Beyond the Platform: What GoFundMe Taught Us About Nonprofit Tech Ownership

This week, headlines broke that GoFundMe quietly created fundraising pages for 1.4 million nonprofits across the U.S. Most of those organizations had no idea the pages even existed. It’s a perfect, if uncomfortable, illustration of where nonprofits stand today in the digital landscape. Tech platforms are moving faster than most organizations can keep up with, and if you don’t actively manage your digital presence, someone else will.

That’s not a dig at GoFundMe. Their intent was to make it easier for donors to find and give to nonprofits. But it highlights a bigger truth: digital transformation isn’t optional anymore. It’s not just about adopting tools; it’s about owning your identity, your data, and your narrative in an increasingly automated world.

When platforms create something on your behalf without asking, it’s a sign that your digital footprint isn’t fully under your control. For many nonprofits, that’s the wake-up call. If you’re running a nonprofit today, you have to ask yourself who controls your donor data, where your stories live, and what happens if a platform changes the rules or shuts down tomorrow. For years, we’ve relied on “free” or convenient tech to manage fundraising, communications, and volunteers. But convenience can come with a cost: loss of visibility, fragmented data, or misaligned branding that confuses your supporters. The GoFundMe situation reminds us that digital transformation starts with digital ownership. Before you chase new technology, make sure you truly own the assets that represent your mission online.

Let’s be clear: digital transformation isn’t about buying software. It’s about restructuring how your organization operates around technology that works for you, not the other way around. It means automating what’s repeatable so staff can focus on mission-critical work, connecting systems so fundraising, communications, and program data actually talk to each other, and making decisions based on insight, not instinct. Most importantly, it’s about protecting donor trust by managing data responsibly.

When I started my nonprofit career, we used to duct-tape systems together—email lists in one place, event registrations in another, donor CRM halfway updated somewhere else. It worked, sort of, but it wasn’t transformation. It was survival. True digital transformation is when technology becomes your infrastructure, not your headache. It’s when your organization operates seamlessly, with staff empowered by tools that make their work more meaningful instead of more complicated.

At the heart of any modern nonprofit technology strategy are five ideas: ownership, automation, security, scalability, and literacy. Data ownership means not relying solely on third-party platforms as your donor database and making sure your records are secure, accessible, and exportable. Automation means freeing your team from repetitive administrative tasks so they can focus on building relationships and delivering programs. Security means treating donor information with the highest level of care and transparency, ensuring your supporters know their trust is earned and maintained. Scalability means choosing cloud-based systems that can grow with you rather than hold you back. And digital literacy means making sure your team (not just one tech-savvy person) feels confident navigating and adopting new systems.

If all of this feels overwhelming, start small. Begin with a technology audit to understand where your data lives and who controls it. Then, take back ownership of your digital profiles, including any GoFundMe pages that might have been created without your knowledge. Clean up your logins and security, and identify one process to modernize: maybe automating thank-you messages, consolidating donor records, or streamlining communications between departments. Transformation doesn’t happen overnight. It happens one workflow at a time.

The nonprofits that thrive over the next decade will be those that move as fast as their cause deserves. They’ll understand that “digital” isn’t a department or a project; it’s part of how we lead. If GoFundMe can spin up a million nonprofit pages overnight, imagine what your organization could do with that same energy, but with intention, alignment, and full ownership.

Don’t wait for platforms to define your presence. Define it yourself. Digital transformation isn’t about keeping up with technology; it’s about taking back control of your mission’s digital future.