Behind the Build: How GoFundMe reimagined fundraiser creation as a conversation.

Most people who create a GoFundMe have never done it before.

They're not marketers or storytellers. They're a parent whose child just received a diagnosis. A neighbor rallying support after a house fire. A friend trying to help a friend. They come to the platform in some of the hardest moments of their lives — vulnerable, overwhelmed, and facing a blank page.

That tension is what led GoFundMe's product team to rethink fundraiser creation from the ground up. "We expected the organizer to come, share a title, write a story, figure out a goal, add images, and then publish the fundraiser for the world to see without having ever done it before," says Taruvar Aggarwal, a product manager at GoFundMe. "That's a lot to ask of someone going through the hardest situation of their life."

Meeting people where they are

GoFundMe has always believed in the power of human coaching, recognizing that a knowledgeable, empathetic guide can help an organizer tell their story more effectively and reach more donors. The challenge was scale. So the team started asking: what would it look like to expand that coaching experience for millions of fundraisers?

Today, when someone starts a fundraiser on GoFundMe, they're met with a conversation. The agent, powered by Sierra, asks about their situation, provides prompts, and helps them build a story, a title, a goal, and a set of images, without the organizer feeling like they're just filling something out. By the end, they have a complete fundraiser, shaped by a process that felt more like guided support.

The agent draws on knowledge from millions of past fundraisers to offer guidance that's genuinely contextual. If you're fundraising for a sick pet, it might suggest adding a photo of the two of you together, or including a vet bill, because those details help donors connect with the reality of your situation. The goal, as Aggarwal puts it, is to guide people "in a way that resonates" while never compromising the authenticity of their story. "It is not about getting them to write a story that just reads well technically," he says. "You're not taking away their ability to write their true story."

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Measuring what actually matters

When it came time to evaluate impact, the team made a deliberate choice: they would not optimize for publish rate or time-to-publish. Those numbers were never the point.

Instead, they asked a harder question: were they actually providing organizers with the support they needed to create fundraiser content during a difficult time? They used surveys, qualitative interviews, and LLM-based evaluation to understand how organizers felt about the experience. The results were striking. Sixty-five to seventy-five percent of organizers said the agent made fundraising feel less stressful. They felt more supported. And perhaps most meaningfully: they felt less alone in the fundraising journey.

"That last one is very meaningful to me," Aggarwal says, "because that's what we were trying to do."

The quantitative results followed. Organizers raised 5% more in donations, which - based on early results - could result in an estimated $125 million in additional help raised in the U.S. this year. But for the GoFundMe team, those numbers feel secondary to the thing they were actually chasing: the sense that someone going through a crisis had a coach to help them put their story into words and ask for support when they needed it most.

The organizational work behind the product work

Getting there wasn't just a technology challenge. Aggarwal is clear on this: shipping from pilot to production is fundamentally an organizational problem.

Before GoFundMe wrote any code for the agent, they built a governance committee, bringing legal, marketing, policy, and cross-functional teams into the room to define what the agent could and couldn't do. They ran millions of simulations and red team exercises. They kept scope narrow by design, limiting the initial rollout by geography, user persona, and lifecycle stage. Not because they lacked ambition, but because they understood that trust had to be earned before it could be extended.

"Trust is fragile," Aggarwal says. "Even before you think about a pilot, please build those governance structures."

They also resisted the pull to measure everything. Choosing a small set of metrics that reflected what they actually cared about, and ignoring the ones that didn't, gave the team clarity and kept the work grounded in the original intent.

What GoFundMe built isn't just a better onboarding flow. It's an expression of what they've always believed: that the right kind of support, at the right moment, can change what's possible for someone in need. The agent doesn't replace that belief. It scales it.