Over on the Charity Lawyer blog Ellis Carter recently posted on a topic that was not on my radar at all. Twenty-three states have sent a letter to GoFundMe regarding donation pages created for 1.5 million non-profits without their knowledge and consent. Apparently Alaska’s attorney general has filed suits against six other donation platforms for doing the same thing.
So you may want to check to see if there are donation pages created in your organization’s name that you did not ask for.
Carter explains some of the issues with this:
…Donors may believe the nonprofit approved the donation page when it did not. The nonprofit may have no control over the content of the page. The nonprofit may not know donations are being solicited in its name. And the nonprofit may be left to deal with donor confusion and regulatory questions about a fundraising effort it never authorized.
…..If a platform creates a donation page without a nonprofit’s knowledge or approval, there is no clear assurance that the nonprofit agreed with the way it was described, understood how donations would be processed, or accepted the legal and practical consequences of the arrangement.
That should concern both charities and donors. Charitable giving depends on public trust, and that trust is weakened when fundraising happens in a nonprofit’s name without the nonprofit’s consent…
Additionally, Carter says she has actually had clients ran into trouble when they decided to stop soliciting donations in states only to have state regulators point to these unauthorized pages and question whether the organization had truly stopped soliciting.
One of the reasons why the possibility of this situation hadn’t been on my radar is because I assumed sites like GoFundMe has a process for verifying a page was actually created by the non-profit named. The fact they are creating pages without an organization’s knowledge leads me to suspect it would be easy for an imposter to create fake pages in a non-profit’s name as well.
Which again, suggests it may be wise to check for unauthorized fund raising efforts on some of these websites.
