CrowdRise

» see crowdrise.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

sponsored running is a ritual americans and britons perform on each other. you enter a marathon and you tell everybody you know that you are doing it for a cause. they pay out of some mixture of goodwill and social pressure. turkey has charity and turkey has marathons. it does not have that particular ritual at that scale, and crowdrise was built on top of it almost entirely.

edward norton entered the 2009 new york city marathon on a team raising money for the maasai wilderness conservation trust, running alongside maasai athletes, and the group put up its own page to take the pledges. they were aiming for something between sixty and seventy-five thousand dollars. the page took one point two million. norton's read on it was that the page had done the work, and crowdrise was founded on 19 may 2010 with shauna robertson and the two brothers behind moosejaw, robert and jeffrey wolfe.

it ran out of detroit and it was funny on purpose, which no other donation platform of the period was. the copy read like a joke and the leaderboards handed out points for doing good. the whole surface was styled as a contest instead of an appeal. underneath the tone it was serious machinery. by the time it sold, over a million people had used it and twenty thousand charities were running campaigns on it. it had moved more than half a billion dollars.

investors put in thirty-one and a half million dollars against a valuation reported at ninety-one million. gofundme bought the company on 10 january 2017 on terms nobody disclosed.

~ the chronicle ~

~ points for good deeds ~

the points were the genuinely interesting piece. crowdrise handed out impact points for donating and for getting other people to donate, then ranked individuals and teams against each other on the total. the points bought nothing at all. they existed so that giving money away would feel like what it actually is for most people who do it, which is a small public act carried out in front of people who know you.

the mechanics were ordinary enough. five percent to the platform on top of card processing, with donors offered the choice of covering both so the charity received the full amount. what was not ordinary was a celebrity-founded charity site refusing to be solemn about charity. norton's own framing was that it stood as the alternative to the rubber-chicken fundraising dinner, and for several years that was a fair description.

~ how it actually ended ~

gofundme kept the name at first. in march 2018 it relaunched the site as crowdrise by gofundme, pointed at organizations while individual fundraisers were sent to the main platform. that arrangement lasted about eighteen months. on 14 october 2019 gofundme announced gofundme charity, a free fundraising suite for nonprofits going live on 7 november, and the announcement said nothing whatsoever about crowdrise being switched off.

on 7 november crowdrise.com stopped being a website and became a redirect to charity.gofundme.com. there was no notice and nothing anywhere on gofundme's own site explaining where nine years of campaign pages had gone. nonprofits worked it out because their links moved under them.

~ the second death ~

the replacement lasted fifteen months. gofundme began shutting down gofundme charity in march 2021, telling nonprofits that their campaigns would not be migrated to the main platform and that the campaigns and the data behind them would become inaccessible. charities that had followed crowdrise into gofundme charity were told to rebuild by hand on a third product in under two years.

a fundraising platform holds other people's histories. every campaign page is a record of who gave what to which cause and when, and organizations plan against those records for years afterward. crowdrise died the way most acquired products die, silently and on somebody else's schedule. what went with it belonged to twenty thousand charities rather than to the company that turned it off.

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