CUSTOMER: GOFUNDME

Since their launch in 2010, GoFundMe has raised $40 billion for people, nonprofits, and communities in need. From families impacted by natural disasters to people dealing with medical emergencies, their mission is to help people help each other—enabling anyone to give or ask for help through easy-to-use technology. 

In this interview, we caught up with Moriya Blumenfeld, Senior Director of Product at GoFundMe, to hear about how the company is transforming charitable giving.

Plaid: Let’s start with the state of giving today. What does it look like?

Moriya: Charitable giving has been stuck at 2% of the U.S. GDP for decades. We want to move the needle on that for future generations by bringing both more dollars and more people to philanthropic giving. One way we’re doing that is through our fee-free donor-advised fund, Giving Funds.

Plaid: Can you break down what a donor-advised fund is?

Moriya: Donor-advised funds, or DAFs, are a type of charitable savings account that lets donors make a tax-deductible contribution, invest the funds, and recommend grants to nonprofits over time. It offers flexibility and simplicity while allowing donations to grow before being distributed. But DAFs have largely become wealth management tools with high fees. As a result, only around 1% of Americans have one.

Even more concerning, roughly $325B currently sits idle in DAFs instead of reaching nonprofits that urgently need the support. Each year, around 75% of those funds go undistributed. We set out to change this with Giving Funds: a modern, fee-free DAF that makes intentional charitable giving accessible to everyone, and encourages both contributions in and timely donations out to the nonprofits that urgently need access to these funds. 

Plaid: GoFundMe has invested in the payment experience for customers. Can you tell us why that’s so important to your team?

Moriya: We want to give our customers payment choice, so we’ve enabled people to contribute into their fund via everything from cards to DAF to DAF transfers to stocks. But we also know that not every donor has these payment options, but most Americans have a bank account. So when we built Giving Funds, we knew we wanted to give people the ability to transfer money into their fund using ACH—and Plaid is the gold standard.

With Plaid, our customers can quickly link their bank accounts and start making contributions. This gives more donors an accessible, affordable way to give.

We also recently rolled out ACH on recurring contributions through Plaid, which gives our customers a really easy way to contribute to their Giving Fund regularly—enabling a habit of giving. It’s a great experience for our customers, and it keeps contributions flowing to the nonprofits doing critical work.

Plaid: How about building trust with your customers? How does that play into your approach?

Moriya: People recognize Plaid and they trust it. That trust helps with conversion and gives our community of over 200 million the reassurance they need when handling money. So our customers get an interface they know and love, while we can help get more contributions in, that will eventually flow to the nonprofits we serve.

And finally, Plaid has best-in-class connectivity and user experience, with protections in place to meet high security and compliance standards. Instead of storing banking credentials ourselves, we rely on Plaid’s secure tokenization and authentication framework—protecting both donors and the platform from risk.

Plaid: Younger donors are one of your target demographics. How do Giving Funds help them?

Moriya: Simply put, Giving Funds empower them. We meet Millennials and Gen Z where they are, online, socially connected, and impact-focused—helping them give, share, and inspire others in real time. We’re seeing young donors open their own Giving Fund and setting up charitable goals for more intentional giving.

And there couldn’t be a better time to move the needle. Over the next twenty years, $124T will be transferred to younger generations through the Great Wealth Transfer. We’re very focused on reimagining charitable giving as a lifelong financial habit, not a one-time act of generosity. field.

Plaid: What about for nonprofits? How are Giving Funds helping them?

Moriya: The response from nonprofits we’ve spoken with has been very positive. While other DAFs were created as wealth management tools, Giving Funds was created to be a giving tool and we are focused on getting the funds out to nonprofits. 

DAFs have long been a valuable but underutilized giving channel, and opening them up to GoFundMe’s community of over 200 million has generated real enthusiasm. One of our nonprofit partners even called them “a game changer” for unlocking meaningful funding opportunities.

DAFs have also traditionally been a black box for donor information. With Giving Funds, customers have the option to share their contact details with the nonprofits they donate to, giving them greater visibility and connection to their supporters.

Plaid: Looking ahead, what’s GoFundMe’s vision for the future of giving?

Moriya: Our vision is to bring in more donors, more contributions, and most importantly, more donations out to important causes and nonprofits. We truly believe Giving Funds have the potential to transform the way people donate, by fostering the habit of charitable giving and, with it, a better world.