Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to this full tutorial and user's guide on how to set up and start your first GoFundMe campaign. Now GoFundMe is a crowdfunding platform that allows people to raise money for a variety of different causes, including medical expenses, education, disaster relief, even as simple as possibly a wedding registry where you're trying to get money for your honeymoon or whatever it may be. So if you're looking to raise money for a cause that's important to you, whether it be for you personally or a friend, GoFundMe can be a great way to do it. Just make sure you use it appropriately. So I'm going to walk you through the steps involved in setting up your own GoFundMe campaign from start to finish. So again, we're going to go ahead and start with the different steps that it's going to take. First, you create an account, then you choose your fundraiser title and story. You add photos and videos, set a goal and a deadline, and then share the campaign and watch hopefully the money roll in. So here we are on the GoFundMe homepage. In order to get here, go to your browser of choice and just Google GoFundMe or just go to GoFundMe.com. And then when you're ready to start your first campaign, you'll see the button here that says start a GoFundMe right here in the center or in the upper right hand corner. Once we click on start a GoFundMe, it's going to then go ahead and present you with the process and the different steps. So it'll first ask you where you are located. So for me, I'm located in the United States and the zip code that I'm going to put for this tutorial is this one right here. Now it's going to ask you what best describes why you're fundraising. So for me, I'm going to say this is for a sports team or a youth sports team. Just for the purposes of this video, go ahead and select which one is applicable to your campaign and just click the green continue button below. Now this page has had a few changes over the years. You are now going to select who you're fundraising for. You can do yourself, someone else or charity, which is a rather new option. So for me, I'm raising funds for myself and my team, but it could also be someone else like other people's kids for the sports team. So I'm going to select someone else because I found that if people think they're giving to a good cause and someone else, and they're not just giving you money, you may have a better chance of meeting your goal and getting the funds that you need. But again, you need to choose the one that is applicable to your campaign. Next we're going to click the green continue button once more. Now to get all of the uniforms and things that I need for this youth soccer team, I'm going to set a nice round number goal of a thousand us dollars. Now in order to receive the money, once it's been raised, you have to provide, go fund me with a us social security number, a bank account and mailing address in one of the 50 States in the desired location that you chose earlier. So understanding all of that is important. Also there are going to be charges or transaction fees, including credit and debit charges. They're deducted from each donation. So if someone donates with a credit or debit card, just like if you're a merchant and you're accepting these types of payment methods, you're going to see a slight, a little bit of a surcharge when that happens. So understanding all of that, as we move forward, go ahead and make sure that the currency is the one that you want. So for me, it's USD or us dollars, and I'm going to click continue down in the right hand corner. Next, it's going to ask us to create an account if we haven't already. And if you're watching this video, I'm assuming you haven't. So go ahead and fill in these details. Now, once you've typed in your first and last name, your email address, and the password, go ahead and click the signup button in the lower right-hand corner. Once you've done so, it'll then ask you to provide a phone number to keep your account safe. So go ahead and do that. Now it'll ask you to type in the code sent to your phone number. Go ahead and type that in. That'll verify. And then now we're going to add a cover photo or video. It's going to let you know that using bright and clear photos helps people connect with you and your fundraiser campaign. So this is where you are going to either add a link to an uploaded YouTube video, say for the soccer team that I'm providing here today for this video, or a nice little photo. So what I'm going to do now is click right here where it says, drag or upload your photo. I'm going to click there and I'm going to find the photo of the soccer team on my computer. And I'm going to either double click or click open here. And it's going to ask me to crop the image, how I want to crop it. And once I do, I can even zoom in or out of the image, rotate the image. If that's something that you want to do. And once you have it, the desired results, go ahead and click done. And it's going to save the image and upload that as your cover photo. Now you can also have a cover video, but it has to be an uploaded video to YouTube. So you need to upload the video to YouTube and then just provide the link here where it says, add a YouTube link below where the images. Once you have your cover image, like we do here, you can go back and edit it by clicking the pencil icon, or you can remove it altogether by clicking on the trash can, go ahead and click continue. Once you're done with your cover photo or video, then you're going to give your fundraiser a title and tell the story. This is probably the most important part or aspect of the entire campaign. So go ahead and title your fundraiser and go ahead and write a little short story explaining exactly why you need the money and what the money's going to be used for. All right. So here you can see I've titled my fundraiser, help the comments get the gear they need. Now let me give you a little bit of a pro tip. If you go to an AI tool, say Google bard or chat GPT, whichever one you like using, you can type in the prompt. I'm creating a campaign on GoFundMe for whatever it is. And then I put, write a heartwarming story as to why the kids or why I need the money and what it will be used for and give it a few more prompts and some more details. And it'll provide you with a nice story and information, kind of a baseline to go from to where you can go in and tweak and add a more personal touch. Once you have the nice grammatical errors and things figured out, you can either write it yourself or you can go to an AI tool like that to provide it for you. So once you have the story and the title, uh, you can see here that we can add images to that. So I can add a nice little image here to the actual story. I can crop that, uh, and add that image to the story itself. Uh, I can also add links and I can make things bold and videos. All of that will be down here below. If I have a part of it that I want to make sure it's bold, I can do that as well. Works very much like a normal word processor does. You just want to make sure it looks clean. As you can see, the images can be moved around and centered, uh, the way that you may need them here within the story. And then once you are done, you click the green review button here and it's going to allow you to review everything that we've just done. So it's going to allow you to preview your GoFundMe campaign. So as you can see, here is the cover image. There's my title. You can see this is where people can share it. This is where they can donate and this is my name letting them know I'm organizing the fundraiser as well as the category. So here is the story that I've inputted for the purposes of the video. Here's a nice image. And then you can see people can make a donation, uh, and it'll let them know if they want to show up as anonymous or their name in the feed of people who have supported. And then people can give you words of support alongside their donation. So as you can see, this is my GoFundMe campaign. Now, once you do this and you go to launch fundraiser, obviously this is a fake fundraiser for the purposes of this video. It will be live, but no one's going to know about it until you share it. So in order to share it, you can see here, there's going to be a share button. You click that it'll bring up the link or links in order for you to share that on your Facebook, on your Twitter, Instagram, wherever you have the biggest following or people who you think would be able to help you in reading or, you know, reaching your goal. Now, depending on how you set up your campaign, it does have to reach the threshold or the goal in order for people to be kind of deducted their money and in turn for you to be able to get the money yourself to use for the purposes. The thing about GoFundMe and other places and sites like GoFundMe is that people have unfortunately soured the way that people feel about it because they use GoFundMe and they try to trick people to give them money for campaigns and causes that just aren't real. So make sure you're using it to the best way that you should be using it. If you have any questions about GoFundMe or anything else, please let me know a couple of additional tips for running a successful campaign. Be clear and concise. Don't run on with long runoff sentences. Add photos and videos to your campaign. Photos and videos obviously make it more personal and people can see and almost touch and feel the people or the thing that they're trying to raise money for. Set a deadline for your campaign. Don't make it ever ending. Set something for say two weeks or a month out, whatever it may be. Share it with as many people as possible. Be responsive to donors, respond, thank them. And then if you follow these tips, you should definitely increase your chances of having a successful GoFundMe campaign. If you have any further questions after watching all of this, please put those in the comment section below. If this video helps you out, don't forget to like share and subscribe and I will see you guys in the next video.