Last week’s GoFundMe news was revealing, not because the company created donation pages for 1.4 million nonprofits without asking, but because of how the nonprofits they serve responded. Some organizations and their partners were furious about the overreach. Many were highly frustrated but simply resigned to it. I think that resignation tells you everything about where we are today: the majority of operational infrastructure of modern philanthropy runs on technology owned and operated by for-profit companies. These partnerships have brought tremendous innovation and efficiency to the nonprofit sector. They’ve also created dependencies and power dynamics that fundamentally reshape how social good is fueled in America. I’m not sure I’m the arbiter of whether this is right or wrong, but certainly the question is: what kind of relationship do we want between the companies that build the tools and the organizations that use them to change the world?
The relationship between nonprofits and these tech companies has evolved into something nobody quite planned for. Billions in charitable giving is flowing through infrastructure built by companies that, at the end of the day, answer to venture capitalists and shareholders. Most donors click the donate button and rightly think their money goes straight to the cause. They don’t realize their transaction just passed through two or three intermediaries, each taking a cut, each collecting data, each making decisions about what gets prioritized and what gets buried in an algorithm.
The Scale Advantage and Its Discontents
These platforms have fundamentally transformed nonprofit capacity in ways we’re only beginning to reckon with. GoFundMe’s 70,000 nonprofit partnerships last year barely scratch the surface of this ecosystem. From every major nonprofit conference to Microsoft’s donation of Azure credits, Salesforce’s Power of Us program, Google’s Ad Grants collectively represent billions in contributed resources. What this means in practice is that a grassroots organization in rural America can deploy the same donor management sophistication as a university with an entire advancement team dedicated to that technology. The sheer velocity of innovation in commercial technology has created a dynamic where nonprofits have essentially outsourced their digital transformation to companies whose development cycles operate on two week Agile sprints and releases. By the time a foundation funded technology initiative completes its needs assessment, commercial platforms have already shipped three generations of features that reshape donor expectations about what giving should look or feel like.
Yet this efficiency comes with inherent tensions that the sector has been reluctant to address directly. When platforms can unilaterally create or remove donation pages for organizations, when their algorithms determine which causes gain visibility during the most critical moments, and when their default settings include substantial “tips” that many donors mistakenly believe support the nonprofit rather than the platform, we’re seeing the exercise of a particular kind of power. The pattern of creating infrastructure first and seeking permission later reveals fundamental assumptions about who drives innovation in the charitable space and who gets to make decisions about how philanthropy happens.
Infrastructure as Influence
The real power shift happens in the space between donors and nonprofits, where platforms have inserted themselves as the new mediators of generosity. Gen Z donors don’t visit nonprofit websites to give; they donate where they already are: social media, payment apps, workplace platforms. The giving experience itself has become the product, and nonprofits are just one ingredient in that product. Facebook can put a donate button directly in your birthday post and the platform becomes more present in the donor’s experience than the cause itself.
The data inequality between platforms and nonprofits fundamentally alters the balance of power in modern philanthropy. When donations flow through Facebook, PayPal, or GoFundMe, these companies capture the entire context of giving behavior, not just the specific content that triggered action, but the correlation between public sharing and donation size and the time elapsed between initial interest and completed transaction. Across millions of donations, this creates a comprehensive dataset on charitable motivation and behavior that no single nonprofit could ever compile. The platforms can track patterns in generosity that correlate with everything from news cycles to user interface changes. Meanwhile, the nonprofits whose missions generated these donations receive transaction reports stripped of the intelligence that could inform, or even better, transform their fundraising strategies.
The algorithms running in the background of these platforms function as invisible grant-makers, deciding which organizations surface in crisis moments, which get recommended to users, which appear in trending sections during giving season. Nobody outside these companies knows the formula. A tweak to Meta’s algorithm can mean the difference maker in a nonprofit’s social campaign going viral. Stanford’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society has started calling this “platform philanthropy,” though the term feels almost quaint given the scale of influence we’re discussing. These companies don’t just process donations anymore; through thousands of small product decisions, they fundamentally shape which causes Americans support. The “move fast and break things” ethos of Silicon Valley sits uneasily alongside the stability needs of organizations whose most valuable asset is their donor’s trust.
So what does the path ahead look like? Well, it likely requires acknowledging a somewhat uncomfortable truth. The nonprofit sector needs these platforms, sure, but these platforms also need the nonprofit sector. The legitimacy and social capital that comes from facilitating charitable giving provides valuable brand equity for technology companies, while nonprofits benefit from innovation and infrastructure investments they could never make on their own. The question isn’t whether these partnerships should exist, but how to structure them in ways that preserve a nonprofit’s autonomy while leveraging these unquestionable advantages of scale.
Toward Intentional Infrastructure
Perhaps what’s needed is a new framework for thinking about philanthropic infrastructure as a form of digital public good that requires intentional stewardship. We regulate utilities and telecommunications to ensure equitable access and prevent exploitation. Why wouldn’t we do the same for the platforms that facilitate hundreds of billions in charitable giving annually? This doesn’t necessarily mean heavy handed regulation, but there is little risk in oversight that balances innovation with accountability. California’s Assembly Bill 488 established platforms as charitable trustees with fiduciary responsibilities. The sector needs governance models where nonprofits have meaningful input into platform policies that affect millions of organizations. I think California’s legislation demonstrates that oversight is both feasible and necessary; it represents just the beginning of a larger conversation about how philanthropic infrastructure should function in a digital economy.
There’s no reason not to move beyond polite acknowledgment of these tensions to engage in a substantive dialogue about the future we’re building. When commercial platforms are the primary interface between donors and their causes, who decides what constitutes a legitimate charitable purpose? When artificial intelligence and algorithmic curation shape which stories get told and the needs that get met, how do we ensure that both equity and impact remain centered in philanthropic practice? How do we conquer the dissonance of the operational infrastructure of social good which is driven by quarterly earnings reports and venture capital returns? How do we protect fundraising’s character in all of this?
These questions become more urgent as new technologies like generative AI, as I mentioned before, promise to further revolutionize charitable giving. The same platforms that have democratized access to fundraising tools are also positioned as the gatekeepers of next-generation philanthropic technology. Without intentional intervention, we risk living in a world where the technology tail wags the fundraising dog in perpetuity, and platform capabilities determine programmatic possibilities rather than mission needs driving technological development.
Building a Better Balance
To be clear, I don’t think the goal is to vilify the technology companies that have contributed significantly to nonprofit capacity building. So many of these organizations are staffed by individuals that are deeply committed to social impact, and the fact is that their innovations have undeniably expanded the reach and effectiveness of charitable organizations worldwide. No, the imperative is that as these platforms become even more essential to nonprofit operations, we maintain a balance between efficiency and autonomy, in scale and sovereignty.
This conversation requires participation from nonprofit leaders who must articulate their needs and boundaries, from technology companies that must recognize their responsibility as providers of infrastructure and innovation, and policymakers who need to grapple with the regulatory implications of technology in philanthropy. The decisions we make now about restructuring these relationships will determine whether technology serves to amplify the nonprofit sector’s impact or whether it becomes another force and obstacle that organizations must navigate while trying to fulfill their missions. We can continue down the path of incremental accommodation, adapting to and reacting to these changes and hoping for benevolent treatment from technology partners, or we can engage ourselves to proactively ensure that the technology reflects the values and needs of the communities and causes that it purports to serve.