Published on: July 8, 2025 at 3:58 pm
The nonfinancial support that crowdfunding platforms such as GoFundMe provide via social media is crucial for raising awareness about charitable causes, entrepreneurial initiatives, and people who need help. For example, dozens of GoFundMe campaigns sprung up in the wake of a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on Valentine’s Day 2018.
Academy of Management Scholar Dean Shepherd of the University of Notre Dame said that crowdfunding has given the world a new way to help people whose lives have been upended by disasters and tragedies.
“Another part of crowdfunding in addition to raising money was more like a social movement focused on how we prevent these things from happening again in the future,” Shepherd said.
“So in some ways, the platform provides a basis for which communities can come together and display compassion, by which we mean trying to alleviate the suffering of other people, but perhaps also create these social movements to try and change the legislation, trying to change laws to try and improve life for people,” he said.
Hundreds of millions of people have donated more than $30 billion for mostly charitable causes through GoFundMe since it launched in 2010. Budding and would-be entrepreneurs have long used the platform to try to get funding for their business ideas, but using it in such as multifaceted way to process a tragedy was rare at the time of the Parkland shooting in 2018.
“It’s a unique way of using this crowdfunding,” Shepherd said. “It was an emotional outpouring of compassion for people shattered by a crisis demonstrating that crowdfunding can also be used for that purpose in addition to trying to fund new products and new services as well—that’s interesting.”
