AI for Process, People for Heart: GoFundMe’s Tim Cadogan

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

Asking for help can be one of the hardest things we do, especially when we are navigating a crisis or an unfamiliar situation. Today's guest leads an organization using AI to make that first step easier, helping people share their stories, reach their communities, and unlock our human instinct to help one another.

Tim Cadogan (0:19)

Hi, I'm Tim Cadogan, and you are listening to Me, Myself, and AI.

Sam Ransbotham (0:25)

Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast from MIT Sloan Management Review, exploring the future of artificial intelligence. I'm Sam Ransbotham, Professor of Analytics at Boston College. I've been researching data analytics and AI at MIT SMR since 2014, with research articles, annual industry reports, case studies, and now 13 seasons of podcast episodes.

In each episode, corporate leaders, cutting-edge researchers, and AI policy makers join us to break down what separates AI hype from AI success.

My guest today is Tim Cadogan, the CEO of GoFundMe. GoFundMe is an online fundraising platform people use to raise money for themselves, for each other, and for causes they care about. People have raised more than $40 billion on it. Tim came to GoFundMe from the advertising world, and he's making an argument you don't hear very often. That asking for help is something that most people do only once, and it's difficult, but they have no chance to practice. GoFundMe can hand that first-timer the hard-won experience of the millions of people who've done it before, and I think that's interesting. Tim, thanks for being here.

Tim Cadogan (1:38)

Hey, Sam, thank you very much for having me on the show. It's a real pleasure to be here.

Sam Ransbotham (1:42)

Tell us a little bit about GoFundMe, what you're excited about, and particularly, what you're using artificial intelligence for.

Tim Cadogan (1:48)

Sure. Very simply, we're here to help people help each other, and it turns out that help is a very important part of all of our lives. We see a lot of people fundraising for charities, for nonprofits. One of the newer things we've been encouraging a lot is what we call community fundraising.

For example, American Cancer Society has had over 100,000 people do fundraisers in the last year to raise money for ACS, and they've done walks, they've done rides, they've done swims. Some of my favorites are community-oriented. We see a lot of community gardens, we see a lot of bookshops, particularly local bookshops. What we're trying to do is make it easier to ask for help.

We found a way to use AI to help us do that. Look forward to delving into that more, but that's one of our main investments, is how do we use this technology that can leverage the patterns of information behavior that we've seen over tens of millions of fundraisers, and put that in the hands of the next person who comes in an hour from now, and says, I'm not quite sure what to do. I'd like to do this, but I'm nervous, I'm anxious. Can you help me?

Sam Ransbotham (3:08)

Okay. Well, let's go through the details of that. You've got the smart fundraising coach, someone sitting there overwhelmed, not sure where to start.

What happens next?

Tim Cadogan (3:19)

Well, let's talk a bit about the situation that someone finds themselves in. So, very often, we ask for help when we have a need. And that need is often something quite significant in our lives, which mean that we're stressed, right? It could be that you're ill. It could be that your relative is ill, or a friend is facing a difficult situation. It can be a wonderful situation too, but often, when people start thinking about asking for help, it's something hard. So, there's a lot of emotion around that already.

And then fundraising, asking for help, is not familiar to most people. It's not something that we do regularly, and there are a lot of decisions to be made. I have a situation I want to tell people about, how do I tell that story?

How do I summarize that story? That's called a title of a fundraiser. What images do I use to convey what I'm about and what the situation is about? What goal do I set? How much money should I ask for? And so on. So you have a situation of really emotionally significant moment. You have stress and you have decisions that you haven't had to make before, all in front of you.

That is the situation of a fundraiser. And I'll just share with you like I have some direct experience of this because I live in Los Angeles and I live in the part of LA called Altadena that mainly burned down a year and a half ago. And while somehow our home survived, we evacuated, we were out for months, but most of my friends lost their homes. And we helped, of course, with some fundraisers. So just to live through that situation, feel that stress oneself.