Which GoFundMe campaigns have raised the highest amounts ever?
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Executive summary
The largest single GoFundMe campaigns reported in the available coverage are a mix of memorial funds, politically charged efforts, and crisis-response drives — notably the “We Build the Wall” campaign that is widely reported to have peaked around $25 million, the George Floyd Memorial Fund which raised roughly $14.7 million, the Las Vegas shooting victims fund that raised roughly $12 million on GoFundMe before additional transfers increased family distributions, and the toy-drive for Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin that drew about $9 million in donations — these figures come from Newsweek, GoFundMe’s own reporting, Wikipedia and news coverage [1] [2] [3] [4].
1. The clear outlier: “We Build the Wall” and the $25 million headline
One of the single biggest totals repeatedly cited in commerical summaries is the “We Build the Wall” campaign, which industry recaps place near $25 million raised — a political, privately organized effort that attracted national attention and controversy, and which is still used as a touchstone for how crowdfunding can power activist or political projects [1]. The $25 million figure is reported by multiple secondary outlets included in the reporting set, but those pieces also note that the campaign’s ambitions and legal entanglements complicate simple comparisons with charitable memorial or relief drives [1].
2. Memorial and mass‑tragedy funds: George Floyd and Vegas as mass‑giving moments
The George Floyd Memorial Fund was one of the most-donated-to campaigns on the platform, with reporting indicating about $14.7 million raised and more than 500,000 donations from 140 countries, which GoFundMe itself highlighted as a record in number of donors [2]. The October 2017 Las Vegas mass‑shooting fund established by local officials raised nearly $12 million on GoFundMe and, after being transferred to nonprofit structures, the effort ultimately distributed larger sums to victims and families — a chain of giving and transfer that Newsweek reported as part of that campaign’s complicated total [2]. These campaigns illustrate how memorial funds can mobilize both hyper‑local and global donors very rapidly [2].
3. High‑profile single‑issue spikes: Damar Hamlin and pandemic relief
High‑profile moments on live television or in news cycles can produce multi‑million‑dollar spikes: GoFundMe’s CEO and independent reporting point to the toy‑drive for NFL player Damar Hamlin as generating more than $9 million after his on-field collapse drew national attention [3]. Similarly, GoFundMe’s own reports describe massive, aggregated COVID‑19 relief totals — for example, campaigns supporting India’s oxygen supply surged into the “tens of millions” across multiple countries — but those are often collections of many campaigns rather than a single page [5]. GoFundMe’s platform reports therefore mix single-page behemoths with crisis-driven aggregates [5].
4. Platform totals, rankings and the limits of public lists
GoFundMe has periodically published “Year in Help” and giving-report summaries and the company and journalists have cited evolving cumulative totals — from $9 billion in earlier reports to public statements of $30 billion in donations since 2010 in later summaries — but the sources vary by date and methodology and do not provide a single authoritative, continually updated ranked list of every top campaign [6] [3] [7]. Newsweek and Business Insider have curated “biggest” lists at different times [2] [8], but those lists reflect snapshots and different inclusion rules (single campaign pages versus multi-page drives or transferred funds).
5. How to read headline totals: context, transfers and political baggage
When comparing the “biggest” GoFundMe campaigns, it matters whether totals are raw campaign pages, sums transferred to nonprofits, or aggregated multi‑campaign relief efforts; political campaigns like “We Build the Wall” carry different legal and reputational baggage than memorial funds, and platform updates sometimes revise counts or emphasize donor counts rather than final disbursements [1] [2]. The available reporting makes clear which high‑profile pages reached the largest headline amounts but stops short of producing a single, definitive ranking that accounts for transfers, refunds, or legal disputes, so any firm ranking must acknowledge those methodological gaps [2] [1] [3].