Struggling, helping and adapting: Crowdfunding motivations and outcomes during the early US COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

During the early months of COVID-19, many people in the US turned to charitable crowdfunding to seek and provide assistance. Little is known about the needs, hopes or experiences that motivated US pandemic crowdfunding and how these were correlated with campaign success. This study uses a mixed-methods data analysis of a randomised cluster sample of 919 US GoFundMe campaigns during the first 7 months of the pandemic. Overall, most campaigns performed poorly, and 38% got no donations at all. The largest proportion of campaigns aimed to address individual, acute financial struggles, often arising from considerable challenges accessing or qualifying for government assistance. These campaigns, as well as those involving campaigners and beneficiaries of colour, tended to be least successful. Qualitative thematic analysis revealed three key crowdfunding motivations that reflect individualistic, agentive responses to the pandemic: struggling, helping and adapting. These motivations reveal a shift away from social suffering and collective mobilisation and towards largely individualised efforts of survival as digital crowdfunding becomes a key domain of crisis response. Crowdfunding platforms are playing an increasingly important role in mediating and influencing individual and collective responses to crisis, which has important political ramifications for how societies perceive and address health emergencies.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, communities across the world turned to donation-based crowdfunding platforms to solicit help with medical care and basic needs and mobilise aid. In low-and middle-income countries, crowdfunders sought to secure access to scarce health resources during epidemic surges (Ebel, 2021; Espinoza, 2021). In more well-resourced countries with fewer cases like New Zealand, crowdfunding helped navigate disruptions to other kinds of health and social supports during lockdowns (Wardell, 2021). In the US, a surge in COVID-19 crowdfunding campaigns followed the identification of community spread in Spring 2020 (Cadogan, 2021; Igra et al., 2021; Saleh et al., 2021). During the early pandemic phase, mitigation measures like business closures and stay-at-home orders caused significant social and economic disruptions, particularly as government relief programmes to address needs were delayed, hard to access and inequitably disbursed. Accessing personal protective equipment (PPE), testing, ventilators and even basic goods proved difficult. Amid chaotic, uneven and fractured pandemic response efforts, many Americans turned to alternative forms of organising and support—such as mutual aid efforts and crowdfunding (Kenworthy, 2020; Kneese, 2020; Rajwa et al., 2020).

Donation-based crowdfunding involves online fundraising appeals distributed to social networks via online and traditional media platforms (Belleflamme et al., 2015). While collective fundraising is hardly new, crowdfunding via online platforms is rapidly overtaking more traditional fundraising models (Bassani et al., 2019). GoFundMe dominates the US crowdfunding market, and the largest portion of GoFundMe campaigns are for medical and health needs (Harris, 2018). As COVID-19 emerged, GoFundMe campaigns for pandemic-related needs proliferated: CEO Tim Cadogan described ‘unprecedented use’ for basic needs (Marketplace, 2020) that ‘persisted at an alarming rate’ even as government support programmes expanded (Cadogan, 2021).

Nascent research on COVID-19-related crowdfunding has tracked its scale, geosocial patterns of use, outcomes, and to a limited extent, intended purposes (Bian et al., 2020; Igra et al., 2021; McKitrick et al., 2021; Rajwa et al., 2020; Saleh et al., 2021; Wardell, 2021). Early in the pandemic, Rajwa et al. (2020) observed that US campaigns focussed on basic needs like food, rent and lost wages, whereas European campaigns supported health-care workers and facilities. In a Canadian study, donations went largely to charities and PPE (McKitrick et al., 2021). In a large study of US COVID-19-related campaigns, Igra et al. (2021) showed that areas with higher levels of income and education were better able to initiate campaigns in response to rising cases and economic impacts and that campaigns in those places did substantially better. However, for typical campaigners, crowdfunding provided little, if any, relief. Echoing other research on inequities in crowdfunding more broadly, Igra et al.’s (2021) research shows that crowdfunding during crisis generally provides more help to better-resourced communities.

While the popularity of crowdfunding as a response to the acute exigencies of the US COVID-19 crisis is well-documented, little is known about what motivated people to turn to crowdfunding in such large numbers nor how crowdfunders narrated and explained their appeals for donations during this acute period of pandemic crisis. A notable exception is Wardell’s (2021, p. 3) exploration of COVID-19 crowdfunding narratives in New Zealand, which she argues reveal the emergence of ‘new forms of biopolitical subjectivity’ focussed on ‘discourses of responsibility, vulnerability and sacrifice’. Crowdfunders in the US faced markedly different epidemiologic, political and social support circumstances during the pandemic, and we hypothesise that these conditions fostered different uses, motivations and discourses of crowdfunding during this time.

This article explores the motivations and outcomes of US COVID-19 campaigns started during the first seven months of the COVID-19 pandemic, to better understand how and why Americans were turning to crowdfunding and what they found when they did. Using a paired qualitative–quantitative analysis of 919 GoFundMe campaigns responding to COVID-19, we found that nearly all campaigns were motivated by personal struggles, a desire to help others, or efforts to adapt to pandemic circumstances. Taking up these motivational frames of struggling, helping and adapting, we argue that crowdfunding during the pandemic has reflected agentive, but individualised, attempts to respond to social crisis. Most campaigns sought help addressing individual needs arising from social and economic precarity, and we observe that structural inequities shape and limit the narrative possibilities for more marginalised crowdfunders, constraining the extent to which their campaigns can succeed or attract public recognition. Pandemic crowdfunding thus presents an inherent tension between the agentive narratives that platforms foster and the experiences of social suffering that both motivate and impact crowdfunding campaigns. In what follows, we show how crowdfunding platforms—as sites where the myriad impacts of the pandemic gain visibility, narration and scrutiny—powerfully mediate social responses to COVID-19. We end by suggesting that crowdfunding encourages a shift in public attention away from social suffering and towards individual struggling in response to health crises. This has important political ramifications for how societies perceive and respond to crisis.

BEYOND THE SUFFERING DIGITAL SUBJECT

Online spaces are an increasingly important place for people to create meaning from, and make sense of, suffering, through shared experiences and the broadcasting of narratives to both familiar and anonymous audiences (Rajabi, 2021, p. 4). Indeed, scholarship has long documented how people experiencing illness turn to online spaces and platforms with complex needs and desires, and use them to create sociality, express and validate illness experiences, shape identities and make meaning out of hardship (Gonzales et al., 2018; Hacking, 2006; Kneese & Merid, 2018; Rabinow, 1996). These spaces can offer opportunities for transformative collective action, but they can also powerfully constrain narratives and subject users to harm, isolation and exploitation (Ghazal et al., 2022). As Rajabi (2021, p. 6) notes, digital media ‘is a bastion for resistive discourse while still being a massive, ideologically inflected marketing machine intent on reinforcing the most oppressive expressions of society’. As a social media platform and a site of appeals for material support, GoFundMe reflects these tensions and also challenges the ways we understand meaning-making and the narration of suffering in the context of crisis.

In enabling user narratives that contest, resist or negotiate with the conditions of their suffering, digital media poses challenges to the figure of the ‘suffering subject’ that is a preoccupation of much medical anthropology. As Robbins (2013) proposes, studies that do not adequately attend to complex realities of care-giving, resistance, life-making and other themes may unintentionally trap the people they study in a conceptual ‘suffering slot’. Holmes (2016, p. e255) argues that the point is not to disregard social suffering but to recognise that ‘life in many parts of the globe includes suffering, violence, resistance, hope and care, often difficult to avoid as well as often intermingled and difficult to separate’. Crowdfunding research has to date been of two mostly separate minds on this topic. On the one hand, studies by researchers concerned with health equity and ethics have focussed on the ways crowdfunding is fuelled by, and fuels, structural inequities, documenting the many unmet material needs people bring to these platforms as well as the ways such platforms extend and deepen suffering by limiting access to resources and care (Igra et al., 2021; Kenworthy et al., 2020; Kenworthy & Igra, 2022; Snyder et al., 2020; van Duynhoven et al., 2019). On the other hand, researchers concerned with identity, media usage and illness experience have shown how crowdfunding offers valuable social support and opportunities to reinforce identities despite privacy risks (Gonzales et al., 2018) or how people with specific diseases are using crowdfunding campaigns to articulate illness struggles, raise awareness and claim legitimacy and recognition (Ghazal et al., 2022; Vassell et al., 2020).

In what follows, we attempt to bring these two perspectives together, analysing how structural inequities and suffering coexist alongside individualised efforts to survive, help and adapt in online crowdfunding projects. Crowdfunding projects are shaped by social suffering while also struggling to narrate the causes of this suffering and to find ways of making a life in the context of pandemic precarity. Motivations and desires intersect with structural inequities, to shape crowdfunding use and narration amid severe pandemic-related precarities. Crowdfunders, as neither solely suffering subjects nor digitally empowered citizens, are engaged in complex, strategic projects of struggling, helping and adapting during COVID-19. However, we posit that appeals, motivations and success may be far more constrained for crowdfunders who are socially, economically and/or racially marginalised. We also attend to the ways that these projects are shaped and constrained by the dynamics of crowdfunding platforms and their audiences. Such affordances influence not only the kinds of actions and narratives that are rewarded on platforms but also impact broader social ideas of what support is possible, probable and desirable in a time of upheaval and crisis.

METHODS

Data for this project draws from a comprehensive collection of 176,561 COVID-19-related GoFundMe campaigns started between January 1st and 31 July 2020, and described in further detail by Igra et al. (2021). We drew a randomised sample of 937 campaigns from 9 metropolitan US clusters where both COVID-19 cases and crowdfunding activity had been particularly dense during the period of data collection. Sampling from geographic clusters allowed for attention to local policy environments affecting access to pandemic support and comparison of campaigns within geographic areas. This sampling process is described in Supplemental File A, and the geographic areas and number of campaigns from each cluster area are reported in Table 1 below. The sample includes metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) from both the East and West coasts, as well as the Midwest, and with varying racial, ethnic and economic profiles. This process yielded 937 campaigns or about 2.5% of total crowdfunding campaigns from those 9 MSAs. We removed 18 campaigns that did not meet the inclusion criteria: 4 lacked sufficient data, 3 were joke campaigns and 11 were unclaimed business campaigns started by GoFundMe (Bursztynsky, 2020). This left 919 campaigns for further analysis.

TABLE 1.

Geospatial clusters and corresponding metropolitan statistical areas used in the study sample

Cluster Name	Metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs)	Number of cases (%)
CA1	San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA	128
CA2	Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA	185
FL	Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, FL	58
GA	Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Alpharetta, GA	58
IL	Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN-WI	79
MI	Detroit-Warren-Dearborn, MI	38
NY	New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA	298
TX	Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX	49
WA	Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA	44
Total = 9 clusters		937

We scraped and catalogued basic campaign data on outcomes (money raised, percent of goal met, number of donations, average donation size, shares and likes) and characteristics (location, date initiated and category of need). Team members then divided up and reviewed cases to generate categories for further coding based on an inductive process also informed by prior research. We developed codes for campaign purpose and objectives, intended beneficiaries, how much the campaign was motivated by COVID-19 needs and whether the campaign involved a death from COVID-19. Given previous research indicating structural and interpersonal racism impacts campaign success (Igra, 2021; Kenworthy et al., 2020), we assessed the race of both organisers and beneficiaries whenever there was enough information provided to do so. Three team members coded the same 50 campaigns and then reviewed errors and discrepancies. Inter-rater agreement was high; where reliability was less strong, codes were clarified and revised. After completing coding, the first author reviewed 10% of all cases to check for accuracy. A second stage of coding used an inductive process to distill 3 thematic categories for primary motivations behind campaigns in the sample: struggling, helping and adapting. Campaigns were coded for these motivations, and in cases where more than one motivation applied, multiple codes were used. In only 4 cases did none of the categories apply.

This study relies on publicly available data collected from the Internet, and the University of Washington Human Subjects Division determined that IRB approval was not required. However, additional precautions to protect data and anonymity were taken. All team members completed research ethics training, and data were stored on secure drives. Below, we paraphrase or slightly change individual campaign details (such as exact amounts of money raised) that could be used to identify original campaign pages. Particularly popular or successful campaigns are difficult to anonymise entirely due to media coverage and spread; in these cases, we only share details pertinent to the research. Previous research has found that campaigns with stronger writing and fewer grammatical errors receive more donations (Sulaeman & Lin, 2018). Consequently, in reporting direct quotes from campaign pages, we have retained, as much as possible, the syntax, punctuation and even grammatical and spelling errors of the original text. Our objective is to accurately portray narratives, including how campaigners struggle at times to articulate their situations, but this is not intended to portray narrators as less deserving or accurate.

Our mixed-methods approach leverages both quantitative and qualitative data and analyses, using these different methods not just to cross-check one another but to improve and build upon insights into motivations for, and experiences of, COVID-19 crowdfunding. We used these approaches to answer two primary research questions. First, how were people in the US using crowdfunding to address various COVID-19-related needs in the early months of the crisis and with what success? Second, what do campaign motivations tell us about the kinds of narratives and responses to crisis that crowdfunding incentivises and rewards, particularly in the context of structural inequities and limited government support?

RESULTS

Of 919 campaigns that mentioned ‘COVID’ or ‘coronavirus’ in our sample, two thirds (n = 612) were directly related to COVID-19. These campaigns encapsulated medical, financial or social needs arising directly from the pandemic and public health measures to address it, like business closures. 22.7% (n = 209) of campaigns were for needs that arose indirectly from COVID-19, or were exacerbated by it, including medical conditions which became more difficult to treat or needs arising from supply shortages. Just over 10% (n = 98) of campaigns mentioned COVID but addressed needs unrelated to the pandemic. Except where noted, we eliminate unrelated campaigns from our analysis below.

Campaign purposes and user characteristics

As shown in Table 2, the largest proportion of campaigns (32.2%, n = 264) sought help paying rent, supplementing lost wages or meeting other urgent cash needs. About 10% (n = 86) of campaigns supported businesses or industries. Though health and medical campaigns typically make-up about one-third of overall GoFundMe campaigns (Zdechlik, 2018), only 8.5% (n = 70) in this sample were for individual health and medical expenses. Funeral assistance comprised 6.8% (n = 56) of campaigns, and most of these (6%, n = 49) were for people who had died of COVID. Community organisations and international aid initiatives both accounted for just over 6% of campaigns. Despite public attention to the need for PPE and nutrition assistance in the early months of the pandemic, these were less common campaign purposes (5.2%, n = 43 and 5%, n = 41, respectively). And despite ample symbolic and material support for health-care workers expressed online and through in-person gestures like nightly cheering, only a small proportion of campaigns supported health workers (5%, n = 41).

TABLE 2.

Characteristics and outcomes (amounts raised) of campaigns, by key variables

		Amount raised
Campaign characteristics	Campaigns n (%)	Median	Mean (sd)	Range	% raised $0
Relation to COVID	919
Directly related	612 (66.6%)	200	3361 (10,200)	111,497	39.5%
Indirectly related	209 (22.7%)	325	2671 (8936)	87,486	33.5%
Only mentioned	98 (10.7%)	450	3341 (10,298)	94,150	32.7%
Campaign motivation	821
Struggling	475 (57.9%)	210	3015 (8750)	105,280	40.2%
Helping	294 (35.8%)	350	3923 (12,245)	111,497	33.3%
Adapting	50 (6.1%)	168	1724 (5263)	32,113	38.0%
Campaign purpose	821
Rent/lost wages/urgent cash needs	264 (32.2%)	20	1894 (5640)	44,603	46.6%
Industry/business support	86 (10.5%)	805	4741 (11,186)	76,100	24.4%
Health/medical expenses	70 (8.5%)	745	4205 (11,643)	87,486	34.3%
Funeral assistance/death	56 (6.8%)	3426	5610 (7741)	38,251	10.7%
Community organization support	52 (6.3%)	460	2674 (6986)	45,325	30.8%
International aid	51 (6.2%)	600	2183 (7741)	28,590	27.5%
PPE/masks	43 (5.2%)	350	3730 (7960)	35,850	39.5%
Food/nutrition	41 (5.0%)	545	4375 (17,119)	108,950	36.6%
Health worker support	41 (5.0%)	1108	8716 (23,974)	111,497	24.4%
Other	100 (12.2%)	3	1512 (6977)	5	50.0%
Not enough information	17 (2.1%)	0	0 (1)	63,098	91.4%
Intended beneficiary type	821
Individual	390 (35.4%)	5	1790 (6485)	87,486	49.7%
Family or small group of friends	103 (12.6%)	540	3942 (9344)	63,098	35.9%
Community	235 (28.7%)	425	4197 (13,406)	111,497	30.6%
Business or industry	91 (11.1%)	760	5032 (11,685)	76,100	29.7%
Community non-profit	59 (7.2%)	575	2606 (6529)	45,325	20.3%
Larger non-profit	27 (3.3%)	55	1756 (4161)	18,051	48.1%
Hospital or medical institution	14 (1.7%)	250	3187 (7120)	26,888	35.7%
Beneficiary race (When individual and known)	346
White	93	210	2598 (5962)	29,230	37.6%
Black	90	103	1770 (3820)	20,615	44.4%
Asian	42	98	1506 (2519)	10,372	33.3%
Other POC	121	850	4840 (13,642)	105,280	32.2%
Organiser race (when individual and known)	322
White	97	350	2111 (4868)	28,696	38.1%
Black	73	0	1779 (3680)	20,615	50.7%
Asian	50	542	1666 (2484)	10,372	32.0%
Other POC	102	798	4299 (12,202)	105,280	37.3%
Total	821 (100%)	260	3185 (9893)	111,497

Note: Except for ‘relation to COVID-19’ variable, results exclude campaigns that only mentioned, but were not directly or indirectly related to, COVID-19. Results for beneficiary and organiser race only include cases where data were sufficient to assess race. Coding strategy allowed for multiple campaign motivations to be applied to a single campaign. Due to wide inequalities in campaign outcomes, both mean and median scores are presented.

We assessed several variables to better understand who was involved in crowdfunding (Table 2). Like the large proportion of campaigns for urgent needs, the majority of beneficiaries were individuals (35.4%, n = 390), followed by community groups (28.7%, 235), family or friends (12.6%, n = 103), businesses (11.1%, n = 91), non-profits (10.5%, n = 86) and hospital or medical institutions (1.7%, n = 14). Similarly, in assessing the relationships between campaign organisers and beneficiaries, more than a third were fundraising for themselves (36.2%, n = 297), their own local community or group (27.5%, n = 226) or for family or friends (17.2%, n = 141). Fewer were fundraising for communities outside their own (6.3%, n = 52). Among individual organisers where race could be assessed (n = 322), 30.1% (n = 97) were White, 22.7% (n = 73) were Black, 15.5% (n = 50) were Asian and 31.7% (n = 103) were other persons of colour. Among beneficiaries (n = 346), proportions were similar, though with fewer White people (26.9%, n = 93), slightly more Black people (26%, n = 90), fewer Asian people (5.1%, n = 42), and a slightly larger proportion of other people of colour (35%, n = 121). Compared with previous research, this indicates a much more sizeable presence of Black, Asian and other organisers and beneficiaries of colour (Kenworthy et al., 2020).

Inductive coding elicited three major categories of motivations for crowdfunding during COVID-19: struggling, helping and adapting (see Table 2). ‘Struggling’, which comprised more than half of campaigns (n = 475, 57.9%), involved largely individual or familial struggles as central motivating factors. ‘Helping’, which made up more than a third of campaigns (n = 294, 35.8%), involved a primary purpose of providing help to others, often to communities or institutions. A key distinction between struggling and helping campaigns is relational proximity: in cases where struggling campaigns were not started by the individual seeking help, they were often started by an immediate family member or friend. In helping campaigns, the relationship was more distant, driven by a desire to help others but not an immediate relationship to the struggling person(s). Finally, a smaller but notable group of adapting campaigns (n = 50, 6.1%) were motivated by a desire for transformative change, often brought about by hardships or changing circumstances due to the pandemic. After reviewing quantitative data on campaign outcomes across these categories, we elaborate on these motivations using qualitative data below.

Campaign outcomes

Despite crowdfunding’s popularity during COVID-19, and the acute needs of many campaigners, outcomes were generally poor. In this section, we provide a brief overview of how campaigns performed and how outcomes varied across different campaign motivations and characteristics; readers interested in more in-depth data are referred to Supplemental file B. In total, just over 10% (n = 85, 10.4%) of campaigns met their financial goals and 38% (n = 509) raised no money at all. Most campaigns saw very modest returns: the median campaign raised $260 from 5 donations averaging $34 each towards a goal of $5000 and had 0 shares and 5 likes. Wide disparities persisted between successful and unsuccessful campaigns. As shown in Table 3, the top campaign raised over $100,000; the largest number of donations to a single campaign neared 4000. In our analysis below, the mean amounts raised differ substantially from median amounts because a large portion of campaigns raised $0 and there were extreme inequalities in earnings between campaigns.

TABLE 3.

Campaign outcomes: Campaign outcomes for campaigns directly or indirectly related to COVID-19. Twenty-five campaigns had missing data on shares and favourites

Campaign outcomes	n	Median	Q1, Q3	Mean (sd)	Range
Amount raised	821	260	0, 2140	3185 (9893)	0–111,497
Goal	821	5000	2000, 15,000	45,566 (330,384)	0–8,600,000
Donations	821	5	0, 30	41	0–3987
Average donation size	821	34	0, 70	47	0–650
Shares	796	0	0, 73	138 (555)	0–8372
Favourites	796	5	0, 29	39 (167)	0–4054

Table 2 shows campaign outcomes (measured by the amount raised) for different campaign characteristics (in relation to COVID-19, motivation, purpose, beneficiary type and organiser/beneficiary race). Regardless of campaigns’ relatedness to COVID-19, outcomes were modest; however, campaigns where COVID-19 was only mentioned had more than twice the median amount raised ($450) as campaigns that were directly related to COVID-19 ($200). Directly related campaigns also had the highest proportion raising no money at all (39.5%). Wide differences in outcomes were observed among campaign motivations: helping campaigns performed best across all measures, while adapting campaigns had the lowest mean and median amounts raised and struggling campaigns had the highest proportion with no donations (40.2%). These outcomes suggest that campaigners faced difficulties mobilising support for adaptations and struggles in the contexts of crisis and precarity. Campaigns to support health workers ($1108 median), industries/businesses ($805 median) and health and medical expenses ($745 median) seemed to perform better than others. Funeral campaigns had the highest median amount raised ($3426) by several orders of magnitude and lowest proportion of campaigns with no donations (10.7%). Though campaigns for health workers had the highest mean earnings ($8716), campaigns for PPE did more poorly, even though they were often trying to direct PPE to health-care workers. Notably, though campaigns for rent/lost wages/urgent cash needs were the most common, this group had the poorest outcomes: 46.6% had no donations, the median amount raised ($20) was nearly 20 times less than the next lowest earning category (PPE/masks, $350), and more than 170 times less than the top earning category (funeral expenses, $3426).

Similarly, among beneficiaries, campaigns for individuals showed very low median returns ($5) and almost 50% of these campaigns had no donations at all. Nearly all other categories had much higher mean and median returns; the median amount raised for business and industry campaigns, for example, was more than 150 times higher. Campaigns for larger and community non-profits had similar mean, but far higher median, earnings as those for individuals. Businesses and industry campaigns raised the most ($760 median), while campaigns for community non-profits had the lowest proportion raising $0.

In terms of race, Black and Asian beneficiaries had the lowest median and mean amounts raised, and these groups earned about half of the mean amount raised in the sample overall. Black beneficiaries and organisers had the highest percentages of campaigns raising $0 (50.7% and 44.4%, respectively). Black organisers had a particularly difficult time, raising a median of $0, with more than half of campaigns receiving no donations. Notably, campaigns by other people of colour had the best outcomes on most measures, a finding that has not been reflected in other research and merits more exploration.

Struggling

Financial, medical or social struggles arising from the pandemic directly motivated the majority of campaigns. Many struggles were financial, involving immediate needs for cash, rental assistance, food or other bills. While reasons for financial distress were numerous, campaigners frequently cited losing jobs, struggling to keep independent businesses and contract work afloat, taking unpaid leave due to illness or being in a high-risk population for COVID-19. Dozens of campaigns explicitly used the term ‘struggling’:

• ‘Covid-19 has really been hard on me and I am struggling bad’ (0177, White campaigner, CA2, raised $0).

• ‘Due to COVID-19 I have lost my job. I am struggling to pay rent and buy groceries for my children. My wife has just passed away so it is an especially difficult time’ (0399, campaigner of unknown race, NY, raised $0).

• ‘I’ve come to the last resort … which is created a go fund me. My family and I have been struggling to put food of on the table and pay bills due to COVID-19 we also don’t qualify for the stimulus check’ (1297, Black campaigner, NY, raised $0).

For these and other campaigns, the ‘struggle’ and the needs it surfaced often far outpaced the funds they were seeking. While campaigns often set low goals for their needs, they mentioned much larger sources of financial vulnerability, such as lost jobs, months of unpaid rent, key wage earners who had died or were too sick to return to work, and large hospital bills.

Campaigners frequently discussed inadequate access to safety net benefits like unemployment, rental assistance and business loans, and they often described maddening pandemic support bureaucracies and gaping safety net holes. A self-described widow wrote, ‘Unemployed. 4 weeks no unemployment … got denied unemployment in New Jersey. My regular job … is suspended … no recourse. Have 2 kids 2 elderly parents. I will not survive if they don’t fix unemployment. I been paying 40 years into it. Never used it. I don’t even know what to ask. I don’t even want to ask for anything’ (0337, White campaigner, NY, raised ~$100). A Latino veteran small business owner asked for $1 million to keep his business, heavily impacted by COVID-19, afloat. ‘I asked my employee for help to fill out the SBA Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) application because I tested positive for COVID-19, and at that time, I had severe symptoms’. He employed 20 people, most of them ‘single mothers’ and wanted to avoid laying them off. He explained: ‘Two other employees also tested positive for COVID-19, and One employee passed away. The EIDL application is still pending, and SBA hasn’t taken a decision yet’ (1411, NY, raised $0). While many campaigners waited for benefits to come through—a common experience during this early period of the pandemic—others described being unable to access them due to immigration status, being self-employed or other bureaucratic exclusions.

Disabled campaigners faced the dual challenges of finding government assistance and navigating medical precarities made worse by the pandemic. Facing complex crises, these organisers sometimes struggled to articulate concrete requests and the sort of single, solvable problems that the platform is designed to accommodate (Berliner & Kenworthy, 2017). A self-described ‘single mom who is disabled’ wrote: ‘[I] have a mom [with] stage 4 throat cancer due to covid its hard to get her to get test done not having a car makes it harder just trying to get help with something any type of car will do. If u can help with anything please i need to make appts for my daughter and myself and is just so hard as i cant walk far myself my daughter could but she isnt old enogh to drive’ (1857, White campaigner, MI, raised $0). Here, the proximate issue of needing a car was complicated by a disability, multiple care-giving responsibilities and a very sick family member—while navigating the (increased) risks of COVID-19. Accessibility issues and limited inclusive design on social media platforms, which limit their usability for populations with different disabilities, likely pose a further barrier to campaign creation, clear narration and success.

Many struggling campaigners discussed homelessness. Often this was expressed in conjunction with the loss of, or difficulties accessing, public benefits and services, and sometimes even alongside the death of family members. A campaigner in New York explained: ‘I’m homeless lost my job and it’s been very hard to make ends meet, I dont get public assistance and have no one I lose my only family I had left do to the coronavirus, I seek help from you guys, God bless thank u for u time and donations’ (0627, other POC campaigner, NY, raised $0). Campaigns spoke of the loss of housing and other basic needs in stark terms. A Black veteran asking for $30,000 wrote: ‘have had covid-19 for 4 months, lost job, lost car, lost home’ (1601, Black campaigner, NY, raised $0). Another elderly veteran wrote, ‘I am razing money to help feed my great grand son. do to the covid-19 situation. I have lost everything I have worked all these years. I have lost my home and car’ (0589, Black campaigner, NY, raised $0). Several spoke openly about the additional risk that homelessness posed during the pandemic, when short-term housing and congregate shelters were especially unsafe. One indebted campaigner wrote: ‘This would make me homeless. During a pandemic. That is a serious health risk I don’t want to die over a debt. All proceeds go to the cause of not being homeless’ (0781, White campaigner, IL, raised $0). In these descriptions, campaigners pointed to necropolitical conditions making healthy survival difficult, if not impossible, during COVID-19 (Sandset, 2021).

Shame at having to seek help on such a public forum was a prominent affect of struggling campaigns, and may have been further fuelled by minimal campaign success (Igra et al., 2021). Sentiments like ‘I never wanted to ask for help’ or ‘I hate doing this’ were common. Some used stock images, photos concealing their faces or other anonymous images to headline their campaign pages. Beneath an all-black image, one campaigner wrote, ‘I am hoping my story is enough for your help because i am to shamed to put a face with it. Due to covid I’ve been out of work making it hard to keep up with my bills. I have young kids so i am trying to reach out. I applied for unemployment and i am still pending as of today’. (1625, campaigner of unknown race, FL, raised $0).

Other struggles were explicitly focussed on medical issues and expenses. These included campaigns for those who contracted SARS-CoV-2 and were hospitalised as well as those like cancer patients whose health challenges were exacerbated by pandemic restrictions and threats to their immunocompromised health status. Large bills arising from COVID-19 hospitalisation motivated several dozen campaigns. For example, the family of an older man who worked as a respiratory therapist and ended up in the critical care unit after contracting COVID-19 started a campaign seeking $50,000 in assistance (1515, Black campaigner, NY, raised ~$4000). A number of campaigns, especially for those who had died of COVID-19, married financial appeals with online memorialisation and collective mourning—a practice that predates the pandemic but may have been exacerbated by the limitations placed on in-person funerals during the pandemic (Kneese, 2018).

While most campaign struggles were dire, some seemed less so. For example, people started campaigns for smaller items they could not afford but needed, like laptops for remote schooling. Several campaigns that seemed far less urgent than others on the site nevertheless raised very large amounts of funding, likely because of connections to wealth or privilege (Igra et al., 2021). A campaign for a farm that rehabilitates and trains animals for acting roles raised more than $60,000 to help cover lost wages and pay for animal care and feeding (0447, campaigner of unknown race, NY, raised ~$60,000). While it is difficult (for either researchers or potential donors) to assess the specific merits or needs of any single campaign, the vast differences in outcomes between campaigns indicate not only an unequal distribution of resources but an unequal terrain of both motivating struggles and donor attention during a time of acute crisis.

Helping

More than a third of campaigns (n = 294, 35.8%) aimed to provide help, often to broader communities or institutions beyond the campaigner’s immediate circle. Most campaigns sought donations for non-profits, such as those supporting frontline and essential workers or helping vulnerable populations at home or abroad. There were wide variations in campaign goals and outcomes. For example, the highly successful campaign ‘Meals for Frontline Workers’ raised more than $40,000 for meals to be donated to health care and emergency personnel in California (0237, campaigner of unknown race, CA2, raised ~$40,000), one of many successful campaigns for similar purposes across the country. However, a similar campaign in the same area fundraising for meals for homeless people saw no success whatsoever (0237, campaigner of unknown race, CA2, raised $0).

In the absence of coordinated government response, many helping campaigns aimed to fill in for complex systems for providing assistance, sourcing and distributing goods and ensuring worker safety. A man whose family developed COVID-19 and whose wife worked in a hospital sought $250,000 to buy a mask production machine to make masks for hospital workers at a time when they were especially scarce. His page detailed major struggles in finding and acquiring such a machine, revealing the disorganisation and inefficiencies which arose as people tried to protect themselves in the absence of more systematic support (0629, Asian campaigner, NY, raised $0). Dozens of other campaigns employed strategies for sourcing PPE for hospitals and frontline workers. A campaign in Chicago raised more than $2000 to purchase PPE for health-care workers at nearby hospitals, but then had tremendous difficulties finding a supplier. Two months some N-95 after a few months delay’ (1739, campaigner of unknown race, IL, raised ~$2000). after the campaign started, an update was posted with a photo of three N95 masks: ‘Finally! Got While campaigns struggled with limited know-how or access to systems for mass distribution, they often expressed feelings of desperation—not knowing what else to do but feeling that something must be done to help. Other campaigns struggled to meet the scale of need they faced: a campaign started collaboratively by 9 bars and restaurants in New York City to compensate (0517, campaigner of unknown race, NY, raised ~$300). employees for lost wages raised less than $300, hardly enough to support their many workers

Campaigners facing insufficient government and institutional support expressed fear and frustration. ‘I’m scared for my life right now’, one campaigner wrote, ‘with all this covid-19 going on it’s scary but their are people out their risking their lives to help everyone through this and help save people so I wanna donate to as many hospitals as I can’. (1397, campaigner of unknown race, NY, raised $0). Some helping campaigns grew out of community networks, institutions or efforts that predated the pandemic and used these structures to adapt to the challenges presented by COVID-19. Others, however, were motivated by struggles, especially direct experiences with SARS-CoV-2 infection, as with the man whose efforts to purchase a mask machine arose after his own family got COVID-19. Several campaigners started appeals after losing a family member to COVID-19. ‘My parents … are victims of COVID’, one campaigner wrote, ‘The enormous pain of loosing them both weeks apart has given rise to a positive plan. I want to give back to my community … and help feed those families affected by this horrific pandemic’ (1483, other POC campaigner, NY, raised ~$1500). For these crowdfunders, the boundaries between struggling and helping were highly permeable

Adapting

A smaller, but notable, group of campaigns (n = 50, 6.1%) were motivated by the desire to adapt to constraints or opportunities created by the pandemic. Schools and businesses sought funding to help shift their work or materials online and manufacturing companies looked to use their expertise and equipment to produce PPE, including masks and face shields. Restaurants pivoted to providing meals to local hospitals and frontline workers. Some people who were laid off or lost work due to the pandemic saw an opportunity to switch careers or start new businesses. Many campaigns used the language of ‘pivoting’, ‘shifting gears’ and ‘adapting’. Campaigns were not just motivated by self-improvement, but by the urgency of the crisis. A hospital gown company that sought to adapt its machinery to make masks explained, ‘This is a way for us to do our part and help provide staff on the front-line with the protection they need … While we are safe at ~ home, this is a way for us to do our part to help’ (0253, White campaigner, CA2, raised $400).

For many campaigns, struggles and opportunities, precarity and adaptation, were intertwined. A single father from California decided to sell his possessions and sail around the world with his children, but also admitted the campaign was motivated by a sense of economic precarity: ‘the Covid-19 pandemic has showed us just what life is like when you have limited means, and that’s a scary existence … when you have young ones to provide for’ (0277, White campaigner, CA2, raised $0). An undocumented young mother eligible for DACA status sought help with financing her application after facing pandemic-related financial hardships. But she narrated her campaign as an opportunity for a ‘brighter future’ (1021, other POC campaigner, CA1, raised $745). For some, the pandemic was an opportunity, but for many it forced adaptations as necessary responses to threats to survival. The much smaller proportion of adaptation campaigns in comparison to struggling ones also points to the difficulties many campaigners faced in framing their struggles as opportunities for adaptation.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS

This study demonstrates that the use of a digital crowdfunding platform to respond to COVID-19 in the early months of the pandemic failed to meet the needs of the most vulnerable, needy users. Despite crowdfunding’s popularity, these data reveal its complex shortcomings as a response to crisis. First, it was most frequently being used for individual, urgent needs for financial assistance, especially where safety net systems were inaccessible or inadequate. Unfortunately, these were the cases in which crowdfunding provided the least support. Second, crowdfunding-based projects, rooted in motivations of struggling, helping and adapting, fall far short of narrating or addressing systemic challenges caused by the pandemic and inadequate government responses to it. Finally, crowdfunding amplifies inequities of race, class, political status and disability that were also profoundly exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. These findings raise questions about the role that crowdfunding plays during complex crises, as well as in social awareness and organising in response to such crises.

We argue that crowdfunding during COVID-19 occupied a complex space between agentic, individualised campaign efforts and broader inequities and social suffering that fuelled the demand for crowdfunding and also limited crowdfunders’ success. Motives expressed through the themes of struggling, helping and adapting reflect this tension as crowdfunders worked to leverage a digital platform whose moral economy is geared towards individualistic projects and solvable problems (Berliner & Kenworthy, 2017) to address a profound, long-lasting and highly inequitable crisis in their lives. While narratives gave voice to the fears, distress and struggles of the early pandemic period, particularly as government support was not forthcoming, they also attempted to express these concerns in agentic, positive ways to appeal to donors. We hope further research will continue attending to the ways that structural inequities intersect with user goals and motivations in campaign narratives and encourage other researchers, particularly those in health research, to study these narratives as intentional texts constructed for specific audiences, arising from distinct moral economies.

A striking result in this research is that individual crowdfunding appeals motivated by acute needs directly related to COVID-19—such as for rent and lost wages—struggled most to succeed, and generally received very limited, if any, support. This contributes to the exacerbation of inequities during the pandemic and reveals further limitations in relying on crowdfunding as a safety net (Kenworthy & Igra, 2022). Despite public support for causes such as hospital and health worker aid, nutrition and PPE, campaigns for individuals and basic needs far outnumbered other purposes. These outcomes lend further credence to observations that crowdfunding is most successful and visible among higher income, better educated and more resourced populations, and less successful among those who need it most (Igra, 2021; Igra et al., 2021; Kenworthy & Igra, 2022; Lukk et al., 2018; van Duynhoven et al., 2019).

The scope of need in both struggling and helping campaigns far outpaced the types of support that campaigners could mobilise online and demonstrated the limitations of crowdfunding as a tool for responding to complex crisis. For example, efforts to supply PPE or help disabled workers failed to adequately address or compensate for system failures in sourcing and distributing essential goods or providing adequate worker relief and compensation. Difficulties accessing key government assistance programmes such as unemployment insurance and the Paycheck Protection Plan (PPP) fell hardest on marginalised and minoritised populations, and these challenges were frequently brought up by campaigners (Howell et al., 2021; Moffitt & Ziliak, 2020; Ravenelle et al., 2021). While research outside the US suggests that people use crowdfunding for needs that fall beyond those formally addressed by government programmes, these data show people in the US are using crowdfunding —with limited success—to address more profound government abandonment and failure of the social contract (Coutrot et al., 2020; McKitrick et al., 2021).

Intersecting inequities of race, gender, class, migration status and disability shape COVID-19 campaign outcomes, as they do the broader impacts of the pandemic. Strikingly, while other studies using similar race coding techniques have found Black users to be underrepresented in medical crowdfunding (Kenworthy et al., 2020), these data show much higher proportions of campaigns for organisers and beneficiaries of colour. This likely reflects the especially heavy impacts of the pandemic in minoritised populations; however, our cluster sampling strategy may also over-sample for metropolitan areas with more racial diversity. While crowdfunding campaigns and popular discourses praised groups such as ‘essential workers’ and elevated their visibility, they were also the most underpaid, undervalued and heavily impacted groups during COVID-19 (Kagan, 2020; Ravenelle et al., 2021). While crowdfunding campaigns may articulate the plight of such marginalised groups, these campaigns were generally least likely to do well and fell far short of addressing the conditions of racial capitalism that cause users’ financial and health precarity. Campaigns started by Black organisers had particularly poor outcomes, compounding the inequities this group faced due to the pandemic. Poor outcomes among Asian beneficiaries may reflect particularly egregious and growing discrimination against Asian-Americans due to political rhetoric related to COVID-19 during the time of the research. Better campaign outcomes among other people of colour in the sample are difficult to explain and may reflect imprecise racial coding categories as well as several highly successful campaigns within that category. Given a relatively small sample size and lack of significance testing for differences between racial groups, we caution against drawing overly strong conclusions about these results. However, these findings do generally align with other research which documents substantial racial disparities in crowdfunding outcomes (Igra, 2021; Kenworthy et al., 2020).

In general, the motivations of COVID-19 crowdfunders reflect agentive but highly individualised responses to crisis that are constrained by dense structural inequities. While crowdfunding platforms tend to favour larger-scale collective projects—and indeed, those projects tended to do better in this sample—the largest group of campaigns were for individualised, basic needs. Though campaigners openly narrated struggles, individualised online appeals made it difficult to articulate the broader political conditions that created such struggles and limited users’ ability to build effective solidarities or collective mobilisations. Broad social crises become individual challenges that require agentive solutions, resulting in users framing their appeals through the motivations of struggling, helping and adapting. Campaign motivations cannot address broader structural inequities, though they give public audiences the false impression that individual resilience and voluntary charity can address enormous systemic challenges. Among marginalised, struggling campaigners, we saw expressions of shame for needing assistance, difficulties narrating complex crises, and much poorer outcomes; race, class and disability shape the affective appeals of campaigns and for whom the privilege of engaging in helping or adapting is more accessible. Campaigns that most clearly point to structural inequities and social suffering perform most poorly in our sample. Troublingly, recent research has found that unsuccessful campaigns like these are also most likely to be invisible to the public, due to platform choices about how these campaigns are indexed, returned in search results and ultimately removed from platforms (Kenworthy & Igra, 2022). Thus, campaigns that speak to individual struggles in the context of structural inequities are least likely to succeed and to reach public audiences.

These observations raise questions about how digital platforms are altering public perceptions of crisis and its responses. As previous research has noted, platforms are built for urgent, solvable problems of relatively limited scope and reward those who create heroic, agentive narratives (Berliner & Kenworthy, 2017; Paulus & Roberts, 2018). During crisis, this limits the ability of campaigners to narrate social suffering and structural violence. Struggling, helping and adapting are strategic campaign motivations that straddle the gap between real world suffering and the kinds of narratives crowdfunding rewards. Ample ethnographic research has shown that prolonged struggles in the context of limited institutional support do not preclude extensive efforts to ‘improvise’ methods of survival (Livingston, 2012) and can serve as crucial sites for moral imagining and experimentation with meaning, identity and purpose (Livingston, 2005; Mattingly, 2014). However, platform affordances limit what can be improvised, the kinds of moral imagining, particularly collective imagining, that can be undertaken to respond to crisis, and the visibility of campaigns trying to articulate and address structural violence. Adapting from Robbins (2013), we posit that crowdfunding traps users in a struggling slot where the are incentivised to re-articulate structural violence as agentive efforts of struggle. This reflects the broader mores of gig and hustle economies that contribute to worker precarity, and Duffield’s (2016, p. 154) prescient claim that technology can become a handmaiden to the ‘enforced resilience of abandonment’, particularly during humanitarian crises.

This study has temporal and spatial limitations and does not capture later phases or all geographic areas of the US pandemic. Specifically, our study captures a period when government programmes to address the pandemic and its effects were just beginning; crowdfunding activity at other stages in the pandemic may have been oriented towards different concerns or motivations. Previous research has shown that fewer campaigns are started in lower-income and less-educated communities; our sampling strategy may actually underrepresent the needs and struggles of these communities where crowdfunding campaigns are less common (Igra et al., 2021; van Duynhoven et al., 2019). Like all studies that rely on data from crowdfunding campaigns, we cannot verify the validity or truth of the narratives reported here; however, we assess them with the same rigour and ethics as we would data gathered through in-person qualitative methods. The highly consistent themes and even language for narrating core motivations like struggle point to the internal validity of this data.

COVID-19 presented a unique, prolonged crisis that put an unprecedented strain on already inadequate social safety net systems in the US. Our research adds to a growing body of troubling evidence showing that crowdfunding is a particularly inequitable tool for responding to system gaps and large-scale crises, even as people turn to it in ever greater numbers (Coutrot et al., 2020; Igra et al., 2021; Kenworthy & Igra, 2022; Snyder et al., 2020). Here, we document how crowdfunding also limits the ways people narrate experiences and causes of crisis, incentivising individualised, agentive narratives that put users into a ‘struggling slot’ and limit more collective organising to address structural inequities. Crowdfunding transforms the collective, social suffering of pandemic precarity into individual, often unsuccessful, and even unseen, struggles and adaptations. In doing so, it fails both individual, marginalised users and broader societies by dampening more collective forms of narrating, and responding to, crises. As the world faces accelerating large-scale crises due to climate change and emergent pathogens, societies must urgently consider both the gaps in existing safety net systems and the inequities and consequences of more informal systems to which people turn in their absence. While users try to leverage crowdfunding for struggles, adaptations and helping, these campaigns’ ability to succeed or even draw adequate attention is severely limited. As societies ask citizens to adapt and become resilient in the face of multiplying crises, digital platforms like GoFundMe amplify inequities that acutely limit who can succeed in such projects, and under what terms.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to privacy or ethical restrictions.