Giving Compass' Take:

• GoFundMe.com is rebranding to GoFundMe.org, which is a new name for the Direct Impact Fund which helps pool funding for large-scale events. 

• What are the challenges for online giving platforms? 

• Read about how team fundraising is now a feature of GoFundMe. 

GoFundMe.com has made a name for itself as a wildly successful platform for people to raise awareness virally and collect money for their personal causes, with $5 billion coming from 50 million donors since launching in 2010. More recently, it has been building out a wider presence working with charities.

It is making the latter more official today, with the launch of GoFundMe.org. And alongside this, it’s debuting a new way to donate to larger fundraising efforts by way of GoFundMe.org Causes, which lets people make donations that might go to one of many charities working to support a variety of general causes, initially covering six “evergreen” areas like animal rescue, K-12 classrooms and mental health.

GoFundMe.org is not exactly new: it is the new name for the Direct Impact Fund, which has been working with GoFundMe since 2017 — and before that, it also worked with CrowdRise, which GoFundMe acquired that year — to help pool funding for mass events like natural or man-made disasters, where it helped distribute what got raised to charities helping to address individuals’ needs. It’s an independent, registered 501(c)(3) public charity.

GoFundMe says that the tax-deductible donations that people make on GoFundMe.org  can be for individuals or certified charities also vetted by its Trust & Safety team. Those made towards wider causes will be disbursed to hundreds of verified fundraisers and charities related to the cause.

Read the full article about GoFundMe.org by Ingrid Lunden at TechCrunch