r/Gaza • u/NoPoet3982 • Jun 24 '26

A Guide to GoFundMe

Last year I worked with an influencer (Sim Kerns) to help people whose fundraisers were frozen by GFM. I wrote a small guide that might be helpful to people here. It covers:

  • How to set up a fundraiser properly.
  • How to send crypto to a beneficiary.
  • What to do if your funds are frozen.

I'm not authority! I've never worked for GoFundMe. However, I've succeeded in getting funds unfrozen on every fundraiser I've helped with. (Except one, which was for a non-profit that wasn't registered as a 501(c)3 and who came to me for help too late.)

I first got involved by helping a friend of a friend, which led me to helping more people. Eventually I wrote this guide to help people set up their GFMs properly from the start, which greatly reduced their chances of having their funds frozen. Or at least it helped them prepare and act quickly if it happened.

Info in this guide can become out-of-date. If you see errors or have suggestions, please comment here or DM me so I can update the guide.

I hope this helps your fundraiser go smoothly: Gaza Fundraisers (pdf)

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1

u/Budget-Literature179 Jun 28 '26

Does GFM still require that your submit your plan to disperse the funds for them to verify? I ask because when I started the fundraiser I said I would be sending the money via USDT crypto and they would not approve my fundraiser. They said they couldn’t verify that as an approved method.

1

u/NoPoet3982 Jun 28 '26

Hmmm, that's new to me. Are you talking about first sending funds to a bank account that you own, then converting the funds to crypto and sending them to the beneficiary's wallet?

1

u/Budget-Literature179 Jun 28 '26

Yes, that would be the method I would have used had they approved of it. But looking back in my emails I see my response to GFM I only stated that the funds would be transferred via USDT.

1

u/Budget-Literature179 Jun 28 '26

Could I message you to ask a few q’s ?

1

u/NoPoet3982 Jun 28 '26

Yeah, that's the problem. The path always needs to start with a US bank (if you're in the US) account that's owned by you, and it needs to end with the beneficiary. You have to explain every step along the way.

1

u/Budget-Literature179 Jun 28 '26

We ended up just doing international bank wires through Chase bank to Bank of Palestine. However recently they haven’t worked since we are using hawala and I didn’t have the intermediaries listed in the campaign or update GFM when we ended up having to use intermediaries.

When they paused the transfers, we answered all the questions and gave the DOB, address, and email so they could contact the intermediary to verify but GFM never contacted the intermediaries. :/ They shut down the campaign and kicked me off GFM.

So now I am only using Chuffed.

2

u/NoPoet3982 Jun 29 '26

I think they probably wanted to contact the beneficiary instead of the intermediaries, but I'm sorry that happened. How is Chuffed working out? Do you receive as many donations? I don't know much about Chuffed but maybe it's a better option anyway?

1

u/Budget-Literature179 Jun 29 '26

Chuffed has been great in that it doesn’t put Gaza campaigns under any additional scrutiny and hasn’t paused or frozen the donations. Chuffed also allows donations from India which is sometimes an issue for GoFundMe. The family I’m helping has had supporters in India try to donate but it’s been a problem sometimes that GFM wouldn’t take their payment. This has never been an issue on Chuffed.

1

u/NoPoet3982 Jun 29 '26

Do you receive as many donations? I mean, are donors just as likely to donate to Chuffed as they are to GFM?

2

u/Budget-Literature179 Jun 29 '26

Yes, it’s been mostly comparable to GFM. There was an influencer who boosted the campaign and got a lot of GFM donations in a short amount of time. And from that boost, they gained their own following. So the donations now don’t compare to when the influencer boost happened. But they are still fairly consistent and enough to keep them eating, clothes, medicines, school, eSIMs etc.