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This was posted across multiple social platforms. The original used some rather strong language. I have reprinted the content although i have reworded sections.

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Some of you who work in nonprofits may have heard about this, but if you don’t actively work in fundraising or if you’re a small nonprofit it likely hasn’t crossed your radar. That’s not surprising; it’s very recent and relatively obscure.

GoFundMe [GFM] just made a -huge- move into the nonprofit fundraising space; somewhat of a power grab, really. They scraped data from state and federal public databases to create GFM pages for every nonprofit on which they could find information; literally hundreds of thousands. This was done without the permission or even knowledge of any of these organizations.

GoFundMe claims that this is an altruistic effort intended to make it as easy and possible for nonprofits to accept donations and raise funds. They claim that they are trying to help the entire sector in a time when traditional funding streams are impacted by tightening budgets and changing priorities. They claim that this move was widely discussed and publicized at conferences and in professional publications.

There are some major problems with this. First of all, GoFundMe is a for-profit company imposing itself into the nonprofit space. It doesn’t really understand how nonprofit fundraising works nor, apparently,  does it care. What it cares about, like most corporations, is profit – by collecting a percentage of donations thatcome through their system. This is, of course, true of many payment processors, but the difference here is that GFM is soliciting money on behalf of a large number nonprofits across the country without the knowledge of the people who run most of them.

That’s the second problem. While many larger organizations are aware of the GFM actions, many smaller ones that aren’t chronically online are not aware. 90+% of nonprofits are one-or-two person operations, and they are too busy focusing on their mission and immediate, known-successful fundraising tactics to even have the opportunity to find out a out something like this, much less incorporate it into their fundraising strategy.

The third issue is visibility. GoFundMe has staggering SEO capacity, which means that when you search for a particular nonprofit, what’s goingto beat the top of the results is the GFM donations page that the organization didn’t ask for and may not even know exists.

After a few days of backlash, GFM agreed to set up a method to allow groups to claim their pages and turn off the donations, tip options, and modify the SEO settings, meaning that you won’t be as likely to find them in a search and even if you do, you won’t be able to send money through them.

This is critical because some nonprofits have fundraising strategies that aren’t built around collecting donations from individuals, and the added steps of accounting for small donors and the fees that GFM charges are just one more complication in what’s already challenging bookkeeping. Keep in mind that such organizations are mostly running with a very limited labor pool, much of it volunteer.

The fourth problem is that there’s no clear path for donations from unclaimed pages to get to the organization to which donors think they are sending them. If people are making donations online that aren’t reaching their intended recipients, that’s extremely bad both for the recipient organization, who has lost out on potential revenue, and for the nonprofit world as a whole, as people lose faith in online payment systems and donation solicitations. One of the most powerful tools available to small non-profits to help raise revenue could be lost because of this action.

Multiple legal professionals have already weighed in, and the prevailing opinion is that what GoFundMe is doing is, strictly speaking, legal. There are some states that might bar this conduct, but whether it remains to be seen whether a challenge could stand up in state court.

Ethically, however, what they are doing is problematic. This could potentially smother a bunch of small non-profits – their online visibility may suffer, and ones that are reliant on individual small donors could see their revenue streams dry up and they won’t know why.

This is ultimately damaging to the world of nonprofits as a whole – the organizations that work to fill the gaps in our society and provide desperately needed services are already struggling. We don’t need another burden added to what we already deal with every single day.

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I found the following dog park nonprofit organizations listed with gofundme pages that appear to be part of this push (and show as “unclaimed”)

Enfield Dog Park Action Committee (CT),
Lakes Area Dog Park (NH)
New Milford Dog Park (CT)
Friends of Litchfield Dog Park Inc. (CT)
York Dog Park (ME)
Ely Dog Park (VT)
Canton Dog Park (MA)
Friends of the Acton Community Dog Park (MA)
Salisbury Community Dog Park (CT)
Friends of the Barrington Dog Park (RI)
Friends of the Marblehead Dog Park Inc. (MA)
Keene Dog Park Incorporated (NH)
Chelmsford Dog Association (MA)

This is not necessarily a comprehensive list — please check specifically for your own organization.

If you run one of these,  please claim and turn OFF actions until you can talk to a lawyer about how this could impact your organization.