likely to reach their fundraising goals, research shows, while close to 90 percent of fundraisers fail. That means there are a lot of people who aren’t getting the help they need. Of the over 2 million people and organizations that fundraised on GoFundMe for the first time last year, up to 1.8 million of them probably did not get the help they needed.“The kids deserve better,” said Jackson, who’s tried to spruce up her fundraising page but to little avail. It bothers her when she sees other campaigns on GoFundMe’s discovery page raising thousands of dollars for, say, a sports competition or a family vacation. There’s nothing wrong with asking your friends, or strangers on the internet, for help. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that we’re all passing around the same $20 back and forth, just one unexpected medical fee away from turning our trauma into fundraising content ourselves, all while navigating an almost endless and inescapable barrage of bad news. Many of us feel the urge to do something — really, anything — to stem the flow. The good news is there is so much you can do and no shortage of places to give. It’s just a matter of finding the right way to give it. Crowdfunding, explainedIf it feels like GoFundMe is everywhere these days, it’s because it is. People used the platform at the mind-boggling pace of two donations every second in 2024.And even as the number of Americans who donate to charity dwindles each year, the gravitational pull of GoFundMe has only gotten stronger. The company has raised $40 billion since its founding in 2010. About $30 billion was raised in the past five years alone.View LinkGoFundMe has become so popular, trusted, and user-friendly that nonprofits have started plopping their fundraisers on the platform too. Many do so in the hopes of connecting with young people who prefer to give to whoever’s tackling the issues they care about rather than to a specific organization enmeshed in the so-called nonprofit industrial complex. But back in 2010, GoFundMe was just a nascent crowdfunding website; one of many, like Indiegogo and Kickstarter, to emerge just after the Great Recession and the internet’s coming-of-age. Nora Kenworthy, author of Crowded Out: The True Costs of Crowdfunding Healthcare, remembers stumbling upon a tear-off flyer for a GoFundMe while on a stroll through her neighborhood back then. “Is this helping to connect people to sources of support that they wouldn’t otherwise have?” she asked herself. “Or is this a kind of desperation politics on display?” The question sent her down a 15-year rabbit hole of research into the efficacy and ethics of digital crowdfunding. The answer: probably a little bit of both. “Part of the reason that this is so popular — despite the fact that a lot of us have somewhat icky feelings about it — is that it also provides meaningful support to people,” said Kenworthy. At the same time, she says, “it’s really not doing anything to avoid people having to crowdfund in the first place. It really doesn’t solve any of those problems.” Why I reported this storyI’ve always tried to be the kind of person who keeps a couple of extra dollars in cash on hand for when someone asks me for money on the street. But social media has taken that idea to a whole new level, with my friends and friends of friends constantly fundraising for often really worthy causes. I wanted to get some clarity over when and where to give when it feels like everyone needs help.In other words, it’s basically a huge bandage for a lot of serious issues that are overdue for some intensive surgery. Think skyrocketing health care costs, federal cuts to science research funding, and human-made humanitarian catastrophes. “Crowdfunding reveals these fundamental, looming chasms in our societies, and we’ve got to get real about how to address those,” Kenworthy added.But that bandage can be absolutely life-changing for the lucky few.People like Elisabeth Potter, the plastic surgeon who went viral after a UnitedHealthcare representative tried to disrupt a breast reconstruction for a cancer patient. In what she considers retaliation, the company has allegedly refused to cover surgeries at her practice, sharply limiting the number of patients who can seek her care, nearly bankrupting her practice. Her husband cashed out his 401(k) to make payroll this summer. But thanks to her newfound fame, Potter recently raised over $800,000 on GoFundMe — an eighth of it from hedge fund CEO Bill Ackman — to cushion the losses. She knows how lucky she is for the support, but it baffles her that she needs it at all.“I’m a microsurgeon who went to Princeton — it’s just ridiculous that I have to have a GoFundMe,” she said. “It’s ridiculous that Americans have to have a GoFundMe to afford medications for their children or surgeries that they hadn’t planned on and thought that insurance would cover.”Even GoFundMe readily admits that its platform is no replacement for a social safety net. The company has tried to put a bigger focus on supporting traditional nonprofits in recent years, acquiring the online fundraising juggernaut Classy in 2022, launching snazzy new donor-advised funds, and building a directory of charities. But the bulk of GoFundMe donations — about 42 million of them in 2024 — still go to individuals, versus the 23 million that went to nonprofits like Feeding America or Save the Children. That’s because the platform, like social media more broadly, thrives on personal storytelling, and more often than not, that warm glow of giving to what’s relatively fixable. It’s more immediately gratifying to donate to a viral heartwarming story — like an apple orchard rebuilding from a fire — with a relatively fixable aim, than it is to give to a more complicated goalpost, such as a nonprofit trying to end malaria.But why not have it both ways?“Even the best-resourced nonprofits and the earliest responders and government programs aren’t able to meet the full range of individuals’ needs,” said Margaret Richardson, GoFundMe’s chief corporate affairs officer. “Individual fundraising really is a complement in those moments.”And, it’s important to give credit where it’s due. Crowdfunding has been genuinely effective at filling gaps where governments and traditional charities have fallen short. Platforms like GoFundMe have facilitated tens of millions of dollars worth of donations to humanitarian relief efforts in Gaza, for example, where traditional aid organizations have been severely restricted by Israel. With no help in sight, one day, Mahmoud Almadhoun “grabbed three pots, some canned peas, some tomato paste” and decided to feed over 120 families himself in north Gaza, his brother Hani told Vox. Mahmoud had been relying on the few farms and suppliers left standing to source local food. Hani, a longtime fundraiser based in the US, built Mahmoud a GoFundMe in early 2024 that surpassed its $25,000 goal within a week. Soon, they were raising up to $10,000 per day.“People were sending me money on Venmo and Zelle and giving me cash, and I was like, ‘Wow, people want to respond,’” recalled Hani. “People want to help, and they’re not feeling that these bigger agencies are doing what they need them to do.” Just like that, the Gaza Soup Kitchen was born. An Israeli drone strike killed Mahmoud, a father of seven, in November 2024. The tragedy spurred even more support, says Hani, and the group has since incorporated into a formal nonprofit. Gaza Soup Kitchen now has dozens of employees at about 11 locations in Gaza, feeds hundreds of families daily, and is in talks to spearhead a humanitarian aid project funded by a European government. The kitchen’s success “speaks to how desperate and bleak the situation is,” said Hani. “But also how hurt people are and how much they want to help.”All the causes left behindThat is crowdfunding at its absolute best, and we’ll have more on that later. But let’s turn back for a moment to the 90 percent of GoFundMe campaigns that fail. The ones that don’t have a Hani Almadhoun at their helm or a hedge fund billionaire willing to give them a boost. “Most people don’t realize just how grim the chances are,” says Kenworthy. In the end, some 43 percent of campaigns raise nothing at all. The platform can be inefficient but also emotionally onerous, said Martin Lukk, author of GoFailMe: The Unfulfilled Promise of Digital Crowdfunding. His research has found that the top 5 percent of campaigns receive a whopping half of all donations. A growing body of research indicates that crowdfunding most often rewards people who are middle-class, white, and internet savvy with a broad — and ideally, wealthy — social network to spread their message to. People like Jackson, the single mother in Indiana, rarely check off all of those boxes. Also, there are a lot of causes that just don’t do well on the algorithm. It’s much harder to crowdfund for insulin than it is to fund an emergency surgery. The same is true for other chronic crises or nonprofit operating costs, like a research team or clean water project, where government grants make a big difference.As a result, crowdfunding has done little to fill the gap for those buckling under the Trump administration’s vast funding cuts. “It feels like every day is a new uphill battle,” said Cheri Levinson, who directs the University of Louisville’s EAT Lab for eating disorder research. Levinson started a GoFundMe after the Trump administration abruptly canceled federal grants amounting to $500,000. But her campaign has only managed to raise about $4,500, which is “not enough to cover anything,” she said. She’s had to lay off two PhD students and a post-doctoral fellow, who moved to Kentucky for the grant and are now “thinking twice about if they should be doing this work or being in science” at all.“The work that we’re doing is work that saves lives,” she said. “If somebody would step up and actually fund this work, it would make such a big difference. But no, no one has stepped up.”Even people affected by a highly visible crisis like the mass starvation and killings in Gaza — which has garnered widespread outrage, attention, and sympathy online — often struggle to raise significant funds because there’s simply so much need. Hani Almadhoun, the co-founder of the Gaza Soup Kitchen, regularly asks his followers to drop links to their own fundraisers so that his supporters can spread out their generosity a little bit more. He has friends in Gaza whose personal fundraisers have faltered because they don’t have the same political acumen, connections abroad, or knack for storytelling that he does. What’s more, GoFundMe only allows people with bank accounts in North America, Europe, or Australia to fundraise on its platform, though Richardson says the company is actively trying to expand its global reach. For now, if you’re from anywhere else, you need to ask someone from one of those largely white and wealthy countries to fundraise on your behalf.And though Almadhoun’s experience with GoFundMe has been positive, other Palestinian fundraisers have criticized the platform for its lack of support and the heightened scrutiny they’ve said it applies to their campaigns.The Sameer Project, a mutual aid group founded by three Palestinians living in the diaspora (including in the United Kingdom and the United States), had a successful campaign removed from the platform. The group formed a few months after the war began, initially purchasing tents for people facing a growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza. In April, they started a GoFundMe that began raising up to $80,000 daily.In July, GoFundMe asked for more evidence of where the money was going. GoFundMe has said that fewer than 1 in 1,000 campaigns turn out to be fraudulent, but with millions of campaigns on its platform, that’s still thousands of fake fundraisers each year. In response to the company’s request, the group sent over reams of data documenting their financial transactions. After a few weeks of back-and-forth over their financial documentation, said co-founder Hala Sabbah, GoFundMe sent an email in September shutting down their campaign with plans to refund to donors the $250,000 that the group raised that month.Sabbah and her team were forced to dig into their “own money, savings, friends of friends” to continue paying their almost 100 full-time staff members in Gaza. Eventually, they found a new fundraising home on the nonprofit crowdfunding site Chuffed. But the experience left Sabbah with a sense that GoFundMe, which wields enormous power over the vast sums of giving it facilitates, is “a discriminatory platform choosing who lives and who dies.”“Decisions to remove fundraisers from the platform follow thorough, evidence-based investigations and are based on these requirements, giving organizers multiple opportunities to provide all necessary context and supporting documentation,” GoFundMe said in a statement regarding the Sameer Project. “In this case, there were unfortunately material discrepancies in the information shared by the fundraiser organizers and their actions, which we communicated directly to them. Our team offered them the option of delivering the donations to a verified nonprofit organization providing aid to Gaza and they declined to do so.”But it’s true that with so much charitable giving pumping through GoFundMe — a for-profit company that earns a hefty commission for each successful fundraiser on its site — even a small twist in the algorithm or a controversial business decision can have wide-ranging, life-altering implications. How to give when your entire For You page is in crisisThere is one big caveat to these critiques: Anything that gets you giving is probably a good thing.Not just for the recipient, but for you too. Giving — however imperfectly or inequitably — is better than not giving at all. As Jon Bergdoll, an applied statistician at Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, puts it: “What produces that warm glow for you? Charity does not need to feel like a chore.”It’s kind of like how the workout that’s best for you is the one that you actually enjoy doing. The same applies for giving, whether that’s a GoFundMe, a volunteer gig, or a charity that you give to every month.The key here is not in forbidding any kind of giving, but catching yourself when the algorithm’s about to batter you into apathy or direct you to a GoFundMe that’s already raised more than the organizers know what to do with. With so much at stake and limited resources, it’s worth being intentional about which kind of GoFundMe campaigns or nonprofits can do the most good — and in what context. It’s easy to think that you have to give a ton of money in order to have an impact. But let’s zoom out for a quick second. If you don’t have kids and you make $70,000 per year, then you are part of the global 1 percent, earning more — often much, much more — than 99 percent of people on earth. And with that kind of money, you really can make a big difference, even with a small amount of cash. $5 will buy a bednet to help prevent a family from getting malaria in Malawi. $12 is enough for an eSIM to get a journalist in Gaza online. $15 can help someone see with a new pair of prescription eyeglasses. And $50 can erase a whopping $5,000 in medical debt here in the United States. It can be empowering to know there are concrete ways that you can make people’s lives better right now that don’t require you to be a billionaire. That said, there’s no one-size-fits-all prescription for how to give effectively. How and where you choose to give is up to you. (Read this great piece from my colleague Sigal Samuel for more on that.) But there are some guiding questions that can help you channel your apathy or outrage — the kind you feel when you read the news or scroll through crises on your feed — into real-life, tangible solutions.What causes most resonate with me? Maybe you’re really passionate about the plight of people in Sudan, or anxious about climate change, or troubled by local homelessness.Do I want to help in an emergency or address root causes? Most people default to giving in the aftermath of an earthquake or an unexpected surgery, but supporting long-term solutions — like a climate resilience project or research for a chronic condition — is just as important.Should I give to an individual or an organization? Sometimes, it really is as simple as giving money directly to someone who needs it. But a nonprofit may have the expertise to tackle long-term issues more efficiently and equitably. Do I want to keep it local or go broader? Giving to a neighbor in need or your kid’s school can be a great way to feel connected to your community. But also consider giving to less-resourced neighborhoods or countries where your dollars can go even further.What’s the best way to help? Giving money is great! But so is volunteering your time or advocating for policy change. How do I vet an organization or an individual? There are plenty of websites — like Charity Navigator or GiveWell — for checking if a nonprofit is legit. GoFundMe has some fraud protections in place, but you should take some time to vet individuals yourself by cross-checking their stories and keeping an eye out for red flags. A trusted mutual aid group might also be able to do that work for you. Phew. That’s a lot to take in. But a healthy giving diet can easily include a zesty combination of all of the above. A recurring gift to Wikipedia. A chunk of your tax return going to school lunches for hungry kids. A weekly gig volunteering with your local food pantry. And it’s okay if crowdfunding is a part of that too. When it comes to helping strangers on the internet, a happy medium can be seeking out a mutual aid group that distributes resources to those who need it the most.In Los Angeles, a network of immigrant-serving nonprofits set up a street vendor solidarity fund that’s raised over $200,000 to help cushion the financial blow of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdowns. After this year’s devastating wildfires, “day laborers were the first on the streets to pick up the ashes” while street vendors “fed a lot of those displaced,” said Sergio Jimenez, one of the fund’s organizers. The city received an outpouring of donations — $250 million on GoFundMe alone — for those who lost their homes.But it’s been harder to raise funds, says Jimenez, for the hundreds of thousands of undocumented families now enduring a “similar tragedy” involving the “loss of an identity, the loss of your belongings” as a result of Trump’s immigration raids. $200,000 is not nothing, he said, but “it’s not enough — it’s never enough.”It’s great that donations poured in after the LA wildfires, but with the constant barrage of crises on our feeds, it can be difficult to stay informed and engaged with the communities who need the most support long after the disaster fades. As my former colleague Kelsey Piper previously reported, it might also be better to loop back with charities on the ground after some time — when people have turned their attention to a different crisis altogether. Removing yourself from urgency and focusing instead on recovery long after disaster strikes can be a great way to help effectively. Taking these steps can help avoid the compassion fatigue and the algorithm-induced apathy that accompanies our modern era of live-streamed crises. They can help you stay in it for the long haul, too. You probably won’t be able to donate away the doomscroll — to foot every medical bill or feed every hungry child. But, in an age when everyone needs help, we can’t afford to feel helpless.