Free-speech fundraising

GiveSendGo was just one of many small fundraising websites—until one morning in August 2020. Co-founder Heather Wilson woke up to find the company’s customer support email inbox overflowing with thousands of profanity-­laced messages and death threats. One referred to “your WHITE SUPREMACIST CHRIST.” Another read: “Your platform is funding the defense of a cold blooded murderer … a vengeful God will watch you burn for eternity.” Wilson had to check the site, and the news, to find out what had happened.

Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old from Illinois, had fatally shot two people at a violent protest in Kenosha, Wis., sparked by the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a black motorist. A jury would later determine Rittenhouse acted in self-defense, but in 2020, amid the ascendence of the Black Lives Matter movement, he immediately faced a media frenzy and widespread condemnation.

Rittenhouse tried to raise money for his legal bills on GoFundMe, but the site quickly deleted his campaign and returned the money to donors. Rittenhouse tried again on another site, Fundly, and raised over $50,000 in a few hours. But Fundly also deplatformed him. So Rittenhouse turned to GiveSendGo. The controversy kicked the platform into the center of a free-speech firestorm—and made it a prominent industry player.

Wilson founded GiveSendGo in 2014, alongside her brother Jacob and sister Emmalie. As crowdfunding became popular, the siblings saw an opportunity for a Christian fundraising site that would provide both monetary assistance and spiritual encouragement. After a year of development, they launched GiveSendGo’s beta version in early 2015.

GiveSendGo fundraisers were uncontroversial—“puppy dogs and mission trips,” according to Wilson—until Rittenhouse’s campaign.

GoFundMe had deplatformed Rittenhouse for violating its terms of service, but the company didn’t offer a specific reason until after his 2021 acquittal, when it said it barred him because he was accused of a violent crime. Yet the company has not enforced that policy evenly. For instance, in September 2024 it hosted a fundraiser for Quindarius Zachary, a man charged with committing a drive-by shooting in Atlanta.

Wilson, like many others, believes Rittenhouse’s deplatforming was ideologically motivated—or at least reflected GoFundMe’s capitulation to cultural pressures. After a week spent praying and seeking counsel, Wilson and her brother Jacob decided they couldn’t do the same. Whether Rittenhouse was innocent or guilty, he deserved to have a voice and a way to raise money for his legal expenses.

“The point wasn’t that we were putting ourselves in his corner,” Wilson said. “We were just going to stand for allowing him the freedom to tell his side of the story, and then let people decide for themselves if they wanted to support him or not.”

Wilson said the angry messages, from both leftist groups and churches, intensified as Rittenhouse’s campaign remained on the platform.

“I was getting middle-of-the-night, horrible calls, and I had to change my phone number,” Wilson said. “My kids were getting messages on social media saying, ‘You guys should kill yourselves. Your mom’s a white supremacist.’”

Since then, GiveSendGo has hosted several controversial, high-profile fundraising campaigns—from Canadian Freedom Convoy truckers to Texas Children’s Hospital whistleblower Eithan Haim. Wilson and her siblings didn’t set out to create a free-speech bastion. But as cancel culture intensified, Christians and conservatives increasingly turned to alternative platforms, and GiveSendGo has become a refuge for people shut out by other sites. While that has put the company at the center of many controversies, including a $306 million lawsuit, it’s also proved to be a successful business model. GiveSendGo is now one of the fastest-growing crowdfunding sites on the internet.

MANY FUNDRAISING PLATFORMS, like Kickstarter, take a 5% cut of all donations, a “platform fee,” from campaigns they host. That’s in addition to the standard costs of using a payment processor like PayPal or Stripe, which deduct about 2.9%, plus $0.30, from each donor transaction.

For its first few months, GiveSendGo also took platform fees. But Wilson said that felt inconsistent with her beliefs.

“We would constantly be telling people, ‘Listen, if God has you raising funds for this because He has something He wants you to do, the funds will come in,’” Wilson said. “And as we said it over and over again to people using our platform, we thought, ‘You know what? We really believe this is God’s platform and that He’s going to supply for GiveSendGo.’”

So Wilson and her co-founders changed GiveSendGo’s model. The site doesn’t take platform fees—instead, it runs on voluntary donations from its users. (GoFundMe followed suit, switching to the same model in 2017.)

“We actually found that it works better,” Wilson said. “We make more money.”

Wilson declined to disclose information about the company’s finances. But according to a Time magazine analysis of leaked data provided to the outlet by DDoSecrets, a hacking group that targeted the company several times in 2022, GiveSendGo received $2.6 million in donations between 2017 and 2022—including over $40,000 from donors to the Rittenhouse campaign.

Wilson and her siblings started GiveSendGo to provide a tangible way for people to receive spiritual support along with needed funds. The site’s simple interface has three buttons on each campaign page: “Give,” “Share,” and “Pray.” The “Pray” button allows users to type a prayer or encouraging message to send to campaign organizers. The site also hosts a “Prayer Wall” where anyone can post a prayer request or click a button indicating they’ve prayed for a request. GiveSendGo’s five-person Hope Team also calls the organizers of every campaign to pray for them.

But GiveSendGo’s mission to “share the hope of Jesus through crowdfunding” seems at odds with some of the ­campaigns hosted on its website. The site has become a refuge for all types of ideologically unpopular campaigns, including some hosted by neo-Nazi groups like the Proud Boys or Blood Tribe. It only rejects campaigns that are illegal, for abortion, or for sex changes for minors—things that Wilson says cause “active harm” and violate her Christian beliefs.

Though extremist campaigns make up a very small fraction of the site’s campaigns, their proliferation troubled Wilson and her team as the platform became increasingly well known: “We hate when there’s somebody on our platform that is somebody who doesn’t love people, because we are called to love people as Christians.”

Wilson said she and her brother Jacob had many long discussions about which campaigns to allow, and still wrestle with the issue weekly. But they believe their platform’s guidelines protect free speech and allow the public square to decide what to support—or not. And the Hope Team gets the opportunity to call and pray for people who desperately need to know God—from neo-Nazis to adults raising money for transgender surgery.

“What we pray for people, especially people we disagree with, is that God will get ahold of their heart … not that they’re going to be successful in their fundraising,” Wilson said.

Though Wilson has learned to square her Christian beliefs with hosting controversial campaigns, they still present a business challenge.

IN JANUARY 2022, U.S. AND CANADIAN TRUCKERS calling themselves the Freedom Convoy drove their trucks to Ottawa and parked in the streets to protest strict Canadian vaccine mandates. Between Jan. 14 and early February, a GoFundMe campaign for their living and fuel expenses garnered over $10 million. But the Canadian government put pressure on GoFundMe as the protest continued, calling its executives to testify in court that the funds wouldn’t be used to “promote extremism.” GoFundMe froze disbursements of the fund on Feb. 2 and then removed the campaign altogether two days later. The company claimed “the protest [violated] its rules on violence and harassment.”

Two new campaigns for truckers sprouted up on GiveSendGo. One raised $8.4 million in a few days. On Feb. 10, the attorney general of Ontario obtained a court order to freeze the funds and prohibit their distribution. But GiveSendGo continued to host the campaigns. Wilson maintained Canada had no jurisdiction over the funds.

But by Feb. 19, the Canadian government had frozen the accounts of the campaign organizers, preventing them from receiving the majority of the funds. After police broke up the protests several days later, GiveSendGo began returning most of the money raised for the truckers to donors.

On Feb. 4, Ottawa business owners filed a class-action lawsuit, seeking $306 million in compensation for business losses suffered during the blockade and for distress caused by loud truck horns and sound systems. If they win, some of the money from the trucker fundraiser still stuck in an escrow account could go to them. GiveSendGo and Jacob Wells, Wilson’s brother, were added as defendants in the lawsuit in late 2022.

Wilson said she and Wells prayed and debated about whether to file a defense or ignore the suit and wait for a decision. Lawyers told them the defense would cost at least $250,000, which wasn’t in the budget. But they both felt strongly that they should respond anyway. Three hours later, Wilson said, GiveSendGo’s cyber insurance company called to say it was sending a $260,000 payout for a previous security breach. She views the timing as proof “the battle belongs to the Lord.”

Wilson describes the ongoing legal fight as a “hurry up and wait” process, with months in between each set of new motions filed. But she said she’s learned to carry out what she sees as a God-given mission without worrying so much about controversy. It doesn’t hurt that despite the controversy—or perhaps in some ways because of it—GiveSendGo is thriving.

The company is often labeled a fringe “parallel economy” platform, but Cedarville University economics professor Jared Pincin calls that term a misnomer.

“What’s happening here is the economy is just simply fragmenting to satisfy different consumer demands … people were not satisfied with a given business model for whatever reason, and somebody stepped up to fill that void,” Pincin said, adding that competition leads to better outcomes and options for consumers.

And with online censorship proliferating, Wilson believes her company’s appeal will continue to grow.

“We used to say we’re the alternative to GoFundMe,” Wilson said. Now, they call themselves its replacement.