Whether it is the aging of donors, financial hardship, or the fraying of social connections that inspire giving, there are challenges lurking everywhere, but digital platforms can create new pathways into generosity.
Giving and helping are part of what it means to be a Canadian. Duke Chang thinks we sometimes just need to be reminded of that. From the historic run of Terry Fox to the residents of Newfoundland and Labrador opening their doors to stranded Americans after 9/11, from gala fundraisers to volunteering, Chang points to a history of generosity in deed and dollars in this country. “These are generosity stories. They are part of who we are,” says the president and CEO of CanadaHelps.
But many of the ways in which we have traditionally given are now bathed in nostalgia. Some would sound downright strange to entire generations. Writing a cheque at the kitchen table and sliding it into an envelope. Jerry Lewis and his telethons – indeed, any telethons. The influence of service clubs and places of worship, traditional conduits for giving, is on the wane, although there is some evidence of a rebound in church attendance. Canada has become more urban, erasing some of the giving advantage held by rural residents. New neighbourhoods are being built for cars, dulling the impact of mutual aid among neighbours who disappear into suburban garages each evening.
More than anything, those who give in this country are getting older. Figures compiled by Imagine Canada show that less than 10% of individuals give more than 70% of the money in Canada. Of the $12 billion donated by Canadians each year, more than half of that comes from people over 60, and half of that again comes from those over 70.
“The nation is changing, and it is time we talk about how we find pathways into generosity,” says Bruce MacDonald, president and CEO of Imagine Canada.
In these days when handheld banking machines are used at Salvation Army kettles and e-transfers are used to raise funds for peewee hockey teams outside grocery stores, digital platforms are one of those pathways.
The nation is changing, and it is time we talk about how we find pathways into generosity.
Bruce MacDonald, Imagine Canada
No company has changed giving habits more radically than GoFundMe, the private California-based company. It has used the power of digital media to shape attitudes about helping and asking for help. It has helped donees craft compelling narratives and has made it easier to share the stories of those in need, multiplying individual donations by raising awareness. GoFundMe has raised US$40 billion since its founding in 2010 as CreateAFund, and since 2017 it has been the world’s largest crowdfunding platform. Some 6,000 Canadians donate through the platform each day, raising more than $1 billion for Canadian causes in the last five years.
GoFundMe is entrenched in Canada, but CEO Tim Cadogan was here this spring to deliver a simple message to the non-profit sector in this country: “We’re here to help. If you want our help, we will help. Simple as that.”
Cadogan appeared on a panel at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, met with non-profit leaders at Toronto’s Foundation House, did media interviews, bestowed an award to a city councillor representing Spadina-Fort York as the city’s most “generous community,” and went on to Ottawa to meet with some Liberal members of Parliament and the deputy minister of public safety.
Donating is just one form of helping, Cadogan says. Helping can also come in the form of spreading awareness, along with more traditional ways, such as volunteering. The advancing age of donors is similar in the United States, he says, where the average age of a donor is 64. But what is changing, Cadogan says, is that people are now more used to expressing themselves publicly through digital services.
I don’t think the heart changes, but I think the mechanics of giving has changed. The way people give has become increasingly varied.
Tim Cadogan, GoFundMe
Sharing awareness of a cause is more important today, Cadogan says. “I don’t think the heart changes, but I think the mechanics of giving has changed. The way people give has become increasingly varied.” He sees similarities between the United States and Canada. “Asking for help and giving are fairly universal across cultures, and emotional and psychological factors are universal,” he says. “In terms of response to crisis, the desire to mobilize is largely similar.”
Despite the differences in their healthcare programs, medical fundraising is the number-one category in both the United States and Canada, and, indeed, every country in which GoFundMe operates, Cadogan says. “The reality is there is no healthcare system in the world that takes care of everything.”
GoFundMe’s 2024 study of the social state of giving highlighted the differences among Gen Z (18 to 26 years old at the time), millennials (27 to 42), Gen X (43 to 58), and boomers (59+). Overall, people listed three top reasons for giving: it is the right thing to do, it makes them feel good, and it resonates with them personally. Most notably, perhaps, the survey found that Gen Z and millennial donors report the most positive feelings after an online donation. But beyond giving, Gen Z is 10 times more open to sharing that they donated online, a concept that has been called “selfish altruism.” Almost half of that age group told the survey they believe people should share donations online to spread the word and inspire others. This breaks another generational barrier: the boomer donor who gives in anonymity.
With GoFundMe able to show how many dollars a “share” generated, it can quantify influence. Cadogan says it can now be determined that a $50 donation can generate $400 or more in other donations. “This is an absolute revelation to people who realize their power to make a difference is bigger with their ability to spread the word than their wallet,” he says. During Hurricane Helene, which devastated the southeastern United States in 2024, a single donor with a powerful social network parlayed a $5 donation into $100,000 in donations with the power of her share, he says.
There can be no doubt that crowdfunding is the choice of a younger generation. When Victoria high school music students Mudita Shikhare, Jeff Zhang, and Zak Kyriacou learned that budget cuts endangered their music studies, they decided to take matters into their own hands. When they decided to raise funds to try to offset a $250,000 budget cut to school music programs in the Greater Victoria School District, they turned to crowdfunding.
They were inspired by a fundraising effort to save a popular Victoria jazz club and they were under a tight timeline – they had a week before the school budget was finalized – and they turned to the Chuffed platform. There they raised $31,050 in a week, but, in a twist, their efforts inspired an anonymous $100,000 donation from a more traditional source, the NRS Foundation, a donor-advised fund held at the Victoria Foundation. By mid-May, they had raised $46,775 on the site, which, with the $100,000 donation, will help fund additional teacher staff training for music students in this fiscal year (the budget cut was also sliced to $232,000). The campaign was partly fuelled by the acclaim they received in local and national news stories.
The students spoke to The Philanthropist Journal on a recent afternoon before delivering a cheque to the school district office. Zhang explained that Chuffed allowed the students to collect the donations in one account to be delivered to the school district. With GoFundMe, each individual donation would have gone directly from the donor to the recipient. “It was very straightforward,” he said.
They were not consciously repudiating more formal fundraising platforms, Shikhare said. “We had a one-week timeframe, and we really had to get the word out quickly. The easiest way to do that was through social media, and by setting up a crowdfunding page we were able to get more donors that way.” All three agreed they would go the same route again if they were seeking to raise funds.
With GoFundMe seeking a bigger role in raising funds for Canadian charities, Cadogan argues that fundraising in Canada is not a zero-sum game and that increased donations through GoFundMe does not mean a dip in donors for the country’s charities. Charitable organizations are needed to sustain long-term efforts, he says, because there is work to be done that doesn’t go away when a disaster is pushed out of the news cycle. “There is a tendency to think that if one thing is growing, something else must be declining,” he says. “We don’t see that in our data. We see a rising tide. You can help individuals, you can help families, you can help non-profits. They all go up. They lead to a habit of giving.”
Crowdfunding introduces acts of financial giving to a younger audience. That’s a good thing.
Bruce MacDonald
MacDonald says the sector should be welcoming all ways that individuals contribute to their communities. “There’s room for direct giving, room for giving to charities and non-profits, and there is room for all kinds of giving,” he says. “Individual giving is now concentrated largely among older, more affluent people. Crowdfunding introduces acts of financial giving to a younger audience. That’s a good thing.”
Lisa Lalande, CEO of the Century Initiative, agrees that crowdfunding lowers barriers to giving, creates emotional connections, attracts young people and first-time donors, and can certainly help in a crisis. “But it isn’t designed to allocate resources fairly or strategically,” she says. “If we rely too heavily on crowdfunding, we risk building a system that responds well to crisis but not to the underlying conditions that created them.”
The sector deals with issues like cost of living, housing challenges, or climate change in silos without acknowledging that they are all interconnected, Lalande says. “Crowdfunding can’t get at root causes or drive long-term impact. It rewards visibility but not necessarily the most in need, so it can reinforce inequality. It also pressures people to publicly perform hardship.”
Crowdfunding rewards visibility but not necessarily the most in need, so it can reinforce inequality. It also pressures people to publicly perform hardship.
Lisa Lalande, Century Initiative
CanadaHelps is the country’s largest online platform, facilitating donations to 85,000 Canadian charities. It is a registered charity and fully Canadian, serving only Canada. GoFundMe is a for-profit company classed in Canada as a “money services business” and is headquartered in California.
“The money from us only goes to other Canadian charities,” Chang says. A donation of $100 is subject to a credit card or debit card processing fee: $4.50 goes to processing and $95.50 goes to the charity to which you are donating. GoFundMe charges 2.2%, plus 30 cents for every charitable transaction, meaning $96.80 will go to the donee. That rate rises to 2.9% for campaigns directed at an individual. But GoFundMe also accepts optional “tips” for its services that go to its business, not its recipients. The “tip” option is pre-set at 16.5%, and the onus is on the donor to move a sliding bar on the transaction site to zero if they do not wish to leave a tip. CanadaHelps also has an opt-in function on its donation page, allowing donors to give a one-time tax-deductible contribution for its services. Chuffed has a pre-set tip, too, that can be lowered to zero by the donor.
The “tip” default setting has sparked complaints and a letter to GoFundMe from 22 US state attorneys general. Some consumers have argued that the tip function operates on the “opt out” process, rather than giving them a chance to “opt in” if they wish to leave one. “A trusted platform that claims to support donors should be transparent and upfront about its product,” the attorneys general wrote. “Using default settings that push donors to pay hefty fees in the form of ‘tips’ undermines the spirit of giving that GoFundMe claims to support.”
In response, GoFundMe chief legal officer Kim Wilford, in a letter to the California attorney general, said the platform makes it clear the tip is optional and donors can slide the tip size on the website above 16.5% or down to zero. She also says it is clear on the web page that the tip goes to GoFundMe, not the charity.
The company also had to deal with complaints from the states’ attorneys general that GoFundMe created pages that used inaccurate names, logos, and social media sites of US charities. Some 1.4 million charities had pages created by GoFundMe without prior consent.
In a response to the California attorney general, GoFundMe disputes that it did not have the right to facilitate donations to non-profits without a specific opt-in from the organizations but nevertheless agreed to take the pages down. “We have more than 100 million people a month come to GoFundMe, and some of those people are looking to support non-profits,” Cadogan says. “We just made a very simple listing so they could find a non-profit and give to that non-profit. We use publicly available data.”
GoFundMe was doing exactly what CanadaHelps does in this country, Cadogan says, but when he got complaints, he apologized and acted within days.
In Canada, GoFundMe has been associated with major fundraising efforts for notable tragedies, including the Humboldt bus crash, for which $15.1 million was raised from donors from more than 80 countries, and the Tumbler Ridge school shootings. But it has also been associated, most infamously, with the 2022 “Freedom Convoy” and, more recently, the fight against the culling of ostriches in Edgewood, BC, which attracted some of the same convoy protesters. In the Freedom Convoy case, GoFundMe quickly shut down the platform, refunded money from donors, and registered with the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada as required by Canadian legislation. It and other crowdfunding platforms are required to report suspicious donations that could be linked to terrorist activity or money laundering. The ostrich case has been shown to be a scam in investigative pieces in major media in Canada and the United States, and the CBC reported that the battle with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency waged by ostrich proponents over the fate of the birds cost Canadian taxpayers $7 million.
Every charity has to deploy multiple strategies now.
Duke Chang, CanadaHelps
Chang does not agree that all traditional channels for giving are disappearing; he says gala fundraisers and charity golf tournaments have returned after the pandemic, and media reports have indicated that Gen Z is going back to places of worship. (An April Gallup poll in the United States found that 40% of men aged 18 to 29 attend religious services at least once monthly, the highest level in 14 years.)
“People are seeking community again,” Chang says, “and that is where forms of generosity happen.” Young Canadians who may be financially stressed still want to help, he says, and many are turning to volunteering.
Chang, however, is not ignoring the value of “mutual aid,” where a donation goes directly to another person, even if some of the viral GoFundMe campaigns get the disproportionate attention, such as an elderly DoorDash driver in Tennessee who was gifted with almost US$1 million in a GoFundMe campaign (plus $20,000 from DoorDash’s CEO) or the Detroit autoworker who received more than US$800,000 from a GoFundMe campaign after he was suspended from his job following a confrontation with Donald Trump. Those numbers may seem huge and some may wonder if some of that money could have been better donated elsewhere, but Cadogan says it comes down to consumer choice. “GoFundMe is just a modern way of helping people do something that is completely timeless: helping each other,” he says. “We used to walk around with a cap and say, ‘Hey, can you put 50 cents in here?’ Now we just do it in a much bigger way.”
Lalande also points to the data that could be generated by a crowdfunding platform like GoFundMe, because it is adept at finding those who have fallen through the cracks and the data could be extremely valuable to the sector – as long as it serves the public good and not corporate interests.
But the non-profit sector in Canada knows it cannot run from any potential channel of giving. Whether it is the aging of donors, financial hardship, or the fraying of social connections that inspire giving, there are challenges lurking everywhere.
Chang agrees that there is no “either/or” scenario when it comes to raising donations. “Every charity has to deploy multiple strategies now.” That includes diversifying their revenue sources or turning one-time donations into monthly subscription donations. Crowdfunding can help with the ongoing challenge of making generosity a regular habit, Chang says.
Or, as MacDonald says, it’s time to make generosity “cool again.”
