Nicola Britton:
GoFundMe was founded in May 2010 by co-founders Brad Damphousse and Andrew Ballester, who were trying to digitise the traditional collection pots that people used to collect funds at their children’s school or for a wedding. Originally it was called Coin Piggy, but it quickly evolved into GoFundMe because it was a simple concept that captured a widespread and organic behaviour of people circulating collection pots for various causes.

GoFundMe launched in Australia in 2015, and then it really ramped up here around 2019 when GoFundMe put boots on the ground. I was the first hire out of Sydney and my role was to support our fundraisers who were already using the platform, to demonstrate the power of peer to peer giving. Australians are early adopters of technology, so there were already incredible fundraisers and grassroots movements happening by the time I joined, I was just in lucky position that I was responsible for sharing their stories, and inspiring others to help.

The very first fundraiser I spoke to was a young boy named Jack Berne from the Northern beaches in Sydney. It was during the droughts in 2019 when the farmers were really struggling, and Jack launched a fundraiser called ‘A fiver for a Farmer’ where he asked his friends at school to chip in $5. He ended up raising over a million dollars and that movement is still live today. Jack has scaled it nationally and now kids around the country have ‘A fiver for a Farmer’ day at school.

Since then, we've continued working closely with our early fundraisers and what's really evolved is the way this platform holds up a mirror to society. Since I joined in 2019, we've raised 41 million dollars for victims of the Black Sunday bush fires, we’ve supported people through COVID when international students couldn't get home, and small businesses needed help with their rent to survive.

 Our platform is in a unique position to catch people who fall through the cracks, and struggle during unexpected life events. The government is able to move quickly and react to unforeseen circumstances, but there are always people who require urgent help who have limited funding options. On the flip side, we now know there are always people willing to help. It's been such a phenomenal journey, but it also feels like we’ve only just scratched the surface.

Nicola Britton:
On the 12th of November last year we announced that 1 billion dollars has been donated to Australian causes. I love celebrating that 1 billion number but it's also hard to fully articulate the power of that statistic, especially when just $3,000 can help someone who is facing homelessness put a rental deposit down to secure a home.

We have seen more than 700,000 fundraisers launched in Australia to date and in terms of demographics, it's the Gen Z demographic who are more likely to organise the fundraisers and the older demographics are more likely to donate. It’s a beautiful snapshot of young people rallying and using their tech skills to launch fundraisers and getting their friends and family on board to donate.

Although the initial donations come from within the primary network of the fundraiser, the power of the [donation] link means that it can be shared to help raise awareness of the cause. Increasingly, we are seeing donations coming in from strangers and that's where the real magic happens.

Another interesting statistic we recently uncovered is that when we look at crisis and disaster fundraising, around 60-70% of those first donations will come from within the postcodes of the disaster but within a few days of sharing, the snowball effect kicks in and we watch the donations expand far outside that original primary network.

Nicola Britton:
The biggest categories on GoFundMe are medical and emergency. Emergency tends to capture the natural disasters and over the past year has been our fastest growing category. However, medical is the top category - a quarter of all fundraising on GoFundMe goes towards medical support.

Originally, we saw the medical category focused on fundraising for access to something like a rare cancer trial but now it’s more general. We see people who are diagnosed with a short or long-term illness out of the blue and they need help covering the out-of-pocket costs. Regardless of the demographic of the patient, these events really hit people. We've seen families relocate from rural towns to the cities to be close to a hospital for three months while their child is undergoing an operation, and they have to get an Airbnb, take time off work and the costs quickly rack up.

Generally, the donations are there to help ease the pressure on families during some of their most difficult moments in life. And we all have those times when a financial hit can be very unexpected. A lot of people are underprepared for that, so a little bit of money can go a long way.

Nicola Britton:
Anecdotally, we see women taking the lead on organising the fundraisers and rallying their friends and family. I think it’s a natural tendency for women to take on the domestic roles and administrative roles within both their family and community.

One trend that’s been consistent over the years is women fundraising to get access to endometriosis surgery. They're raising the $10,000 that it costs to access a specialist because, until now, there haven’t been that many specialists in Australia – hopefully that’s about to change with the government investment in endometriosis. But it’s been interesting to witness women think creatively about how they can break down all the financial barriers to get to that diagnosis and they’ve refused to take no for an answer.

Nicola Britton:
My key learning is that one of the biggest barriers to help is, simply, asking for it. The most consistent narrative I've seen on GoFundMe is how hard it is for people to launch these fundraisers. But over the years, as people share these success stories, and more fundraisers are referenced in media, there has been a positive shift and social acceptance around asking for help.

And on the flipside, we need to make it easier for people who want to help, but don't know how to help. We need to put better systems in place to support different types of giving and understanding people's passions and where they might want to start helping, the causes they care about and when and how they like to give. We’re really working on a way to connect more people with the causes they care about.

Nicola Britton:
GoFundMe's ambition is to better understand the needs of donors and match them with the fundraisers and the causes that are launched on our platform. The platform to date has largely been focused on the fundraiser’s journey and helping those fundraisers now be more successful, is our primary focus.

We've safely processed 11 million donations in Australia and to date we haven't done enough to better understand the needs of every single donor who has passed through our platform as a donor, especially those who seen the power of the platform.

We would love to be in a position where we can better understand what Australians want to give to and how regularly they want to give, so we can connect them with registered charities and individuals who are launching appeals on our platform.