WASHINGTON DC, Oct 18 — The Oxford dictionary describes crowdfunding as “the practice of funding a project or venture by raising many small amounts of money from a large number of people, typically via the internet.” GoFundMe, created in 2010, is among the most well-known online fundraisers. Jacob Wells and his family created their GiveSendGo website in 2015 as “a crowd for the crowdless,” as he put it in an interview with Rebecca Weber, CEO of the Association of Mature American Citizens and host of AMAC’s Better For America podcast.
Wells recalled that soon after serving in the military in 2006 he “began wrestling through what I was going to do. Myself and my siblings [six brothers and six sisters] sat down after a Thanksgiving meal, and we said, Wow, everyone we know is using crowdfunding to fundraise to make a difference within their community, to go on a missions trip with their church, to do whatever. We came to the conclusion that it’s important to help people raise money for the financial elements that they have, the issues that they have that require finances.”
Of course, he said, “there are actually many things that money doesn’t solve, particularly when there are difficult moments where you just have a tragedy, an issue that no amount of money you give to them is going to give hope.” Wells added that his goal was “to build an incredible tool for people to raise money. But we’re going to also share the hope that we have that people can realize that they are valuable, that they have purpose, that there is a God that loves them. And so we built GiveSendGo with those elements back in 2014 to compete. We launched at the end of 2015. And it’s been a wild ride from there.”
It wasn’t easy, he said. “The challenges were numerous, partially because you don’t know what you don’t know when you get into something like this. We didn’t come into it with a huge technical background from having gone to school for all of these things. And having learned the ins and outs of what a startup would look like, we just took a step of faith. Beyond just the unknowns and the technical, the business environment, there’s actually political elements that are fighting actively against the very freedoms that this country was founded upon. And, wow, we were in the middle of this fight as a platform that is now faced with those challenges where you have big players in the industry, like PayPal and Discover Card and other big institutions and financial institutions. But we stood tall and we built our own systems and we bought our own servers and we just took each step a day at a time, trusting that God would lead us as he has in the midst of those challenges, challenges that actually turned into successes because as we faced those challenges head on and stood boldly in them, they became successes allowing us to reach greater audiences. And now we have a platform that’s in over 80 countries around the world. We have campaigns actively going on right now in the UK, in Australia and in Africa and South America and throughout Europe. There are campaigns all over the world using our GiveSendGo platform. It’s because we met challenges and we stood on our faith and our principles that they became successes.”
It’s noteworthy that GiveSendGo is a free platform. As Jacob explained it, “we actually champion generosity in our business model. We said we’re not going to charge for our service when platforms like GoFundMe were taking 5 percent plus of every donation that came through. We said, we believe in a generous God; we’re going to live generously ourselves. And what that means is people are raising money because they need it. They’re in a situation. Thus, it doesn’t make sense for us, as a platform, to take money from people that need it. Why don’t we just ask the people that have the money to give a little bit extra, if they’re willing. So we created a generosity model where we were going to be free and rely on the generosity of our users to just give us a little bit extra.”
John Grimaldi served on the first non-partisan communications department in the New York State Assembly and is a founding member of the Board of Directors of Priva Technologies, Inc. He has served for more than thirty years as a Trustee of Daytop Village Foundation, which oversees a worldwide drug rehabilitation network.