Since its founding in 2010, GoFundMe has become the go-to platform for helping others in need, with more than $50 million raised every week and more than 8,000 fundraising campaigns launched every day.
But using the platform to raise money from friends, family, and generous acquaintances or strangers often doesn’t come naturally, especially when people are already dealing with a traumatic situation like a house fire, medical problem, or other emergency.
“In order for help to occur, people have to do something quite difficult, which is asking for help,” says GoFundMe CEO Tim Cadogan. “That’s something that almost no one likes doing, so it’s a hard threshold to cross.”
To make the process a bit easier, GoFundMe has rolled out an AI-powered “smart fundraising coach” that can assist people raising money for themselves or others from the moment they begin to plan a campaign. The coach can chat with users to gather information about their situations, show some AI-generated sympathy, and help draft an initial fundraising message and set an appropriate goal based on GoFundMe’s wealth of data. While much of what GoFundMe’s AI offers is similar to smart features that have sprouted up across marketing and sales software, it is also specifically designed to help users through what can be an unfamiliar, stressful, and even embarrassing process.
“We spend a lot of our time thinking about and working on products that make it easier for people to believe that they can ask for help and be successful,” Cadogan says.
The coach also provides a set of suggestions for campaign titles, which Cadogan says most users end up adopting. They typically perform better than user-generated headlines, he says. It can also help fundraisers select appropriate and effective photos to use for their campaigns, again based on GoFundMe data. The automated assistance helps people make practical decisions about a sensitive subject at a difficult time and, perhaps equally important, relieves some of the stress around raising funds.
“Between 65 and 75 percent of the folks we’ve surveyed say that the smart fundraising coach helps them feel more confident, less stressed, and critically, less alone,” Cadogan says.
