Sharing Helps More Than You'd Think

We hear a version of this a lot: "I can't donate right now, so I feel like I can't really help." We get it — money is tight for a lot of people. But it turns out sharing a campaign is one of the biggest levers there is, with real data behind it.

A share is worth more than it looks like

3× more likely Campaigns shared more than six times in their first few days were three times as likely to go on to raise significantly more than campaigns shared less often.

Source: "The State of Modern Philanthropy 2023," a joint report from Classy and GoFundMe, covering 34 million donors.

5% more money, platform-wide In its own internal testing, GoFundMe found that getting just 10 percentage points more of its campaigns shared at all — not shared more, just shared instead of not shared — produced a 5% increase in total donation volume across the whole platform.

Source: GoFundMe's product analytics case study, published by Amplitude.

+17% in early donations Peer-reviewed research on crowdfunding found that simply seeing social proof — evidence that other people are engaging with a campaign — increased donations by about 17%, and the effect was strongest during a campaign's earliest, most fragile stage.

Source: peer-reviewed study on crowdfunding information-sharing, published via PMC.

Why this matters even more for a zero-donation campaign

A separate study looked at what happens when a crowdfunding campaign gets bumped in front of people who don't already know the person running it — a stranger's feed rather than a friend's. Donations jumped by 257%, and almost all of that increase came from people with no personal connection to the campaigner at all.

That's the exact mechanism this whole board is built around. A campaign with zero donations is usually just one that nobody outside the organizer's own circle has seen yet. Every share is a small, free version of that same "front page" effect: it puts a real need in front of someone who was never going to find it on their own.

Hit "Share" on a campaign card here, or just paste the campaign link into a group chat, a story, a comment. It takes fifteen seconds and it does not cost you anything. Based on the numbers above, that fifteen seconds is doing real, measurable work — arguably more per second than almost anything else you could do for a campaign you can't personally fund right now.

Go back to the board and share something. Read more about the project on our Why Boost Board Exists post.