The big business of GiveSendGo: U.S. crowdfunding site earned at least $735,000 on Ottawa protests alone, leaked data shows

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This article was published 25/02/2022 (1677 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The founders of GiveSendGo preach a simple message: “The most valuable currency is God’s love.”

Since 2015, when siblings Jacob Wells and Heather Wilson founded the American crowdfunding site, GiveSendGo has become the Christian response to GoFundMe, a religiously-inclined platform devoted to collecting money for causes that other crowdfunding sites won’t touch.

The family-owned business hosts campaigns ranging from “Send a kid to Christian camp” — a fundraiser that purports to help prevent Gen Z students “from falling prey to the lies of secularist, Marxism and anti-Christian trends in culture” — to the “Enrique Tarrio Defence Fund,” a fundraiser that collected $113,056 (U.S.) after a member of the far-right Proud Boys was arrested en route to Washington, D.C., with high-capacity firearm magazines in his possession, two days before the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.

GiveSendGo’s recent campaign for the “freedom convoy,” which shut down Ottawa’s downtown for nearly a month, may have been one of the company’s most profitable, not just for the fundraisers but also for the site’s founders.

While GiveSendGo does not publicly disclose how much it earns on individual campaigns, the Star’s analysis of a leaked donor list found that the company received at least $735,782 (CAD) in voluntary “tips” from the nearly 100,000 people who donated to the Ottawa protest via the crowdfunding site.

That figure is likely higher now, given that donations have continued to pour into the campaign since its data was leaked early last week.

The company earns revenue through a voluntary tipping system that encourages crowdfunding donors to throw in a few extra dollars for the website.

It also charges a three per cent processing fee per donation on behalf of an undisclosed third-party payment platform, which has earned at least $405,485 from the convoy fundraiser, based on the Star’s analysis.

On the website, when a donor inputs their contribution amount for a fundraiser, GiveSendGo will automatically add an additional 10 per cent gratuity, unless the donor explicitly opts out.

A contribution of $100, for example, will grow to $110 unless the donor deselects the tip option under a heading labelled “Help Keep GiveSendGo Free!”

Based on a scan through the company’s leaked data, it appears that many donors do not opt out of the automatic 10 per cent gratuity.

Among the convoy’s top contributors, U.S. billionaire Thomas Siebel gave a $90,000 (U.S.) donation with an additional $9,000 tip for GiveSendGo.

Cryptocurrency enthusiast Travis Moore gave $17,760 to the protesters, accompanied by a $1,776 tip for the crowdfunding site and a message that read, “Let freedom ring, brothers of the North. Cryptocurrency is the future.”

GiveSendGo’s earnings from the convoy campaign are “in line with what most crowdfunding sites make” on big fundraisers, said Jeremy Snyder, a professor at Simon Fraser University who studies health sciences and medical crowdfunding.

In total, the convoy protest earnings amount to roughly five per cent of the campaign’s overall crowdfunding effort, demonstrating how a seemingly minor slice of a major fundraiser can amount to windfall returns for the company.

The tidy revenue from tips shows how organizations such as GiveSendGo are incentivized to latch onto popular fundraising efforts snubbed by mainstream crowdfunding organizations.

In 2020, when GoFundMe and Fundly removed campaigns for Kyle Rittenhouse, who fatally shot two men at a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wis., GiveSendGo effectively monopolized fundraising revenue for the since-acquitted teenager by becoming one of the only websites willing to host his campaign, which ultimately raised $630,485.

“They’ll host fundraisers for pretty much anything. That’s how they make money,” said Chrissy Stroop, a self-described ex-evangelical writer and researcher based in Portland, Ore., who has followed the rise of GiveSendGo.

The company did not respond to the Star’s requests for comment.

In a recent interview with Fox News, co-founder Wells said that traffic to the website has been “booming” since the trucker convoy began.

“We haven’t seen this much business before,” said Wells, who is also chief financial officer. “We’re seeing 100 per cent growth month-over-month. It’s absolutely outstanding.”

Wells and Wilson, who were raised in a devout family of 12 children in Salem, N.H., founded GiveSendGo because, as Wilson explained in a recent interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, they wanted “to do what the Church is actually supposed to do” — but on a broader scale.

“When there’s a need, everyone comes together and helps,” said Wilson, the company’s CEO.

On the website, each “Share Now” button is accompanied by a “Pray Now” button, where users are encouraged to send their devotions to the fundraiser’s recipients along with cash. At the payment stage, users are greeted by a verse from the Old Testament: “Every man shall give as he is able, according to the blessing of the LORD your God which He has given you.”

But the company’s most popular campaigns tend to veer away from piety and towards fringe political movements, often attracting controversy in the process.

A crowdfunding campaign for Alex Jones, the far-right conspiracy theorist and founder of Infowars, has raised $374,000 toward its $2 million goal, though the campaign does not say where the money will go or how it will be used.

Some studies have indicated that conservative Americans are more likely to donate to fundraisers and charities than liberals, and Wells himself has acknowledged that’s a “boom for our business.”

The only campaigns that are prohibited on GiveSendGo are campaigns that explicitly “cause harm to somebody — like physical, purposeful harm,” Wilson recently said.

She cited abortion as an example. “Abortion is legal in the United States, but we say that’s causing harm to somebody because we believe that a baby, from conception, life begins then,” she said.

True to form, when the San Francisco-based Church of Satan recently tried to join the crowdfunding site to raise money for “abortion ritual rites in Texas,” Wilson said she shut it down.

“We are Christians that believe that taking sides in politics is not the answer. The answer is found in Jesus. We will continue to Share that hope with everyone that comes on our platform,” the founders wrote in an April blog post.

Stroop, who was raised in an evangelical household in Indiana, said the founders of GiveSendGo “have pretty much a standard evangelical ideology.”

In the days following the U.S. Capitol riot, which ultimately left five people dead, PayPal cut ties with GiveSendGo as its primary payment processor over its fundraisers for QAnon and the riot’s participants.

In an April blog post, the founders announced they were also parting ways with WePay, a processor owned by JPMorgan Chase, and Stripe.

Now, the company says it charges a fee of 2.9 per cent plus $0.30 per transaction — withdrawn from the total donation amount during payment processing — on behalf of a third-party processor that the company has not revealed.

The company’s founders have previously suggested that GiveSendGo would create its own in-house payment processing system so that they are not beholden to companies pressured by the public to cut them off.

“We know we do not have to answer to the angry mob, just to God and that is why we do what we do,” the company said in a blog post addressing their clashes with payment processors.

“We are prepared to answer to God for our platform. We actually talk to Him daily about it.”

Jacob Lorinc is a Toronto-based reporter covering business for the Star. Reach him via email: jlorinc@thestar.ca