Transcripts
1. Welcome to GoFundMe the #1 fundraising platform online!: welcome to go fund me. Go fund me is the leader in online fundraising. What we're here to do is show you exactly how to get your go. Fund me campaign up, show you every single step inside of that. Help you understand what exactly is go fund me what you can raise money for with go fund me . What kind of projects are likely to be successful on go fund me how to write your story and even how to consider your tax liability on Go fund me, I'll show you the exact messages that I use for my campaign to ask for money. I'll show you inside my exact campaign. I'm fundraising for myself. I'll explain every single detail for you. That way, when you've gone through this course completely, you are empowered not just with information, but you're inspired to start your go fund me campaign to create a campaign that makes a difference and as many lives as possible that you feel good asking for money that you understand how it works that you're prepared to succeed. Thank you very much for getting started with me here in my golf on me course I'm Jerry Banfield I've made thousands of videos online. This is my personal passion project. At the moment is my go Fund me project. So I'm excited to teach you and share with you what I've learned, making my project reading and looking at other's projects, doing my own initial fundraising for my project. I've also got years of experience using other crowdfunding platforms. Go fund me is my favorite. This platform is simple. The fees of the lowest. There's no approval for your project. That's an awesome platform. I'm honored you're here. I imagine you'll love this class, and I trust when you find something helpful in it, you will take the time to give back to the class and leave a review. The secret with Go Fund Me is that giving is receiving and giving people the chance to give is giving people the opportunity to chance to feel good and to get back. I'm grateful. After years of seeing Go fund May I finally tried my own project on it and now teaching this class with you. I love your awesome Let's get into go fund me
2. Share your GoFundMe with us in the class project on Skillshare: for the skill share class project. We please share a link to your gulf on me project including a screenshot off your page, for example for mine. This is my project here we please for the class project. Share your project with us because this will help us give feedback on your project. This may help some of us donate to your project. This may help some of us get connected and build a relationship with you. And you have the chance to help all of us teach the course and give us another example besides just mine for the class. I understand the challenge of trying to find appropriate places to share your go fund me project you hear in this class on skill share. Therefore, this is the perfect place to share your go fund me project as a class project. I imagine I will take a look at it. Maybe not right away, but in time and thank you very much for the chance to teach and help you with. Go fund me. I'm excited to see your project soon
3. GoFundMe explained including what to fundraise for, campaign creation, and tax liability: go Fund May basics. What is it? How can you use it? What are the fees and tax implications will cover that right now. Go fund me is the best place to fundraise according to their how it works. Documentation Rather an individual group or organization. The main thing that seems to happen on Go fund me in terms of projects getting created, our projects created by individuals for help with personal issues. If you look at the main website, you can see it says that there's 10,000 go fund me projects over 10,000 people started. Go fund me every day. You can see the categories here. Medical memorial, emergency nonprofit, education, animals, business, community competition, creative event, faith, family, newlywed sports travel, volunteering wishes. These are all different things you can do from starting a business. Some of the most successful gulf on me projects I've seen tend to be medical emergencies, memorials, fundraising for non profit or big causes. For example, if you look on the platform right now, the top fundraisers are government Shutdown, a Chris McCallum Family Fund and attribute Turn Mirage. These are some of the top donations. If you click Seymour, you can see a little bit more depth. You can see Ah, let's get Burke Home Project of Family Memorial and Sean Family Fundraiser So a lot of the things people donate to tend to be very emotional events, things like medical emergencies or memorials. Also, you can use this to fundraise for a business to help get your new venture started to make something creative or competitive to build a community to fund your education. I'm using this to build a movement of pay it forward student loans of helping each other out, talking about student loans. My project, his student loans win the game together, the idea being I asked for help get honest with the exact amount that my family we owe in student loans and then I commitment on our part to pay that forward at least five times over the course of our life to help others. That's my project. I am imagine the projects created that are not emergencies or not really emotional or tragic events. The best of these projects are ones that have a big vision for connecting in helping others . A lot of the unsuccessful projects I'm go fund me seem to be things like just basically give me money with the help. Much more of an explanation. There's nothing wrong with that. But it's, you know, aren't seeing a lot of donations to those now you might wonder. Okay, how does go fund me? Work is pretty easy to start a campaign you it on. Lee has three pages. It's just got a main basics page. Then it's got a photo or video page than it's got the long story format. So in mind, the basics are over here in the fundraising goal and in the name than the video or pictures up here than the stories down there. It's really easy to create a campaign. You can share it easily with emails, text or social media. You can even customize your link. Teoh give you the ability to have a nice short share, a bill you are like I have go fund me dot com slash banfield for my project. Then you can manage your donations, accept donations, thank donors and withdraw funds. What you can do on Go fund me is fundraise, and the fee is very low. So far, I've paid on $650 in donations. The actual amount I'm getting out of it is something like 620 or $630. It's on Lee The processing fees that you pay. So something like 3% or so is the fee you pay on the donations now. It depends on how you set it up. What's really cool? There's 0% platform p because go fund me is powered by donations itself. When you go to donate on, go fund me. They asked you to contribute to help their platform going, which is beautiful. If you are able to just support go fund me with your donation and therefore there's no fees on the platform itself, which is awesome. Your project publishes instantly, which is a lot nicer than some other crowd raising platform. One other one I'm thinking in particular we have to get it approved. You can use it for just about anything. When you go to withdraw your donations, you do need to verify your identity with your birthday, a social security number, name, address and phone number, and go fund me also encourages you to naturally share it everywhere. But go fund me. What was I gonna say, Come on, I have 101 last point. I really cared about before I got it. Taxes, taxes, air completely. The users responsibility. Go fund me. Does not send 10 99 forms out in the U. S. A. Donations, for example. These donations to my project are considered gifts. These air gifts to me where you don't get anything back. It's straight towards my dole. These are gifts you can give up to. 14,000 year in the USA is a gift. The gifts are not taxable. This particular project, in my mind, qualifies for gifts where there's no taxes paid on it. However, if I was to put up something to say fundraise for my business, that more than likely would be taxable. I've seen stories of people getting big tax bills for their go fund me. It is possible the IRS could either do it on purpose or have something mess up in trying tax a go fund me. It is completely the user responsibility to determine your tax liability. Go fund me does not trigger tax forms as far as their documentation says, and these can be considered purely gifts. Now it all depends on how you set your project up. I've sent my project of as purely gift project. However, if I set it up to fund a new business expansion or something like that, that more than likely would be considered income. I would need to report that on my taxes. Therefore, when you consider you project, you need to set it up in a way, if you don't want to pay tax on it, that it's strictly a gift. Therefore, you can't do things like rewards on your project, because gifts must be given without the expectation of something back. If you set it up, there's something back that's called a service or business that is taxable. You don't get anything back from donating to. My project is purely charitable donation. You do not have to have a charity or a nonprofit set up in order to accept donations, because there's an individual. At least in the USA, you can take donations personally. Therefore, if you want to fund raise for organization or charity, you can do that. You could set it up that way. You can also set up a go fund me to ah, have it for someone else. For example, you can set up a go fund me for a family member or a friend that you can add them onto the campaign. If you go over into the settings tab in your campaign, you have team members. You can add people onto your team, especially if you're an organization are raising for family. Like I can add my wife on the campaign to help her out. Manage it thus, all right, I think I've covered the most critical things for Go Fund Me is terms of how it works, the things I wondered before signing up. I hope this useful for you when you're considering making your oak own go fund me and you're trying to do the research on it as well.
4. GOFUNDME Summoning the Courage to Signup and Launch the First Campaign!: Where do we summon the courage to start our go fund me project? For me, this was the single biggest step because I had never launched a go fund me project. I hadn't signed up for the website. I didn't know about it. And yet I'd seen other people's projects here and there. I've heard that other people were raising lots of money on it, and my main concern actually was taxes to begin with. As a self employed business owner, I consider tax some front. If I raise money through go fund me, I am I going to get taxed on it? Will anybody donate My main fear in overcoming it was failure of looking bad that I'd started project and fail again as I've started. So Maney Kickstarter projects I maybe 3 to 5 they wouldn't even accept my last projects, failed all my Kickstarter projects. I've had a patriotic account that has been on Odyssey to get a decent amount of income on it every month. I failed so many things entrepreneur online, and I thought I can't possibly start one more thing and fail again. Who's going to give money to me? Is my cause really worthy. These are the things I was thinking beforehand, and I got the courage to go through with it because I thought about the essential importance of asking for help when I need it. I've got my go fund me project up now. My wife and I have a fantastic amount of student loans, and anyone who donates is better than nothing. Not only that, but I thought about all the help I could offer other people is the result of my project. I imagine every bit of good, not every bit. But I'm exit a lot of the good it could do to see my projects succeed. And I realized the only way to fail was to not try it all to make no effort. If I put up the project and no one donates, so what? I also was thinking about getting rejected for donations. I would think a lot of us are very uncomfortable with asking people for money for showing up to. Someone is saying, Hey, we give me money, especially on something like this, where there's a lot of expectation for me and for my wife project for student loans that you ought to just do that yourself. You shouldn't ask for any help. You need to just play the game, suffer struggle, work hard. Don't ask anybody for help. Do it yourself. Why is anybody gonna help? You don't deserve any help. These are all that kind of thoughts going through my head. And I realized all that doesn't matter. All what matters is do. Is this something we really need help with? Yes. Could this offer a lot of good to the world? Yes. Can I be willing to ask people and accept whatever answer they provide? Rather, it's yes. No, maybe Or sure, I'll do it later and they don't do it. Can I show up to people and just ask, Am I willing toe ask over and over again? And I said yes. And I realized it's a good opportunity for me to practice One thing I value and it's asking its showing up the art of asking my man a palm was really helpful. Show up and ask. You'd be amazed how many people are willing to say yes, and it's a good opportunity. Love people. When you show up and say no, it can even be a good opportunity to gauge where your ad with, ah, friendship or a family member. If you show up and ask for helping, they say no. Well, that's an opportunity. Love them. It might be another opportunity to focus on different relationships where people are willing to help out. I thought about all these things prior to launching my Go Fund me project. I'm grateful today that now it's been 48 hours. My project is up and we've actually got the very first donations on it. $150 already towards the $193,000 goal of paying off all of my family. Student loans have great fire, the courage to just put the project up. I'm extremely grateful to off. The first donations came from members of my partner group members who collaborate with me in business and who I've helped them a lot, and they put some of the first donations and realizing that other people are having successful campaigns. I'm looking around now go fund me. There's fundraisers right now where people are raising hundreds of thousands of dollars and it's awesome because the fees are very small on Go fund me, there's a 0% platform fee. There's just a payment fee, and it's it can prompt jealousy. I honestly will admit that I looked at some of the projects. I'm like, This is dumb. Why're people donating to this? Can't Can't they see this is a waste of money, that there's going to be a small percentage of people and good that is done by this project in a large amount of waste, or this project is the relevant and pointless, like the person's dead. Why bother with a memorial fund for them at this point? Well, these thoughts, I said, No, I'm not going to take action on these thoughts. And if I can accept that, I have these thoughts come up about other people's projects and I'm willing to donate to them anyway. And I'm willing to give to imperfecta people in their perfect projects, then that gives me total confidence that other people will do the same for me. What's really nice with Go fund me as one, we get do well on our projects and we raise a lot of initial support from our own friends, our own family. There is potential to get support from strangers, which is fantastic. I mean, we're also I find strangers who might be willing out me pay off my student loans. Where else can I just find people, for example, looking here, this is locally near ST Petersburg. I can see people who are in need of help, and I might be able to help with my donation. So I'm very grateful. I got the courage to start a go. Fund me after working through a bunch of fear thoughts, a bunch of judgmental thoughts against other creators and other projects. Ah, bunch of judgmental thoughts against other people. I've have Bunches of thoughts against other people, like other people are stupid for their donations. They aren't gonna help me anyway. And they're all wrong, and I can't stand them. And I worked through these thoughts. Okay, well, we're not gonna take action on that thought. And I consciously put other thoughts out like other people are doing their best. Just like I'm doing my best. Other people might look at me and say, I'm stupid. Can I live with that? Sure. Can I accept all the judgment and criticism I may get as a result of honestly asking for help with something when I need it. Sure, I can accept that because getting all that love and support getting those first donations on a project is worth it. And I imagine you put as much time and effort. I'm willing to dump a ton of time and energy and effort into this project because this project I've put up does a lot of good not just for me, but for, ah, lot of other people that I can pay it forward to when you're willing to put a lot of time and energy and really ask and ask and ask and ask people in your life to help you out. Then you got courage to say, Well, all I need to do today is start to go. Fund me is very easy and fast to get started. The majority of the work is after getting started. However, if you don't start, you will never do anything else. I've made this for you, but I hope is really helpful. If you're thinking about a go fund me project or you're looking around and feeling financial insecurity, wishing there'd be some divine intervention, that money would just fall into your bank account. and help you out with a certain problem, I am Imagine the opportunity with talking about Go fund me and teaching course on Go fund me to promote honest asking and sharing of our financial struggles and open up to helping each other directly as a part of my mindset and philosophy of money. Win the game together that we've got enough money in the world already. The answer to all of our financial problems is toe look and help the people around us and trust then and ask when we need our help back versus giving and spending a bunch of money impersonally too big big companies, big governments, wealthy individuals instead of spending and sending all that money and personally send and spend is and give as much as possible to the people around us. I'm very grateful. Go fund me Empowers This kind of giving empowers my visions and I worked through all kinds of negative thoughts all kinds of fear, thoughts prior to starting my project. And today I've got it up, got my first donations and I'm ready to inspire and help in sheer much more with you on go fund me going forward. Thank you for experiencing this with me, and I hope this helps. I imagine this help you a lot with courage to just say, Hey, look, I'm just gonna put my campaign up like Jerry did. What's the worst that can happen? I can spend some time and energy on it. A couple of people can tell me. No, and I won't get any donations. At a minimum, you'll learn something. But if you're like me and when people say no, then you go right and right on. Rollo, this why you said no. Okay. I'm gonna write about that. You said no because of this. I'm gonna write about that, too. And we're gonna dress all this stuff and make this the best project ever. All right. I love your awesome. There we go. Done.
5. GoFundMe campaign creation overview, story, and photo: go Fund me has a very straightforward campaign creation process. It's on Lee three steps. You've got the overview, then you've got the photo. Then you've got the story. This produces your entire campaign in addition to all the donations and updates you do. But this what you see here, the title is right here from the overview page in the title. Then you've got the category education and learning that pops up right here. Then you've got the goal and the location. You also can put some additional options on there and you can Onley change the link once, which is nice because I made a much longer Lincoln. I want a short of link. Fortunately, you can change the link once and it does not break the previous link, which is nice. So this this can make it much shorter. You also can put these additional options on Once you've created the campaign, you can allow users to leave comments, donation, comments, public comments, donations to the campaign and make it public. You can also de activate it. So I'm actually going to change my u r l to something shorter on here that will make it easier to share on the photo. You can put in a YouTube or Vimeo video a Facebook photo or upload a photo. I personally recommend a YouTube video because if you've got a YouTube channel, you can get people over from your go fund me project on it. And video is so much more personal and more effective for connection. So I've got a video on mine, then the story is where you really put in the majority of your time and effort. The majority is the story is what people read down here. Although the title makes a huge difference. Also, lots of people may not read Mawr than the title I had changed. My title mine title was De Free 2019 versus Law School and graduate school loans. But that doesn't do a good job of communicating the big vision for my project. So I've re titled mine, and I encouraged have a project name that has a big vision. People like a big vision. People like to see the context, especially if it's something like student loans. Now, if you're doing something like a memorial fund, that can be pretty straightforward. And if you look through the campaigns, you can get some inspiration from the campaigns that are on here. Now, keep in mind if you're looking for inspiration for the title, you may see titles that work for others that might not work for you. There's a lot more to it than just a title. So starting out, keep in mind when you put in your overview what? Your title here, this title will be your first you are, and then you get one, Um, or your l change That will keep your initial u R l and play still. So whatever you put as the very first title on your project will come out as the first Earl , then your goal on here. You can change the goal at any time, I guess. Then you've got your photo story, and it's nice. You can bold things. You can link things, put photos and videos in here. Then you just save when you're done, these air basics off making a campaign on go fund me. And once you've got the campaign up, then you also get donations on here. Then you also can have comments and discussions down here
6. #1 tip for success with a GoFundMe campaign: What's the number? One thing to know up front when planning and considering and creating and managing your campaign from when I can see after having a campaign up for four days and looking at other people's campaigns on Go fund me, this is a long term fundraising effort. This is not a one and done. I'm gonna throw it up real quick, and people are just going to fund it now. That may happen. Sometimes to some people, especially if there's been a death or a tragedy, you might be able to put a memorial fund up and in proximity. The earlier it is, the faster you get people in. Yes, people may donate a lot of money right away, however, what it seems to me, most campaigns are a long term, ongoing fundraising effort. This means that you look at it with patients. You expect that it may take a while to reach your goal, and that in most cases you're not just going toe, have everything poor in at once. When you go into it like this to begin with, I imagine it's much easier to keep expectations reasonable. I'm a seeing that it might take six months it might take a year might take two years to fulfill the goals of my campaign, and that's OK because I get regular withdrawals, all the donations. I get those right away, and that is awesome. It also means I am making effort patiently and consistently to keep sending people into the campaigns. When I've noticed and looking around at other campaigns, there's a lot of campaigns that people have started and put a lot of energy into and did not follow through. It's very hard. Let me rephrase that. It doesn't have to be very hard. The initial donations are absolutely critical for a campaign because most of us are wired with social proof. Most campaigns that I've seen did not get the initial get the ball rolling donations, enough donations to kind of tip the campaign where it starts getting featured around Go fund me as a top fundraiser or when people search for it comes up. What draws my attention on a campaign is seeing that a bunch of money has been put into it . The majority of campaigns have very little money put into them. When you look and see that there's over 10,000 people starting a go fund me every single day. You can imagine a majority of those get almost no donations or very few donations. Therefore, from the very beginning thinking about a willingness toe, ask every single person you can imagine, especially those closest relationships. First, to donate to your campaign and being willing to make this an ongoing project, not something that you'll just put a bit of time into for, ah, week or two and then forget about, because that's a waste of time. If this isn't something you can stick with like a marathon, then to me, it's a waste of time to even get it going because that you'll get a few donations, maybe, and probably be from a few of the people closest to you. Then you'll get disappointed and forget about it, and you'll miss the majority of the opportunity out there, especially whatever the big vision you were doing. I've got a big vision for my project of student loans. Let's win the game together. Let's make this a thing, and I see someone else who has exact same kind of project. The key is to stick with it, raising donations as according to many of the charities and books I've read is very difficulty for many charities to figure out how to get people to donate, how to connect with people, how to get regular donations. Getting people to just give money takes a lot of individual one on one asking. So what I'm intending to do is send ask people directly via messages on Facebook or text messages. Asked people in person, relentlessly fund arrays and ask for the foundation. It's up to me to build a very strong foundation on my project. I'm grateful three people have already laid the most three critical donations on this project. The first is the most important donation. The second is the next most important donation. The third is the next most important donation, and as I see it, it is my responsibility to do the work one on one with people to get those 1st 100 donations to get that first initial funding level, that then, when people come in and see it and immediately triggers that thing in the brain, that this is happening, this is a real thing. This is something people are donating to. It triggers that social proof that this is safe to give to, and alternatively, it triggers that criticism when people come into it. See, you gotta be kidding me. People have donated thousands of dollars to this guy's student loans. This is a stupid It triggers that also. And that's good, because in this case, any publicity's good publicity. You might have someone talking and her friend of saying This is disgusting. Look at this project. This guy's raised $10,000 people just given in this money pelvis student loans is so stupid . But the friend that might be nodding yell Yeah, that is stupid. The friend might go home and think, Wow, let me take a look at that. And the friend might even end up donating. I've had lots of people come follow me online and have said I found you through this person who was talking bad about you. This person was going on and on about how much you suck in your scam artist, and that's how I found you and started following you because ah, lot of us don't agree with the opinions of other people in our lives. Therefore, it's my responsibility to keep asking and asking and asking overtime and build this project up and up and up. And then it's up to me to just trust the universe, to say OK, I've I've laid the foundation. I trust you to bring in the rest of results. But the universe asked us to do our foundational work to show that we're really interested in serious about something. And then that's usually went. All the help pours him, but it from what I see, the majority of projects on Go fund me do not make it this far. The founder of the project doesn't put in the initial effort and make all those one on one asks. And in the majority of cases, unless it's something like a death, earn emergency. People don't get fired up that much to just immediately donated as soon as they see it. Most of us are kind of predictably irrational. We don't just think Oh, well, this logically is a very good cause. I will contribute to most of us are very emotional. We need to be triggered off by emotions. We see a death, we get triggered off. Oh, I do. I got to donate to that. Oh God, this is horrible, even though rationally, it might not make sense like, Okay, this person died. Why do we need to raise $200,000 now that they're gone? Why wouldn't we have raised that money before? To help the family, to have a good time and enjoy their life together before the person died? I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it, but you could see that it's not a rational decision. It's an emotional decision. Oh, this is horrible. Let me help that family out. But a lot of what we often need to trigger emotion is social proof. We need the establishment that there is enough interest and excitement, and then the collective interest of the whole project triggers us off when I've triggered people off just talking about my project. Even when there were no donations, which is good if people get offended or upset with your project, like on mine, how dare you ask? I'm not paying off your debt. That's good, because that's emotion. And the more you get people who are willing to contribute to your project, the mawr, that emotion, you will find it in the positive variety as well, unless you've put up something totally offensive that even then someone will still get probably really excited about it. So I hope I've communicated here to you. The number one thing that's really important is toe be willing to lay a strong foundation and be willing to go at this for a long time. It doesn't have to be difficult. In fact, I see this is a great opportunity to build relationships with the people in my life's Here's how I look at it. If I'm friends with you on Facebook and I can't ask you money, we're not really for friends. If I can't ask you for money for my Go Fund Me project, we don't need to be friends because that's not a real friendship, a real friendship to me as you can ask for anything. Now, the person can say no to anything as well, but you feel safe asking for whatever it is you think you need that day, even if it is totally inappropriate. I'm not paying your student loans off or whatever. Then it's safe to say no the like Jerry. No, thank you. I'm I'm not contributing your project. No, thank you. I was still here though, So thank you very much. I hope this is useful for you in planning out you go fund me project. And if you really care and you really your heart is in your go Fund me projects sticking with it through the initial fundraising.
7. GoFundMe campaign link change and custom URL: How do we change the You are all on our go fund me campaign. This is in your manage option. So what you do, you go to your campaigns all the your campaigns on your dashboard, you click your dashboard, you go to my profile. You can go to it there and see that or the best way to do it is click on the top, go to my campaigns, then you've got your campaigns. Here you click. Manage, Then once you're on manage, you click edit. Then you click on additional options inside your campaign. You can get your campaign link right here. I encourage changing to the shortest link possible something that will never change despite you changing your project title from me. Mine is a fundraiser for student loans. Winning the game together. Help my family pay off our student loans. We agree to pay it five x forward to others. This gives me the idea that just putting our last name as the go fund me dot com slash banfield is the best way to go for the campaign. So that's where you change your campaign and why you change your campaign. You are l in go fund me when you're initially creating the campaign. You won't see these additional options, but once you hit overview, then photo than story you've published your campaign. Then when you go into manager campaign, you can just go to go fund me dot com slash manage right before whatever you u R L is, and I'll take you straight through this interface. When you go over toe edit, you'll click these additional options to bring it up over here. And that's where you get to the URL on your Go Fund Me campaign. I encouraged a short share a bill. You are all that you can even tell someone easily in person. When I talk to someone in person now, I can easily say my campaign is just go fund me dot com slash banfield Super easy to get to super easy to share. Then, if I make additional campaigns, I can create things like Go fund me dot com slash j Banfield or Jerry Banfield. If someone else did the same last name creates one. They can easily do the same, and they can call there's Banfield family or they can do same thing like they could put their first initial, then Banfield. They could do their first name and last name. I think something that's first name and last name is ideal. Also, because of anyone searches for you, they might be able to find you. However shorter is generally better. Go fund me dot com slash banfield Super simple. This is how you change it and why you change your go fund me campaign. You are l I highly encourage. Do not use that default long You are l that is so awkward to share. I started off with that. Thankfully, I found the option to change the length. Now keep in mind, your link can only be changed once which I've already changed the title several times in my project. I put this synching on Lee. Change your link once. Then you need to put something that will never change, Which is why encouraged to use your name or the person's name because that's unchangeable. You might want to fool with your project title a few different times. I was going to put something like Go fund me dot com slash student loans. But let's say something crazy happens and I changed the whole scope of the project. I still want the u R L to be relevant and therefore you want it to be something that won't change.
8. Reflecting on initial donations and rejections: Let's reflect on my 1st 3 donations on my project, because this may help you to get an idea of who might be your 1st 3 donations on your project. My very first donation is my business partner, Thomas George. We've worked together for years online. He initial hired me for coaching. I hired him for coaching. He hired me for coaching on teaching. I hired him for coaching on music. We've worked together and collaborated. We met in person, even though he's from the UK and I'm from the US I talked to him in our weekly partner calls. I have it jury banfield dot com slash partners and I asked for helping. He made the very first donation to the project. The second donation was another donation from another one of my business partners. Both of these business partners or people I've helped out a lot. The 2nd 1 is one I'm currently employing and paying each week to help me out. The two donations have something in common. These are people. I've helped a lot and I've given a lot to already. Now that doesn't mean everyone I've given a lot, too, and helped a lot is going to be willing to give back, and that's okay. I'm very grateful, those very first to donations or people I've worked with. Then the third donations from my sister. Huge donations and what I've reflected on in considering my sister's response versus my brother's response. My sister likes and enjoys generous giving. That's what she does. That's what she likes to do. And my brother, at the same time as a very strict and regimented way he goes about is giving Oh, he likes to give to very certain charity and have his donation matched, and he feels that it's objectionable, that I should asked for money for to help with my student loans. Now, he says, if I became destined to, he would give to me. He also, however, gave me some very valuable feedback about one question on my project. I answered all these questions on my project, and I greatly shortened the answer based on his feedback, because he got triggered off reading this comment down here about already donating enough to charity, and I I talked to my wife, Laura, about this, and she said that if you want to make sure to communicate what you're trying to say here but do it in a way that doesn't trigger people off asses much in the initial way. I wrote this. I had a long, drawn out response off a specific case of where people donated to Haiti. $500 million to the Red Cross. The Red Cross, according to NPR, spent hundreds of millions of dollars of that was lost in administrative fees, and it looks like very little got actually accomplished from $500 million in donations. Basically, 130,000 people went to seminars showing how to fix their own homes up got some temporary shelters and relief assistance for $500 million. That's pretty terrible. That is something like three or $4000 of person. And if people is simply given Haitians three or $4000 person to each individual Haitian. I imagine a lot of those Haitians could have built their own permanent homes or at least work together and built a ton of permanent homes for that money. But instead I went on and on about a specific case of waste, and my brother, even though he didn't donate, helped me to write this a little bit shorter to make my point and say yes. If you already donate to other charities and causes, that's good. It can be even. You might even feel better donating two things in person and two people you already know. And sometimes when you donate to a cause, there's so much money that's raised its hard to spend it. So I made that point a lot quicker. I deleted over half of this response. So even though my brother did not donate, I am. He got some really good feedback out of him now. Looking at these donations also makes another thing very clear. These donations are function of the relationship I have with a person and a function of the person's own self identity, who they think they are. My sister sees herself as a person who generates donuts, gives generously, is very grateful for what she has and is available to help out with that. And she makes a donation on a level that she thinks represents herself. Same thing with the Thomas and the other guy I work with. That is a function of them. Therefore, there's a lot of this that's impersonal, what people give has, you could say a strong correlation to their own ego. This means that when people donate or don't donate, it's nothing really personal against my project, which is nice, because five years ago I asked my brother to sign upon my patriotic up, and I got really mad at him that he wouldn't give me $5 a month. When my business was dying. I got really mad at him, and he had some principle in his head that that violated and he just would not do it. And this time, when my brother said no, he's not gonna donate, Even though he paid off, helped his wife pay off her student loans, and he has no student loans himself. Even though he's got a PhD, he has no student loans himself. He's got lots of money in the bank. It won't give a dollar in my project. I'm grateful that this time I'm not mad at him because I understand that's his current. That the same reason my sister gave a huge donation is the same reason my brother did not. It's both of function of their own world, their own ego, and therefore, as my responsibility as the project creators that campaign craters to simply to reach out and allow others to give what they want to and to allow others to simply be themselves as a part of my campaign, which is likely so far to include lots of rejections. Lots of people saying No, this isn't for me or no thank you or whatever people say and to realize it's nothing personal. My sister's donation is nothing personal any more than my brother's rejection is nothing personal. The donations from my business partners are nothing personal either. It's the same kind of generosity they would have with someone else in a similar spot. And the people who haven't donated it speaks more about their life in the way they think than whatever I've asked. For example, I have a good friend. I asked him to donate and he said, Well, I'm in the same spot and we're looking at having even less money in the future and and therefore I'm not gonna donate anything today and again, I'm grateful I wasn't mad because I told they understand his lack of a donation is the same reason that my sister dropped such a generous donation it's the same thing hit. The interaction with my campaign is a function of how it's processed through his world and therefore all is up to me is to simply invite people to participate in trust, set up everything on my end to effectively interface with their world and then accept that really it has nothing to do with me. Once I set everything up. Once I think of every way to make the project to process successfully with everyone's world , to share my vision for the project with whoever's reading it. Once I do that, the results are out of my hands. Whoever makes a big donation, whoever doesn't it really doesn't matter. And in fact it's a good opportunity for me to love whoever I've asked regardless of what they do. I don't love my sister any more. Forgiving a big donation. I don't love my brother any less for not donating my brother I. If he asked the same thing, I'd be happy to help him out because that's a function of my own reality. The same is my sister. Asked something. I'd be happy to help her out. That's a function of my own reality. It's not really doesn't have anything to do with them, and lots of people simply won't respond and just ignore the message, or we'll take a quick look at it and not do anything about it. That's a function of their reality to their too busy or awkward about money or don't know how to say no, that's okay, too. It's my responsibility to ask. It's not my responsibility to dictate toe others how they respond. These are some of the most challenging things I think, for having a campaign on Go fund me like this. So I hope sharing these things is useful for you to navigate to me a huge growth opportunity and having a go fund me campaign and to maintain and even use your gold fund. Me campaign is away toe build relationships with the people in your life today
9. Who to ask for donations to a GoFundMe campaign?: How do we ask for donations on or go fund me project Boy, Isn't this the big question? How many of us air so awkward about asking for money? How many of us don't know where to start? First begin with sending messages to the people you already have close relationships with. I started by going through my phone and sending text messages to 10 off my closest family members and friends. These are people I regularly talked to almost every week and some even more often than that . I asked them to donate to my campaign first. That gives me the initial foundation. I also just having a following online. I tried putting up YouTube video about this, tried doing a Facebook video and our of the millions of followers, not one person donated as a result of doing that, which gives me the very clear guidance to, say, Ask the closest family members and friends first to donate, the more general public or people not as close and relationships will expect to see that people already close to you have already given donations first before they see it. Now what you've got those initial donations on, then it is time to make a system to ask more people that are not maybe in daily contact or people that you have his friends or co workers. I recommend, if possible, Teoh reach out to 50 to 100 people Over time. I don't recommend do it all at once, but steadily over time, go through people you regularly see and interact with and ask all of them directly. You want as many people as possible who have the highest chance of donating and already support. You already know you then branch out further what I'm doing. So my very first is ago literally sent text messages to my essentially my inner circle. Second is to branch out to the people who are just on the periphery of the inner circle. People I might talk to a little bit less often, but people I still see on a regular basis, for example, people that I see it my A meetings on a regular basis. Friends that I've had for years that I might not talk to them is often reach out to that second circle. Then after that, start going through places, wife, any kind of relationship. For example, I have 900 something friends on Facebook Myint thought Process on It is We aren't really friends if I can't ask you for money and you can't ask me back for money And if you don't feel safe saying no when I ask you for money or it's just purely annoying that we don't need to be Facebook friends, this is a good way to do kind of a friend purge to say, Look, I'm gonna ask straight through my go fund me project, and this gives me the chance to build deeper friendships with people who may be on the periphery, and it allows me to cut loose with some people. Some people might delete me as a friend or what? Not that don't want to hear from me. And aren't willing Teoh have a deeper relationship with me? It allows me to cut loose from those. This can include people. You've got his co workers, people you met a while ago, people you knew from high school. My main mindset is I'm willing to be rejected. I'm willing to get told no nine out of 10 times when I ask a with 900 something Facebook friends. Even if my success rate is only 10% I'm still looking at 90 people who are likely to drop donations on my project. That's pretty good. That's a very strong initial foundation. Then, as I stretch out even further, maybe post more videos on YouTube on my podcast reach out even further than just Facebook friends. Then I've got a foundation is strong enough. My campaign might be in a good position to get some donations from strangers at that point . So this sour playing my initial ask and the next step, then, is to show you an actual message I send for asking.
10. GoFundMe message template to ask for donations: How do we actually word our go fund? Me asks for help. Here's the exact message I just sent between the last video on this one. I sent 21 messages to people I've most recently texted with on my phone. What I did is put their name at the very beginning of the message. For example, I texted my friend Eric. I put Eric right in front of this message, and I just pasted in the rest of it. Therefore, make the message personal. I intend to send this message or very similar out to hundreds of friends on Facebook also and ask for help today. This is an opportunity for someone to help me and to build a deeper relationship. Because guess what? When someone donates to this campaign, there's some kind of karma with that that when they've got something there asking for help with guess what they can ask me. I love to be someone that people will turn to and say, Hey, can I Can you help me out with this? And that gives me the chance. Sometimes I can. Sometimes I can't. I just texted 21 people today, and if two of them donate. That's awesome. The I trust that probably half won't respond it all. Some may take it as an opportunity to reconnect. Say, Hey, how you doing? This is what I've been up to. I didn't beat around the bush and get any awkward about it because, especially when you haven't texted someone in a while, you might as well get straight to it. If the person just is annoyed by it and doesn't want to talk, well, that's fine. That's up to them. This is not up to me. I understand when people talk to me and want something for me. I'd rather just get straight to that. There's no point in trying to warm me up with five or six messages of how you doing? How's the family? Bam! All right, now I'm gonna ask some Don't even don't even bother with that. If we've already known each other, just get straight to ask in whatever it is you think you need. I've also chosen to send this on Friday today because our mindset definitely can vary by week. A lot of us tend to be feeling good on Friday, giving on Friday. I've noticed Ah, guy watched live stream Ricky Live. He does his big donation days on Friday. He gets really good donations on those days. I sent my initial messages out on Tuesday, and I realized Tuesdays, one of the worst days a week for a lot of us. Often when we're feeling good, we will do things to keep feeling good, like giving. Meanwhile, for feeling bad, we will find an opportunity to feel good as something we're not interested in. So I'm intending to send lots of these messages out on Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays weekends when people might have some more time or might be thinking more about family or giving and fewer of the messages on Monday Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, when people are often grinding often in kind of a negative mindset are often focused so totally that there's not time to look up anything else. I worded it this way because this is, ah, format this proven effective for me, it is one equal to another, asking for help. Will you please is very polite and very direct, and all I ask people to do is take a look. I didn't say they need to donate or anything, and then there's a reason most of us think we're rational beings and we expect there to be a reason for us to do something. And then I've focused on the feeling you will love helping us with our biggest challenge today. Now I don't set up any expectation of exactly how someone should help. And I don't exclude people just because they don't have any money. In fact, someone that doesn't have any money might be able to help a lot just by sharing this on social media and saying, Hey, can you help my brother on? It also might help someone to see this and make their own go fund me because this is not just about my project. This is about spawning other projects that are similar. Spotting MAWR personal donations and MAWR conversations openly and honestly about money, I am suggesting make projects that are thought of like this that are not just about helping you, but consideration is given to everyone else. That helps that you're giving other people a chance to feel good. You're paying it forward, your inspiring others to make a similar kind of project For me. My intention is to show a project format that works show a way of thinking about it and imagining it that works. Show a persistence, show a willingness toe. Ask and get support for it. Show a willingness to fail and be rejected. Toe Have eight out of 10 people. I send the message to not donate or give some kind of a negative response or be annoyed. That's OK as long as I've thought of them. I'm offering everyone. I've messaged opportunity to help me. I've chosen not to message people that I don't want to wield a relationship with or have or maintain a relationship with. This is because I don't want anything further to go on with them. Therefore, I don't message everyone Onley message. People id like, and I'm open to building a deeper relationship with or maintaining the one we've already got. What better way to maintain a relationship you've got? Then asked someone for money? That's a very intimate thing to do. Some of us have our time asking our spouse or our partner for money, let alone asking our friends and close family, and my vision is to make this more of a thing that's acceptable. That's normal, say to just reach out and ask for money. This is how I word it, because this is how you ask an equal for help, and this doesn't dictate a certain kind of help is necessary. All I've asked is to take a look at the project, and I've given a reason based on ah feeling. I know I love helping other people with their biggest challenge. That's what motivates me to show up. Film, video courses, a podcast, episodes, blawg post. That's what motivates me to show up each day because I love helping people with whatever the biggest challenge of the day is, and it's my responsibility to accept help and ask for people to help me with the same thing . I imagine the one reason most go fund me project Fail is a lack of willingness to get rejected repeatedly and then a format to do that, so that's acceptable. If someone takes a look at my project and doesn't want to help, that's fine. Even if someone looks at it has an emotional reaction of offense that even in the energetic sense, is helpful because they've paid attention to it. And even if the person doesn't respond it doesn't mean they didn't look at it. In fact, some people may not respond to my message. May see it may do nothing about it. And then when they need something themselves, they might make a donation and then asked me for some kind of helping. I'm good with that to me when we can win the money of game together by just helping each other. That's the world I love living him. So this exact format, I ask it, and this is why I ask it in. And if you were one of the people's texted me recently, this a message you just got. Always personalize it always start with their name. I always start with the name to show that I'm thinking about that person specifically getting a generic IA anything that some kind of generic message. It was clearly completely copied and pasted without even the time to put my name in at the beginning of it. That annoys me because you didn't think of me personally, hardly all enough to take the time to at least type my name into it. Putting the name and at the front of it shows that at a bare minimum. You thought enough to put the person's name in at the very beginning and personalized the message that makes a big difference versus if I just copy and paste it and sent this out to a bunch of people without taking the specific time to think of that person like I message my friend from air from college. I imagined him when I typed his name out. I imagine him getting the message. I messaged a friend's brother, the friend said, Noah messages brother that I'm friends with. Also, I thought of him specifically when sending the message. Just typing the name out gives that specific person the attention. And that is one of the reasons most of us will feel a certain way when we get a message. Now. Sure, this may not make a difference. Five out of 10 people might not care whether you put the name on it or not blood. Well, that makes a big difference for some people ready? You've actually put the name on there or not. I hope this is useful for you figuring out exactly how to ask for money for your go Fund me project. You can see again here. Why? You want a nice short URL with it? And I hope this formats helpful for you. Once you've got a message that you know you're good with, then it's very easy to just asking, asking, asking, asking. Ask after that, as long as you're good with what you're saying that people, then it's good to go forward with it. When you've got a message like this, you don't want to send it all out too much. You want to be available when people respond. If I send out more than, like 20 or 30 of these in the day, what happens when five or 10 people respond? All the sudden? I'm overwhelmed with messages, so I recommend when you get a good message, pace yourself with it and keep using it. And then if there's something you need to tweak on the message than the first people, you message can kind of help you get that. This message is significantly different than the first version I sent out. And this is tweet. After getting the initial feedback getting my shorter you are l. And putting it in a format that I can ask anyone and realizing if just someone shares this on social media, that's fine. And when someone says they don't have any money to donate, I can say, that's okay. Just sharing this on social media can be really helpful to get awareness out for it to get us thinking about it, to show, to help people find this project. So this leaves an open ended way for anyone to help. So I'm grateful for this message to share with you today, and I'm imagining how helpful this is for your project.
11. GoFundMe identify verification setups and bank account connection for withdrawals: what steps do we need to complete in order to actually get paid on? Go fund me. There is the verify identity step. When you try and go set up withdrawals. These are the exact things you'll need to provide. You will need to provide this information and have a Social Security number to continue. The first thing is to pick what kind of bank account you're going to use to verify your identity than the next step. You need to put your first name last name. You need to put your street address city country. You need to have a phone number with it that you can verify via text message or phone call . Then, once you've completed that step, you need to put in your last four digits of your Social Security number along with your date of birth. If go fund me is unable to use this information to finish the verification process, then they will ask for additional documentation. Once you've finished all that, you will be able to connect your bank account, including putting in your routing number, account number and bank name. It'll automatically fill in the bank name once you put your routing number and account number in the basic thing for account type is just rather it's savings or checking or personal only. Remember whatever. Once you've got that in, then you can set up withdrawals. You can set your withdrawals up on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. I'm doing mine weekly for simplicity in accounting. I don't see the need to have donations come in every single day. If my projects going really well and there's tons of donations coming in, I don't wait for those once a week. If people are just making occasional donations, I can wait once a week for that as well. If no one's donating, I can certainly wait, not get anything at all that way. So I've set mine up weekly just so. There's not as many transactions in my account, but it also gives me pretty study access to any of the new donations, which is great Faster I get the donations in, then I can pay the loans off directly instead of waiting a long time. So this is how you go through and get your identity verified. Connect your bank account. This is what the interface looks like on Go Fund me. I hope this is helpful to give you an idea of what information you need to have up front. I know. I always like to know what I'm getting into before I get into it. So here you go. You got it now.
12. Let's stay together!: thank you very much for finishing this. Go fund me course with me. You're welcome to check on the progress of my campaign and any time to get further validation and see what I'm actually doing. Based on my continued learning on my go fund me campaign and to get inspiration to see what might work for you. If you'd like to continue learning with me, I intend to teach video courses and make podcast episodes Blawg post for the rest of my life. I've got hundreds of pod cata episodes you might enjoy on my website at jury banfield dot com slash podcast. I've got many more video course that you might love and enjoy. I've got hundreds of blawg posts you might find helpful. I've got music, I've got books, I've got audio books and I every day I show up and I'm thinking, How may I help you? How may serve you How may make life easier for you if you are an entrepreneur online. I've got a partner program at jury beautiful dot com slash partners where you conjoined me have weekly calls with me If you really want to get connected with me and build a relationship. Help each other out. Have me get to know what you're doing. Collaborate. My partner program is the way to go. A jury. Bayfield dot com slash partners I'm grateful for the chance to serve you today. Thank you for making it to the end of this course I'm imagining when you found it. Super helpful. You'll take the time to leave a review because you feel good. You feel good giving back in that way if you're like me. I've listened on hundreds of audio books, the ones that have helped me out at all. I consistently leave five star reviews on them. I end up feeling good afterwards. I've got things like a reading list on my website. You can see the books I read that are most helpful, and that's all right. That's it. Thank you for being here, and I imagine I'll see you again soon. Rather, it's in another video course. My podcast is a partner wherever you are.
Jerry Banfield, Twitch Streamer, YouTuber, and Podcaster
