A Chronicle of Philanthropy opinion piece published last week laid out a reasonable position on online giving platforms. The authors, leaders from Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP), GivingTuesday, and The Nonprofit Alliance, argued that the sector needs self-regulatory standards, not legislation. They worried, reasonably, that sweeping state laws and mandatory opt-in requirements could cut off billions in donations and hurt the smallest organizations most. On the narrow question of legislative risk, they’re not wrong.
Today, AFP published something more concrete: a formal set of nonprofit-first considerations for platforms, reviewed by AFP’s ethics committee and endorsed by GivingTuesday and The Nonprofit Alliance. I’ve read it carefully. It deserves a specific response.
There’s a frustration I keep hearing from fundraising professionals who work on the front lines of this problem every day. Not frustration with the principles being proposed. Frustration with the gap between the principles and anything that could actually enforce them.
Last year, GoFundMe created 1.4 million donation pages for nonprofits. No consent. No notice. Pages timed to go live before year-end giving season, when donation volume is highest and competition for donor attention is fiercest. They pulled data from public IRS records, took a percentage of every donation, and let their pages rank above the organizations’ own websites.
Nonprofits found out by accident. A board member googling the organization. A donor asking a question. What they found was a page collecting money in their name, with no access to donor information, no way to thank anyone who gave, and no path to a relationship. To claim the page, they had to accept GoFundMe’s binding arbitration terms.
This was not a product launch that moved too aggressively. It was not an engineering team that didn’t think through the implications. It was a calculated decision to build a revenue stream on assets that belong to someone else. The identity. The mission. The donor trust that nonprofits spend years earning.
When I wrote about it at the time, I called it a full-frontal assault on donor trust. I’d use the same words today.
AFP’s considerations document names the GoFundMe behavior directly. Consideration two says platforms may not proactively promote a nonprofit’s donation link in search results unless the nonprofit or a supporter has actively created a campaign. That is the GoFundMe problem, in plain language, called out as unacceptable. The sector has now said, in writing, that what happened was wrong.
The fee transparency provisions are right. The data portability provisions are right. Nonprofits should own their donor relationships. Donors should know what percentage of their gift actually arrives. These are the right principles.
My question is still the same one. What does a platform lose by ignoring them?
The endorsement language from GivingTuesday and The Nonprofit Alliance commits to “working alongside… to gather feedback, build alignment, and strengthen these ideas over time.” More process. More dialogue. No consequences.
Self-regulatory principles work when the parties involved have aligned incentives to follow them. Platforms and nonprofits don’t have aligned incentives. GoFundMe created unauthorized pages and captured year-end donations. It made money. The nonprofits those pages represented lost donor relationships. The principles proposed after the fact didn’t change that math. They didn’t cost GoFundMe anything.
That is the accountability problem. Not the content of the principles. The absence of consequences.
The organizations behind these efforts set the professional standards this sector runs on. AFP defines what ethical fundraising looks like for tens of thousands of professionals. GivingTuesday mobilizes millions of donors and nonprofits around the world every year. The Nonprofit Alliance advocates on behalf of organizations across the country.
Employers that run matching programs ask these organizations which platforms to use. Community foundations ask which platforms they should recommend. Major donors ask which platforms are trustworthy. Small nonprofits across the country look to these organizations for guidance on where to direct their supporters.
They don’t endorse platforms. But they define what acceptable behavior looks like. That’s real authority.
A public standard isn’t a product recommendation. It’s a line. When AFP says a practice is inconsistent with ethical fundraising, fundraising professionals pay attention. When GivingTuesday and The Nonprofit Alliance say the same, employers running matching programs pay attention. Foundations pay attention. The platforms themselves pay attention.
That influence is an asset. Right now it’s not being used like one.
Real accountability looks like this: sector organizations establish clear, public behavioral standards for giving platforms. Platforms that meet those standards earn endorsement. Platforms that don’t lose that endorsement. Publicly. With an explanation of why.
That removal has to matter enough that platforms change behavior to get it back. That’s what a consequence looks like.
On fee transparency specifically: the AFP considerations list it as a nonnegotiable. I agree. But we’ve been talking about fee transparency in this sector for years and donors still regularly don’t know what percentage of their gift actually arrives. If something is genuinely nonnegotiable, there has to be a cost for not doing it. Inclusion in a public scorecard. Loss of a certification. Something a platform’s leadership has to explain to its board.
The opt-in versus opt-out debate is a distraction from the more important question. It’s not about a default setting. It’s about whether a platform can use a nonprofit’s identity and donor relationships as raw material for a revenue model without that organization’s knowledge or agreement. The answer to that question should not be determined by a checkbox. It should be determined by whether the sector has decided this behavior is acceptable. Right now, the answer appears to be: acceptable enough.
I understand the nervousness about legislation. State attorneys general acting independently, mandatory opt-in rules written without sector input, legal frameworks that make no distinction between fundamentally different platforms. These are real risks. The organizations arguing against blunt legislative approaches are right to flag them.
But you can’t tell state regulators to stand down and then offer a principles document in return. That’s not a trade. State regulators are acting because someone has to. If sector organizations want to fill that role, they need to fill it with actual authority. Not aspirational standards.
AFP’s document calls these considerations “a baseline and a starting point.” The sector now has a shared, written definition of what good platform behavior looks like. The next step is deciding what it costs platforms to fall short of it.
Fundraising professionals at AFP ICON this week know exactly which organizations in their communities got hurt. They know about the small food bank that discovered a GoFundMe page collecting donations in its name and couldn’t do anything about it without a lawyer. The animal shelter that lost months of donor acquisition because a third-party page was outranking its own site. The youth arts program whose executive director spent a week trying to navigate a claims process designed to frustrate her.
These organizations don’t need a framework. They need the sector to treat protecting them as the actual job.
Principles are where accountability starts. Consequences are what make it real. The sector has the authority to create those consequences. The question is whether it’s willing to use it.
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