How public opinion on crowdfunding soured, explained in one chart.

Today, no American tragedy is complete without a GoFundMe.
It took less than a week to raise over $1.5 million for the family of Renee Nicole Good, the woman fatally shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis earlier this month. At the same time, a parallel fundraiser for her killer raised hundreds of thousands of dollars. And last year saw GoFundMe campaigns for people rebuilding their homes after the Los Angeles wildfires, therapy for the Camp Mystic flood survivors in Texas, struggling families affected by the SNAP shutdown, and far more.

But even as one in five Americans donate directly to those in need through crowdfunding, many feel uneasy about the rise of platforms like GoFundMe, which has raised over $40 billion since 2010, according to a recent survey by the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. The poll of 1,146 adults nationwide measured the extent to which Americans now participate in crowdfunding, the details of what that participation now looks like, and the nature of how they perceive crowdfunding campaigns.

The survey found that less than 10 percent of Americans — including both donors and non-donors — felt very confident in the effectiveness of crowdfunding campaigns, and many harbored serious doubts about who really stands to profit from them. More than half of those surveyed said they had very little confidence that crowdfunding websites like GoFundMe charge reasonable service fees. And nearly as many doubted that crowdfunders themselves use the money they raise responsibly or raise enough to meet their goals at all.

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