Tania Burstin: Crowdfunding, Crises and Ethics

Have you ever raised money for a cause online? Have you ever donated to a crowdfunding or fundraising platform? If so, you’ve participated in the online fundraising sector.

While online fundraising has undoubtedly been a huge benefit to charities, exposing their brand and their work to a global audience and raising enormous amounts of money in the process – it is a murky ethical area.

What responsibility do fundraising platforms hold when it comes to whether or not to host a charity, or a personal fundraiser? Is it enough for a charity to be legally registered, or do fundraising platforms have an obligation to take a position on the ethics of a cause? What about personal fundraisers? How do we regulate who can fundraise, what for, and where the money will go? What about Celeste Barber’s $51million bushfire campaign that ended up in court?

I invited Tania Burstin, the founder and managing director of mycause, Australia’s first online fundraising platform to chat with me about these issues. Tania started mycause after noticing a gap in the market for donation sponsorship. Mycause has now grown to have over 6500 charity partners and has raised more than $140 million for Australian community groups, charities and individuals.

Tania was named in the Female FinTech Founders project as a fintech entrepreneur in 2018 and a Monash University Global Fellow in 2019. She is a thought leader in the crowdfunding community and regularly commentates on charitable fundraising in Australia.

Tania is reading American Wife: A Novel by Curtis Sittenfeld