GiveForward

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

~ the goodbye ~

GiveForward opened on 14 August 2008 out of Chicago, built by Desiree Vargas Wrigley and Ethan Austin around one specific use that the general-purpose fundraising sites of the time were not designed for. The page you built here was for a friend whose treatment had outrun their insurance, and it said so in the first line, with a running total and a deadline that was somebody's actual deadline.

The mechanics were ordinary. Five percent to the platform and 2.9 percent plus fifty cents to the card processor, 7.9 percent all in. What separated it from the donation tools of the period was that it did not require the cause to be attached to a registered charity, which also meant the company could not call itself one. It was a for-profit sitting inside other people's emergencies, and it was reasonably honest about that. The Chicago Tribune called it the future of medical fundraising in the internet age, which was meant as praise.

Reading the category from Turkey takes a second of adjustment every time. A medical crowdfunding industry is a thing a country grows when the bills can exceed what a working household has, and the Turkish version of a cancer diagnosis in 2008 involved SGK and a queue rather than a web page with a thermometer graphic on it. The site is legible to me as software and strange to me as a social fact.

It worked, at the scale that kind of thing works. Two sisters raised $32,000 in March 2009 toward a kidney transplant for one of them. David Hartsock, a skydiving instructor who came out of a tandem jump quadriplegic after the parachute failed and he put himself under his passenger, raised more than $150,000. At the point of sale the totals stood at 270,000 fundraisers and a little under 200 million dollars moved.

YouCaring put out its acquisition release on 29 March 2017, and that is the last date on which GiveForward is a company rather than a line in somebody else's press copy.

~ the chronicle ~

~ world give day ~

In 2010 the company tried to invent a holiday. World Give Day was set for 4 May, pitched as one day a year when people focus on giving, and backed with an online and physical petition asking Mayor Richard M. Daley to make it official in Chicago first.

It did not take. GivingTuesday, launched two years later by the 92nd Street Y with the UN Foundation behind it, became the one that stuck, and it stuck because the coalition existed before the date did. GiveForward had the date and a petition.

~ bought, then bought again ~

YouCaring's announcement on 29 March 2017 is a polite document. Dan Saper, the acquiring chief executive, said the GiveForward brand and what it stands for could not be more aligned with who we are. Vargas Wrigley said she was happy to see the vision expanded. The word closing appears nowhere in it, and the brand does not appear anywhere after it. YouCaring charged fundraisers nothing and ran on voluntary donor tips, so the GiveForward fee model went out with the name.

GoFundMe bought YouCaring in 2018 and the chain finished there. giveforward.com answers today with a WordPress page whose own metadata says it was published on 7 May 2018, titled GiveForward Has Joined GoFundMe, inviting you to start a GoFundMe instead. The archive's last capture of the real working site is from September 2016, at seventeen kilobytes; by May 2017 the same address was serving five kilobytes of exit sign.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »