Humanitarian Crowdfunding

Humanitarian Crowdfunding is an emerging, donation-based crowdfunding vertical recognized by the humanitarian community. It is classified as child category, nested under the generic term "charitable giving".

Humanitarian stakeholders are working together to define humanitarian crowdfunding and establish reporting guidelines for humanitarian crowdfunding campaigns, bringing professional standards, proper aid activity reporting, transparency and accountability down to the crowdfunding level.

Presently, humanitarian crowdfunding campaigns are expected to be initiated by Aid agencies and raise support for activities falling within the scope of humanitarian and development activities classified by OECD DAC-CRS purpose codes and supplementary activity codes established by AidData. Campaigns and activities are also expected to adhere to common principles and universal minimum standards for humanitarian response outlined by the Sphere Project.

In practice, crowdfunding platforms like Crowdrise, Fundly, Generosity, GoFundMe, GlobalGiving, Indiegogo, StartSomeGood and YouCaring treat humanitarian activities differently. They use inconsistent terms to refer to humanitarian activities and aggregate humanitarian and non-humanitarian activities together, based on how Humanitarian Aid is defined. YouCaring for example loosely lists 21 subcategories under the term "humanitarian causes", including categories like Pets, Tuition, Neighbors and Sports.GIVEasia claims to be "Asia's Leading Humanitarian Crowdfunding Platform" while hosting a similar broad range of appeals.

Humanitarian crowdfunding is seen as an evolving vertical, adapting to humanitarian needs and input provided by humanitarian organizations. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and Beehive, a nonprofit, open source initiative improving humanitarian crowdfunding, see Humanitarian Crowdfunding heading toward a distributed-goal framework allowing data sourced from the humanitarian community to inform giving in real-time supporting humanitarian and development aid activities.

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