The Steep Slope of Need
Over the past two months, Americans have become familiar with exponential-style graphs of the spread of COVID-19. Steep curves illustrating the scope death and disease have exposed our vulnerability to this novel virus and the institutional failures that hampered the US response. In addition to the direct damage wrought by the novel coronavirus, mitigation efforts like physical distancing have led to widespread economic displacement. In response to these acute challenges, many Americans are seeking support using crowdsourced funding platforms. Many more Americans have been asked to contribute to such campaigns.
As COVID-19 has spread across the country, so too have personal appeals for aid — and challenging questions about where and how to donate money.
To better understand the scope of this new phenomenon, we tracked the growth of COVID-19 related crowdfunding campaigns in the US. We found 59,330 US fundraising campaigns created since January 1, 2020 that mentioned “Coronavirus” or “COVID”. The chart below shows how the need for support has spread as rapidly as the virus:
The largest number of COVID-19 campaigns on GoFundMe are listed in the general “Accidents & Emergencies” category, so the graph below does not show the true diversity of need reflected by funding requests.
Looking at the text of the campaigns in more detail, one can get a sense of the particular ways our existing social safety net and institutions are failing to provide for people’s needs in the midst of the pandemic. Over 4,000 campaigns mention personal protective equipment or masks, including campaigns supporting those who work with adults with disabilities, to raise funds for refugee and immigrant women making masks and to acquire PPE for healthcare workers in many different locations across the United States. Thousands of campaigns seek to help people pay rent and avoid eviction. Other campaigns seek funding for people whose precarious situations have grown even more perilous during the pandemic, including homeless youth and asylum seekers. While government programs to support small businesses have struggled to deliver sufficient funds, over 13,000 businesses are now seeking crowdfunding with aid from a small business relief program coordinated by GoFundMe, Quickbooks and Yelp.
Over $100 million has been donated to the crowdfunding campaigns we identified. The widespread support of crowdfunding campaigns is a heartening demonstration of solidarity. Yet crowdfunding is unlikely to be a solution in times of crisis, when so many people are suffering simultaneously. Even in normal times, crowdfunding is a poor substitute for universal social programs. As Nora Kenworthy noted in the Washington Post, research shows that the vast majority of crowdfunding programs do not reach their goals, and that crowdfunding can replicate existing patterns of stratification by race, ethnicity, and geography. It’s also worth remembering that companies like GoFundMe are for-profit, and stand to make a great deal of money from this crisis. GoFundMe requests a 15% tip on all donations; at $100 million donated, this would amount to $15,000,000.
The financial cost of the current pandemic is too large to be filled by online crowdfunding. As this additional exponential chart below reminds us, the true cost is much higher than the financial cost.
Written by Mark Igra on behalf of the UW Crowdfunding Research team. Mark is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Washington who is studying US medical crowdfunding.
