Solving Crowdfunding Fraud with WordPress

Fraud has stained the crowdfunding community in general, but has especially impacted disease-related crowdfunding campaigns.

In February, a Florida family was charged with faking their child’s brain cancer to raise financial support for bogus medical costs. In another story, a woman attracted over $10,000 in donations using a false cancer claim.

When it comes to crowdfunding for disease, verifying the authenticity of the campaign is absolutely necessary. Trust and authenticity allow struggling families to raise more money from the general public.

Childhood cancer deserves better crowdfunding

Due to lack of federal funding, the childhood cancer community relies on crowdfunding and generous support from cancer foundations like Arms Wide Open.

Generic crowdfunding platforms do not verify the legitimacy of a fundraiser until after it is reported as fraudulent. Transaction fees also reduce the actual amount of funds raised.

A crowdfunding platform should focus on a specific niche so that the fundraisers benefit from the network effect of the platform.

Verified crowdfunding with Wordpress

We partnered with Arms Wide Open to build a crowdfunding platform focused on the childhood cancer niche. Our #1 goal was to create a system that made it easy to only publish verified fundraisers and allow families to keep 100% of the raised funds.

For this particular project, we decided to use WordPress to power the website.

We developed a simple, multi-step submission process that helped users easily submit the required verification information along with their campaign description.

During the campaign creation process, the user must enter in medical information that allows a volunteer to verify a child’s diagnosis.

Arms Wide Open manually approves and verifies each campaign individually, so a custom submission process was critical to their needs. Once a user submits their campaign for approval, the admin can easily publish the campaign after the medical information is verified. This provided a simplified administrative process, enabling foundation volunteers to easily manage the website.

Since users have ownership over their campaign, we decided to create a simplified dashboard providing an overview of useful statistics about the user’s published campaigns such as progress towards goals, share counts, contributors and more.

Simplifying the user dashboard to only show relevant information significantly reduced support requests and provided users with a quick snapshot of their overall fundraiser performance.

With most users typically submitting fundraisers while in a hospital on a mobile device, it was critical the entire process was simplified for mobile.

Most users were referred by Facebook, so adding a one-click login with Facebook that immediately directed to the fundraiser creation page streamlined the process for mobile users.

Impact

To date, Helping Hands campaigns have raised over $450,000 for childhood cancer patients and their families. Arms Wide Open covers all transaction fees to ensure families keep 100% of any funds raised. Helping Hands is completely free and all costs are completely covered by Arms Wide Open. For every $10,000 raised, Arms Wide Open covers approximately $300 in transaction fees.

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