Go Fund Yourself (or how to beg online)

GoFundMe. A simple brainchild of Brad Damphousse and Andrew Ballester has grown into the newest way to beg for money from strangers. Back in days prior to May 2010, many people had to go outside and dress poorly to get money from strangers. It was absolutely barbaric. These two geniuses had the idea to make it more Web 4.0 friendly and allow more people to feel superior through their donations.

I remember only a few years ago, I did a social experiment. I went out to a hot spot local street corner two days a week for a couple weeks and studied some reactions. For one day, I dressed in this year’s clothing line for Modern Hobo. For the second, I dressed in this year’s clothing line for Slightly Nice Young Male 9-5 Working Drone. I did this so I could beg for money from each person passing by. For the first, I was sitting down most of the time on an overturned bucket with a sign that said “Anything Helps. God Bless You.” For the second, I had a white board saying I was kicked out of my house and that I was looking for money or a job.

I was under the impression that I would receive a lot more money as the well-dressed man. This was entirely false. I received far more money as a homeless beggar than as a… homeless beggar with nice clothes. From this, I can deduce that people just want the feeling of being superior when they donate. There is no reason for someone to help someone else that looks like they are doing everything right.

Now, let me bring this back to GoFundMe. If I had done the same thing, I would have made a lot more money as the crappy suit wearing guy. I believe GoFundMe has the rare ability of allowing anyone to feel superior. There was a donation to give a woman $800 so that she could get a tattoo of the number 420 removed from her head. This raised over $1,000. Meanwhile, there are desperate people on the website hoping for cancer treatment money or providing water filters for underprivileged children in foreign countries.

How much money does this actually get though? GoFundMe makes so much money from all of these donations. I pulled this straight from their website: “WePay charges a fee of 2.9% + $0.30 per donation, in addition to GoFundMe’s 5% flat fee.” There were one hundred donations and a total of $1,084 raised. According to my basic math skills, GoFundMe made $54.20 while WePay made $61.44. This is $115.64 removed. In total, the woman only made $968.36 from her begging.

You might ask why I wrote this article. You might also ask why it wasn’t really funny. The answer to that is because I once tried to do a GoFundMe. I raised $75 to supply free first aid classes to Cache Valley. I was nowhere near my goal. This was because I failed to reach out for a specific noun and I didn’t have plans to use the money for personal gain. For example, I saw the posting history of a guy who asked for dog cancer treatment money that he ended up spending on new tattoos and watches or whatnot. He said in another post that he would have to put his dog down because he didn’t raise enough money.

In short, altruism is a lie and people are terrible. Go fund yourself next time.

— kaihartley@gmail.com