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May 23, 2022 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
53:57
GiveSendGo co-founder Heather Wilson interviewed by Mike Adams about GIVING for all the right reason
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This is forcing us, the climate of our country today is forcing people to stop being so complacent and actually go and do something so that we can, if we don't like, and this is what, you know, the free marketplace, this is what's great about America.
If you don't like how something's being run, create your own.
Welcome to the Health Ranger Report here on Brighton.tv.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon.
And in this realm of freedom of speech and freedom to engage in transactions and contracts and so on, there's a lot of suppression out there by big tech.
And not just, you know, the speech platforms, social media, but also the financial platforms, including fundraising platforms.
Well, today we have a special guest with us who is the co-founder of GiveSendGo.com, which is a Christian-based fundraising platform slash network that helps people raise money for worthy causes without the insane censorship of some of the other platforms out there.
Her name is Heather Wilson, and GiveSendGo was launched in 2016.
She's going to join us for this entire show here on Brighteon TV today, and we're going to find out...
What Give, Send, Go is all about and where it's going next.
Stay with us here on Bright Town TV. All right, folks.
Thanks for joining me today.
This is a really fascinating interview.
I reached out to Heather to get this set up because GiveSendGo.com is doing such amazing work to help people raise money for worthy causes without the censorship of other platforms.
So, Heather, you're the co-founder.
I want to welcome you to the show today.
It's an honor and a privilege to have you on here.
Well, thank you for the invite.
I look forward to our discussion.
Well, absolutely.
Now, more and more people are hearing about GiveSendGo.com.
We just recently announced a campaign on behalf of Greg Caton, who's been one of our guests, and he's on life support in Ecuador at the moment.
And your platform is hosting that fundraising, which is, I think, $10,000 or something or more than that right now.
So, personally, I just want to thank you, because I don't think a lot of other platforms would have Welcome that.
Just because Greg Caton exercises free speech.
So give us your, if you would please, kind of describe what is Give, Send, Go all about and your willingness to host people that other platforms would ban.
Sure.
So, well, Gibson, like you said, the first real year that we were fully available was 2016, but we had about a year and a half prior to that of developing the website and figuring out what we were going to do.
And it was my brother and I, we're co-founders.
We had this great idea that, you know, GoFundMe, you're starting to see it become something on, you know, social media was...
Becoming bigger and you start seeing these campaigns and we were talking about what it would look like if Christians were to do that, like see a need and then everybody give a little and help people.
That's what we should be doing.
And so we looked around to see if there was anything available and there really wasn't anything viable in the marketplace.
And so we said, well, let's Launched this.
And we started, again, almost seven years ago, walking down this journey of developing the site, marketing the site, not really actually knowing what we were doing.
We bootstrapped this thing and we just had this idea.
And now, looking back, we know that God planted the idea back then so that today there would be a vehicle that would not be censoring people.
Otherwise, there would be no funding vehicle in the marketplace today.
For conservatives or people who maybe have a different side than mainstream media.
Well, yeah.
Thank you for giving that description.
And I think it seems to a lot of viewers, certainly our viewers, that the GoFundMes of the world, they are happy to host fundraisers for murderers, violent criminals, terrorists, as long as they're on the political side of the leftist.
And I know you're not all about the political, the politics of all this.
You host a big diversity of different things.
It seems like those platforms, they don't mind hosting terrorists, but then Kyle Rittenhouse, who has been found innocent.
They banned him from their network when all he was doing was defending himself and the courts have now affirmed that.
The jury has affirmed that.
So go ahead and speak about Kyle Rittenhouse and that candidate.
So about a year and a half ago, you know, we're just plugging away.
We're growing year after year and becoming the Christian alternative.
And then all of a sudden, one day we wake up to a lot of hate mail and death threats and we're like, what's going on?
So we scroll to the site.
And we see this campaign where this young man named Kyle Rittenhouse and, you know, we're reading things on him and someone had come to our platform and started a campaign for Kyle because he had been taken off every other platform.
And so we look at it and we're immediately, this is a new situation for us.
And so we say, okay, are we going to allow this?
We have to like figure out, is this something that we're going to allow?
And If so, why?
And if not, why not?
And so as we started to talk about this, it almost became incredible that the other platforms weren't allowing it.
Because first off, this man, all he wanted to, this young man, all he wanted to do is raise money for legal defense.
Well, last I looked, in the United States, anybody can...
Hire any attorney that they can afford.
It shouldn't just be for the wealthy people.
And so people even with no means should be able to raise money, whether it's a spaghetti dinner or whether a car wash or give, send, go.
They should be able to raise money for a lawyer and get the best lawyer they can so that when they go to court, if they are guilty, it's not because they didn't have a good lawyer why they got thrown behind bars.
And so all this stuff was coming out about Kyle.
We didn't know more than anybody else what was true, what wasn't true.
Everything was being spouted in little spurts.
Everybody was making all these claims.
No one really knew what was going on.
And so we said, you know what, we live in a country where you're supposed to be presumed innocent until you're found innocent or guilty in a court of law.
And so we're going to allow this campaign with the presumption of innocence.
And even if he did it, even if he went out and he shot those people On purpose.
He deserves to be able to defend himself on why he did it.
And so we allowed him the campaign.
It threw us into this media spotlight.
These people attacking our sites, trying to take us down.
Discover card, issuing a memo, a leaked memo that they weren't going to allow people with their own Discover cards to give to Kyle's campaign on Give, Send, Go.
And I haven't checked recently, but Facebook, even the day after Kyle was found not guilty, they still wouldn't allow his campaign URL to be shared.
That's right.
Even the day after.
Crazy craziness.
But then we became the known as a platform, and they have lots of names.
If you were to Google Give, Send, Go, they have lots of derogatory names for us that are not true.
true.
We simply exist for freedom, both freedoms that we believe spiritually happens and physically happens that we have in the United States, both which came at a really high price.
And so, you know, we're not focused on the politics.
People want to say, oh, are you a right-leaning website?
And we say, no, we don't lean either way.
We just stand for freedom because our goal is to share the hope we found in Jesus to anybody who comes on our platform.
Okay.
So, um, Thank you again for that detailed answer.
You have really thought through this quite a bit.
But as I'm known to do, I'm going to press you on this a little bit and let's explore your values, your philosophy.
What are your current principles?
So if everybody deserves a defense, you're a Christian network.
How do you balance that?
So a CNN producer has recently been charged with child trafficking by the Justice Department.
And he was trafficking, you know, allegedly by the Justice Department, girls as young as nine years old and doing horrible things.
So what if somebody wants to raise money for his legal defense on your Christian platform?
Is that allowed?
So this is something, you know, it's a question we wrestle with, right?
So this isn't something we take lightly.
We're not just like, oh, yeah, we love this.
There's a lot of campaigns even now on Give, Send, Go that personally, I wouldn't want to hang out with the person.
I think what the person did was horrendous.
I think he or she are bad.
Bad people.
Just reading the story and hearing people write in about them.
It's not that I'm going, oh, I want to give to this person.
Give, send, go doesn't give to campaigns on the site.
We don't share campaigns.
We're not pushing these as our agenda any more than Facebook or Twitter that have people on there saying ridiculous things on both sides of the aisle.
Or, you know, that doesn't mean it's Facebook's agenda either or Twitter's.
And we look at ourselves the same.
Now, one of the good things about crowdfunding is if you're a child molester or rapist, or you're not going to find it easy to solicit donations because guess who's going to give you donations?
Your friends and family.
So that was one of the things we noticed with Kyle was that all of a sudden he was getting And it told us there might be another side to the story that we weren't being told by media.
And so we were like, we need to step back and not be the judge and jury.
Because like you said, even with this case, it's alleged.
What if it's not what they're telling us?
And we're finding that more and more we can't believe what they're telling us.
And so I don't...
We're going to always, you know...
Give ourselves grace to maybe not always make the right decision.
We say that if you say, I want to raise money for a bomb so I can go bomb the White House, well, we're not going to allow you to raise money to go do something criminal.
We're not going to allow you to raise money to kill a child, even in your womb.
There are certain things that we say that are very...
Things that we believe in that we're not going to just allow you to go and harm somebody else on purpose.
But a lot of times there's some gray area because we know we don't know all the situation.
And so just like that guy, he deserves a full defense with the best lawyer he can get so that when he's found guilty, they lock him away and there's nothing he can do about it because he had the best defender he could do and he's still lost because he's a creep, you know?
Right, right.
Right.
So you're really kind of a free speech purist and you believe in the free marketplace.
Let the people vote or not vote on who they want to support is what it sounds like.
And that is how crowdfunding typically works.
You know, most people, when they raise money, they say, I'm going on a missions trip.
And they ask their friends and family and church and neighbors to give to them.
And then grandma knows if you went on your missions trip or not.
So it kind of like self-regulates, right?
Because if you don't go on your missions trip, she's going to be like, give me my 200 bucks back.
And so it kind of self-regulates.
It's when these campaigns get bigger and go viral that we tell people, make sure you do your due diligence, right?
Give, send, go will make sure that the name that is listed as the recipient on a campaign is the actual person who's getting the funds.
So we 100% guarantee if it says John Smith is getting the funds, then John Smith's bank account is attached to that.
We will guarantee that.
But...
We can't guarantee what John Smith is going to use that money for.
Of course.
So make sure you know, and we tell people this all the time, when you give to somebody, either give just knowing that they might spend the money somehow you don't want them to, but that you give knowing you trust them, that...
You know, it's your sister, and you know she's going to go help with this house fire across the street.
Right, right.
It's like Hunter Biden's campaign.
He says, I'm raising money for paint and canvases.
It ends up spending it on crack and hookers.
So, you know, if you donate to Hunter Biden, that's your fault.
And there's nothing you can do.
You know, exactly.
We believe that people are smart enough, and maybe they're not, but that doesn't matter to us.
Like, you can make your own decision.
Why would Discover Card step in and say, we won't let you use the card that we issued you with money on it to give to whatever you want?
Like, I get not funding terrorists or something along, you know, something crazy, but like giving to a campaign for someone's legal fees, I could call up any commissary of people who are In prison, convicted of heinous crimes, and I could donate or give money to their commissary account with my credit cards.
And so why can't someone who's being charged with a crime, not even convicted yet, why can't I give there?
It was like they wanted to strong arm a result that they wanted.
And that's where we step in and say, no, we're not doing that.
Well, that brings up an important question because your site offers merchant processing of donations via credit cards.
You've already mentioned Discover.
I would imagine you've received pressure from merchant processing.
You've had to source out maybe alternative merchant processors.
Now, I mean, you don't have to share anything that's a trade secret or what have you, but how do you even keep that going?
You know, we have redundancies upon redundancies.
We saw the writing on the wall pretty quick as people were just trying to even take us down off our servers.
It wasn't a place that we ever thought we would be, but we found out really quickly we needed to have backups of backups.
You know, when we all saw, was it Patreon?
Not Patreon.
Was it Patreon?
What got taken down?
Parler.
When Parler got taken down and then all of a sudden wasn't able to get up for months.
And we were like, we're not going to be that platform that gets taken down off our servers and can't get back up.
So we're going to have backups of backups where we can pull a trigger.
If our processor won't allow you to raise funds, well, we have a backup processor and we're working on becoming a processor ourselves.
Okay.
That stands behind what we want to...
That believes in what we're doing.
And again, our whole platform is not just for right side or left side.
We don't care.
We believe in freedom across the board.
If someone, let's say on the left came and made a campaign for something I didn't agree with, that's great.
There's a lot of things I don't agree with.
We are simply here to share again, the hope of Jesus through crowdfunding.
We have a whole team.
I don't know if you know this, but that calls every, we hire them.
They call every single campaign that gets launched on Gives and Go and offers to pray in person with them on the phone.
Wow.
And by the way, prayer is working for Greg Caton.
We've called for worldwide prayer in addition to the funding campaign.
And you probably don't know Greg, but he is an incredible person, a gift to this world, and there has been healing taking place.
The doctors are amazed.
They thought he was gone.
He's not.
He's recovered.
But we can get into the power of prayer, I guess, separately.
But on a practical note, You just said something that lit up a giant light bulb in my brain.
If you're going to become a merchant processor, I know about 500 business owners representing hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue that would switch to you.
And we know that, too.
We get emails all the time because people are wondering how we haven't been taken down yet.
And we're at the very, very beginning stages of just...
Seeing what's out there, seeing who we can partner with, asking God to bring the right people so that we can start down this journey.
But we see the writing on the wall that it is where we need to go.
We're actually getting ready to launch a whole new site design.
We're in the testing stages, so we're getting close.
And with that new site design, we're also offering a cryptocurrency ability to give on our site as well.
Because we, again, we're trying to cover all the different avenues that will help us continue to be able to grow and offer our platform.
Oh, that's great.
That's great.
And I think Andrew Torba, founder of Gab, I think I heard him say he was looking at launching a bank in order to, you know, become the financial system.
And ultimately, I think that's what all of us have to do.
All of us who are Christians, we're going to have to create a parallel Christian economy.
And you're part of it.
You're a big part of it.
And, you know, we are part of it.
We're parallel Christian free speech video site, you know?
So this is how it happens.
And this is, I think, you know, we can look at our world today and go, how did we become like this?
Like, what in the world is going on?
This is so different than the America of even, you know, when I was a kid.
And it's changed so quickly.
And we can get...
Feeling down and nervous and scared and all of those things.
But I go, there's a bright light that is shining right now.
And it's because we are being forced to not be complacent any longer.
We've been complacent.
For years and years, the Facebooks were comfortable and easy to use and they were great, easy platforms to stay connected to friends and family.
The Amazons, so easy to get packages delivered the next day.
How much money do we give to Amazons and their web servers?
And all these different pieces, banks, even banks, big banks that are using our money for ways we would never approve of them to use our money.
But secondly, also then coming back and not allowing us to use our money, you know, the way we want to use it.
And so we're seeing that this is forcing us, the climate of our country today is forcing people to stop being so complacent and actually go and do something so that we can, if we don't like, and this is what, you know, the free marketplace.
This is what's great about America.
If you don't like how something's being run, create your own.
You really get it.
No, you really get it.
And I would just add that so many of those other institutions and big tech and so on, of course they're easy and convenient.
The path of Satanism has always been the seductive easy path.
And folks, if you read the Bible, I mean almost any part of it, the path of walking in the footsteps of what God has planned for you is usually the difficult path.
And then even people who are with God at first, and then they get sucked into the easy Satan path, and they turn from God, and then their life falls apart, their civilization falls apart.
Read it.
It's all documented over and over again.
You know, when we say all the time, we say, you know, the world...
The world we're living in makes us think that there's a dividing line and that line is red and blue, right?
So you're either one side or the other.
Families are falling apart over it.
No one can have civil discussions.
There's just accusations and hate on both sides.
And we keep reminding ourselves and our teams at Gives and Go that that's not the dividing line.
That is smoke and mirrors to keep us preoccupied with the final dividing line, which is the narrow road and the wide road.
And it says that wide road leads to destruction.
And just like you said, it's an easy road because it seems like everybody's on it and it's fun and it's easy.
And then there's a narrow road of saying, no, I'm going to live with conviction and I'm going to live following the way, the truth, and the life.
It was Jesus.
And that's a harder life to live, especially as we start seeing what we consider persecution.
And I don't think being shadow banned on Facebook is the ultimate persecution, but I have a feeling it's coming.
And we read the book and we can tell it's coming.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Okay, so let me ask you a practical question.
What's your revenue model?
How do you pay your bills out of all the donations and transactions that are going?
You also have risk.
I want to ask you about fraud later.
Some people may deliberately try to defraud your system.
So you have overhead, you have costs, you have R&D costs.
How do you cover all that?
Yeah, so when we first started, you know, we thought, okay, well, GoFundMe at the time was charging 5% plus processing fees.
Plus?
Oh, wow.
Let's come in a little bit lower than that, you know, because we want to be the competitor.
We're new on the scene.
So for the first couple months, we were probably like at 4% or 4.5% and said, hey, we're cheaper.
And then a couple months in, we really started to feel like that wasn't the way God was leading us.
He wanted us to become this free platform, where obviously there are processing fees, and that's a third-party processor, so we can't get rid of those because they're not ours.
They don't go to us.
But as far as on our end, not charging a platform fee.
And so we decided that we were going to become a free platform besides, you know, that we wouldn't charge a platform fee.
And so we would just allow it up to the giver to, if they wanted to donate a little bit to us when they donated to the campaign, that they would be able to.
Now, We realized that the person raising money usually is in a pretty desperate situation and needs all the money they can get.
So it seemed like a wise thing to let the giver, if they have a little extra money, to give.
And we found it worked.
And a couple years later, all of a sudden, if you go to GoFundMe, it's the same model.
We just say, though, we did it out of obedience because we really feel like that's where God was leading us.
And they did it out of some marketing.
Right.
So just walk us through that user experience.
So when they're making a donation, they can choose a separate amount to offer to your platform.
Are there different amounts that are auto-suggested to them, like 1% or something?
You type in how much you want to give to the campaign, and then there's some auto-suggested.
You just can change it to other and zero, or whatever amount you want if you don't want the auto-suggested amount.
And we find it works.
And we find that most people, if they have a few extra dollars, they're happy we're not charging the campaign owner.
And so they're happy for our stance.
Actually, recently, our stance of freedom and our stance of sharing hope with people.
And so they go, no, I'll...
Our givers are generous.
It is generous.
And you know what?
That shows because that's what God is.
God is generous.
And so people that love God mirror Him the longer they're alive or we should.
And you see people become more and more generous.
Well, that speaks to the church.
You know, the Christian church in the greater institutional sense has always been very, very generous.
You know, even before Social Security and the social safety nets of big government, people would donate large amounts to churches.
And today, Christians today are the most generous segment of society.
So what you put in place may not necessarily work for, let's say, a platform of Satanists.
Or atheists or something.
But for Christians, I think it works.
They are generous.
We see it.
We see it working.
As we grow month over month, it's that fast.
We're seeing explosive growth and we're hiring as fast as we can.
And we're trying to just even figure it out.
It's funny.
We saw on Twitter that they were like...
There has to be some backer behind these two siblings, because how are they, like, withstanding all this pressure?
And me and my brother, we look at each other and we nod and we're like, yep, we do have a backer.
The best backer in the world, you know, like, who's behind the curtain?
Well, we know who's behind the curtain, and he promises to give us generous wisdom.
And so we rely on that daily as we walk this out, because there are a lot of people on both, Christians that don't like us for allowing campaigns.
There are Christians that hate us.
I'm sorry to interrupt you, Heather.
We've got to go to a break here.
This is the segment for Bridgetown.tv, but this interview continues in the extended form on Bridgetown.com.
I have more questions for Heather, but thank you for watching today.
I'm Mike Adams.
God bless you all.
Take care.
Alright, in the extended interview now, sorry about that there, Heather.
So, let's talk about fraud.
So, one of the things that I suspect would be happening is that those who are trying to take you down, they might set up like a recipient, you know, have a campaign.
And then they would donate to it with their own credit cards or credit cards of their friends.
They would try to get paid from you and then they would issue chargebacks on the credit cards and therefore defraud you.
So that's kind of the most obvious.
I'm sure they've tried that.
How do you deal with a deliberate fraud?
So we see all different ways that people try.
You know, they're very creative.
Yeah.
We've put a lot into place, and I'm not going to go into too much of it because I don't want everybody to know, but we have put a lot into place to stop those types of transactions, different security measures, different audits and scannings and things like that that help us target it.
And plus, our payment processors have a lot in place as well that they've built into their site because they're carrying a lot of that weight as well.
They don't want a ton of fraud.
So have we seen fraud?
Yes.
Have we had to move quickly to try to figure out what was happening?
Absolutely.
But in those journeys over the past six years, we've learned a lot.
And it's helped us actually refine our platform to become a safe place that people can donate.
And we're always watching.
We have eyes on the site all the time, like watching, okay, do these...
Where are our charges coming from?
Do they match IP addresses?
Are there a lot of weird amounts or big amounts or little amounts?
There's a lot of patterns that over time, as you start being in this system, We just have learned to recognize and see.
And a lot falls on the campaign owner as well.
So if someone were to start a campaign for themselves, they would be charged a lot of chargebacks and money would be withdrawn from their account as well.
So there's just a whole bunch we have in place to kind of monitor that, both in the, you know, not having bots themselves, Throwing out stolen credit cards.
We've seen that.
Just trying, you know, breaking up our giving pages into steps so that it's not just one step.
Changing it up often so it's not something that's just easily clicked through.
So there's a lot of different things that we've done and put in place because people do not like freedom.
Or you know what?
Actually, they would say they like freedom, but they like freedom as long as it agrees with them, which is not freedom.
That's interesting.
Yeah, I know what you mean.
But let me ask you then, speaking of freedom, give us a sense of what kind of different campaigns are on Give, Send, Go.
Because as I understand it, anybody can create a campaign and ask for money for any reason.
I mean, someone could go on there and say, hey, I want to buy a yacht or something.
Please donate to my yacht.
And if they get the donations...
So be it, right?
They can launch it for anything.
Hey, I wish I had their friends, right?
Because again, it's going to be your friends and family that give.
So if I were to be...
Bold enough to go create a campaign to say I want a yacht, my friends and family would be like, okay, I think we need to get her to the doctor quickly because something's wrong here.
Most people want to give to something that they'll feel like is bigger than themselves.
They're not talking yachts.
They want to make a difference in the world and they want their money to make a difference in the world.
Now, occasionally someone's car breaks down and somebody wants to help them raise money for a car.
And you see those type of things where somebody's stepping into a situation to help.
And it's exciting to be a part of those type of things.
But A lot of that is just monitored by givers choose wisely most of the time where they're going to spend their hard-earned money.
It's one of the myths about crowdfunding is that you're going to make a campaign and put it up there and then money's going to start pouring in.
And we say, well, actually, unfortunately, that's not how it is.
Where everybody would be funded.
It's just not...
We...
Logically, if you think about the world we live in, that's not what happens.
Now, on Give, Send, Go, again, we have...
Listen to even our name, Give, Send, Go.
All things we do outside of ourselves, being more than ourselves rather than going and funding in me.
You know, like, go fund me.
Give me money.
We said, no, we want it to be all about that outward...
You know, we actually have a little ad we run that says go fund dot dot dot someone else on gives and go dot com because we do.
We're you know, it's not all about me.
We see the need to marry the financial needs that people have with the The need to have that hope that Jesus can fill, that they need to come together.
GoFundMe offers that one side.
Hey, you can raise money on us.
And it works, right?
People have raised money for years on GoFundMe successfully.
They've done it.
But we as Christians know that's not the only need people have when they come to that site.
And so we said, how can we create a site that does both?
Helps people, allows people to raise money, but then also share with them the hope that we found in Jesus.
Well, that's really inspiring.
I really love your perspective on this, and you've thought through these issues quite deeply.
So I've got a couple of questions for you.
First, but let's set this aside.
I just want to get it out there.
Does your company ever create campaigns, for example, for victims of the recent storms and tornadoes that hit Kentucky?
Or do you just wait for others to create those campaigns?
And then secondly, Speaking of GoFundMe, I think GoFundMe is responsible for this cultural phenomenon that has been called or criticized as so-called online begging.
So when you hear online begging, what are your thoughts about that criticism?
You know, I can see it.
So I'm not going to totally say that doesn't happen.
I'll see people that are like, hey, I need money to pay my bills.
And you can tell it's not like a one-time thing.
They live consistently in this.
I need somebody else to give me money to do what I want to do.
And so...
We do see that sort of thing.
Again, when people ask how to have a successful campaign on Gives and Go, what I tell them is the 100% way to have a successful campaign on Gives and Go is to be a giver in your real life.
And if you are a giver in your real life, like just helping people and giving of yourselves, that when you have a need in your life, People will give to you because they just will want to.
They'll be like, oh my gosh, you've done so much for me.
You've helped me out.
You've been a listening ear.
Of course I will help you.
So the online begging is those people who have burnt all the bridges, who have just taken and taken and taken and taken, and their campaign's not going to really do much because they haven't been a giver.
And so I tell people all the time, hey, and they think it's going to be some secret.
You want to know the secret?
Yeah.
To making your campaign goal every single time, be a giver.
And they go, oh, well, that's hard.
Yeah, welcome to the real world.
Exactly.
But as you're saying that, I'm recalling there was an instance, seems like it was a couple years ago, and I think it involved GoFundMe.
But I remember there was a man and a woman who conspired with an apparent homeless man to create a false narrative.
And then it got picked up by all the media and all these people gave millions.
And then they were using the millions to buy luxury cars or whatever.
The whole thing was faked.
And I think they got criminally prosecuted, didn't they?
Do you know what I'm talking about?
They did.
I know.
Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about.
And they did get prosecuted.
It was recently in the news again because they were like doling out the consequences for that.
And so, you know what?
That is again why we say, be careful who you give to.
And that's a hard place.
As a Christian, I'll say, if God leads you to give to someone, you don't have to second guess it.
Just give and walk away.
He told you to give it.
You don't have to even worry about what happens from then on, right?
Like, it's done.
Otherwise, be very diligent.
In who you're giving to.
Because there's so many good causes.
So many great people.
So many things we can be giving our money to that will make a difference in this world.
So be super diligent.
And when you see a story like that, that's like a heart-tugging story, if you're not connected to it, ask for wisdom.
Again, God promises he'll give you wisdom.
And you say, God, should I give some money here?
And if you feel like he says yes, give it and walk away.
And say, this is it.
Like, I'm not...
I'm not responsible now anymore.
I was responsible for obeying God, and now I've done my responsibility.
You know, good-hearted people, you know, Christians can often be targeted and exploited because of their sense of goodwill.
And that's the perfect example of that.
But then on the flip side, someone creating a campaign, if they create a campaign out of a fraudulent story, they should know that they can be criminally prosecuted by their local DA.
Because that is, I mean, that's criminal fraud at some level if you're raising money on a fake story.
We have people that will write in.
And most of the time they're writing in because they're what everybody's calling a Karen, right?
They have seen a campaign that they don't like, and they're putting in to let us know we need to take them down because GoFundMe took them down, or we need to take them down because he's not a Christian, and you shouldn't allow somebody like him to raise money on your site.
This is fraud, right?
And they want to use that word fraud all the time.
And so we always go and look.
We have a whole team that goes in and looks at the campaign.
If we need to do some additional reaching out to find out what's going on, we will do that.
But for the most part, we say, if this person has frauded you money, if you know that you've given money to this campaign and they're not using it the way they said they would, go to your local police department and file a charge because they can be prosecuted.
But most people who are complaining in our scenario, Aren't people who have given.
They just want to tell us.
They want to be the voice of good and bad.
They're going to tell us who we should allow.
These are like the neighborhood Nazis, the HOA owners who tell you, you can't have one dandelion in your yard.
That's exactly it.
They're going to be like, wait a minute, what's going on over there?
I need to stop it.
I'm like, stop walking by my house, right?
If you don't scroll by, you don't even have to go to Give, Send, Go.
I don't know why it bothers you so much.
You're not giving to it, so it's not like you've been frauded.
You just don't like it.
No, just tell them, apparently, you've missed out on the go part of Give, Send, Go.
Like, go away.
That will be...
I'll have to use that in coming up.
Okay.
All right.
No, I have a twisted sense of humor sometimes.
Go away.
Right, right.
But no, what you're doing is really awesome.
It's very important in our society.
I'm really glad you exist and I'm really glad that I've recently discovered that your platform exists.
And if anybody asks me what they should use for fundraising online, I will recommend Give, Send, Go without question.
Do you talk about how many campaigns you have going?
Is that a secret or is that public information?
It's not a secret.
The way it works, though, is that campaigns come on and most campaigns have a shorter duration.
Right.
So there may be like six weeks, two months, depending on what they're raising money for.
And then we have some that are long term.
Maybe they're a missionary.
Maybe they have a foster boy home and they have monthly donors because you can give monthly on GiveSengo as well.
OK, you we see a turnover of campaigns.
You know, you have explosive campaigns for four to five weeks, and then they die down, and then the next big campaigns come up and die down.
And so we're getting hundreds a day of campaigns of just people starting campaigns and raising money on Give, Send, Go.
We're processing millions of dollars.
It is like exploding month over month.
Literally hundreds of new campaigns a day?
We're watching, yep, we're getting lots of campaigns, lots of active campaigns, you know, because there's campaigns that come on and then they never do anything, right?
They're started and they're like, oh, maybe I can get some money here.
And then it doesn't happen.
You know, we see a good portion of active campaigns that are raising money every day.
We have become the replacement.
We used to say we were the alternative and now our whole goal is to replace.
And so we are the replacement.
Well, that's fantastic, yeah.
And I would imagine, I mean, people have to market their own campaigns, in essence.
They need to spread the word on social media or videos or whatever.
I mean, I've seen campaigns, too, where somebody says, oh, I want to travel and see the world.
Goal is $100,000.
Current donations, $37.
You know, I mean, we've seen that.
We're like, dude, people have other higher priorities than funding your tourism.
Yeah.
I would love to see the world as well.
You know, and that's the thing.
It's just crazy that it's this day and age of like instant stars, you know, and TikTok celebrities that people think that everybody's really invested in what they're doing.
But when it comes to money, people are a little more cautious.
But one of the cool things we're seeing, so we have a The January 6th insurrectionists that are raising money for legal fees.
We have a lot of campaigns when voter fraud was being looked into.
Campaigns, those are the ones people didn't like as well.
Anti-vax type campaigns.
So we have a lot of these hot button topics on Give and Go.
But then we also have the adoptions, right?
People are raising money for adoptions.
And it's so wonderful to see.
We're seeing people raise money for medical bills.
And Funeral expenses and all sorts of things where people are coming together to offer support and love to somebody in need.
And you can tell it's needed when you see a campaign.
I have one pulled up right now, and it has over 2,000 shares.
So every campaign has a Give Now button, just like GoFundMe does, and a Share Now.
But we also have a Pray Now button.
Because we know that some people come on, they just may not have the money to support right at the moment, but they can leave a prayer message.
And just watch these campaigns get thousands, like the Kyle campaign.
Let's just bring it back to that one.
Thousands and thousands of donors supporting this young man Shows that there is a group of people out there, even though we're told that there's not, there is that silent majority or that silent group of people that are saying, no, we're going to step up in the gap when it's needed and make our voices known, and a lot of times financially.
Absolutely.
Okay, last main question for you then.
You mentioned you're accepting some crypto now.
And I think that's great because the greatest benefit of that is that it largely eliminates the merchant transaction percentage, which is typically like around 3%.
So people donating with crypto, the recipient of the campaign is getting essentially an extra 3%, right?
Yeah, it's going to be great.
We're looking at also adding ACH so you can just pay like through your bank.
You know, we'd love to find a wallet, a Venmo type thing that we could add.
Unfortunately, Venmo is owned by Apple and Apple back with the Kyle stuff said, we won't work with you.
And so, you know, PayPal, we didn't work with PayPal.
They didn't like Kyle.
All these companies that I want to say now, okay, so this not guilty young man, so will you work with us now?
We don't want to work with you.
But it's just so funny that they cut off these ties and the kid got not guilty.
Well, you know, I'll go ahead and ask you this on air, although you may provide answers off air, but for a long time we've been looking to add a tipping donation layer to Brighttown.com, where we take nothing.
We just want people to be able to tip other content creators, and we thought, you know, crypto is definitely the way to go on this, and we don't want to handle the money because we don't want all that risk that you're very familiar with.
But do you have any suggestions or is there anything coming out that might work for that?
We just want to help people exchange tips and donations without getting in the middle of it.
You know, what we did is we found a young developer who is very familiar and we said we want to add crypto and he let us down this process.
So as far as my expertise in crypto, do I own a little bit here and there?
Yes.
But as far as my expertise in crypto, In all how you would set it up and work, we've walked through the process.
But it's because we found somebody who came to us and said, hey, I can help you add crypto.
And it was easy for him.
And so I have a feeling that if you ask around, you'll find somebody who says, oh, yeah, that's easy.
Let's put a donate button.
And when they donate, you know, really how it will work on us when someone hits give now, if...
The campaign owner has opted to allow crypto because it won't be default.
You have to say you want to accept crypto.
They'll put in a wallet address, a crypto wallet address.
And then when they hit GiveNow, they can choose to give through cryptocurrency and they put in their address and send how much money they want over.
And so that's the basic.
Again, it's not necessarily...
It's an exciting part for me, but not something I have my hands deep into today.
Yeah, yeah, me too.
I'm in the same boat.
But thank you for sharing your thoughts on that.
And it's interesting that people like you and I, we just want to help connect people with givers.
I mean, really, that's this conversation that we're having.
You've done it in a really extraordinary way.
We'd like to add that kind of component, but it's the same basic philosophy is how do we allow people to empower others for meaningful things?
And I think that's why we're put on this world is to reach out and affect more than ourselves, right?
Yes.
That we should be always outward facing, that we should be looking for what God has for us looking out.
And I think having availabilities, we've started something called the Giver Army that we just started that we're asking people to join our Giver Army to commit to giving like once a month to any campaign on Gives and Go.
And we send them a gift package with all sorts of cool Gives and Go stuff.
And then we invite them to a Giver party we have at the end of the year.
But it's saying, hey, just give five bucks a month or 10 bucks a month.
And every month they get a notification.
Hey, it's time to give again.
What campaign are you going to give to?
I've heard so many people that say, oh, this is so fun for my family.
Me and my kids, we sit down and we look through and see who we want to give to this month.
And then we look for that campaign.
And they join our Give Our Army.
And we really know, you know, we've always heard it's better to give than receive.
But we really know that is true.
And anybody who's ever been able to give To somebody who wasn't expecting it or was in a really financial hardship, knows that that's true, knows being able to be used, you know, as Gives and Go grows and financially is growing, Jacob and I, we say, God, just keep our hands open so that it's not like, yes, we have all this money, bigger houses, bigger cars, bigger yachts, you know?
No, we want our hands to be open to say, God, where do you want us to use this?
Let us be givers in our own lives because, again, that's what we're telling people, that we all should be generous givers and we want to do the same.
Actually, this last weekend we were in Dallas and we had a campaign up in two hours away that was for a foster boy home and we decided, you know what, let's go and buy them Christmas presents.
And so we went and we filled up the truck with all sorts of basketball hoops and balls and stuff and we traveled up there and we gave, Surprise this center with stuff.
And I'm telling you, that's when you know it's better to give than receive, when you can feel that God has led you to a place to give out of your abundance and to see someone's life actually be touched because of it.
And I think a quick question you asked was, do we make campaigns?
Like, does Give, Send, Go make campaigns?
And so I just really quickly wanted to answer that.
We don't tend to.
We did make one for the car that drove through the parade.
Oh, Waukesha.
Waukesha, yeah.
And so we made one.
It's raised a few thousand dollars.
And then what we'll do is we'll team with a church or hands and feet on the ground, find somebody down there that can help us get the money dispersed.
But what we're planning this next year is to actually make a non-profit, a Give, Send, Go non-profit that will be the ones that will make campaigns for big disaster relief type things, make a campaign that's under the umbrella of the non-profit and And then they will be the ones dispersing money.
So if you're a local church or an organization in an area and something's happened where you are, we'll reach out to you and say, hey, we've raised $100,000.
We want to get it to the tornado victims.
How can we do that?
And then our nonprofit branch will go down and help facilitate that.
So we're really excited about that in this upcoming year, too, because we think it will be an awesome extension of what we do.
That's a great idea.
Please keep us posted.
I'd love to have you back on to announce that because a lot of people want the tax deduction, being able to donate to the nonprofit.
And I got to tell you, too, by the way, you should try giving away food.
And I'm saying that from my perspective.
We have tried...
It's so difficult to give away vitamin C supplements by the palate or even to give away food that is not what food banks are used to seeing, which is like soup cans and other packaged processed food.
We don't make processed food.
We make organic, lab-tested, superfoods, nutritional supplements, and they're like, we don't know what to do with that.
We've gone through the craziest things trying to give away food before, and I'd never realized how hard it was to give away nutrition.
You know, when my daughter, she's now in her 20s, but when she was about 14, her and her friend decided one winter that they wanted to make these, like, care packages for homeless people.
So they saved their money.
They actually started a campaign, raised a couple hundred bucks, and went to the dollar store and bought socks.
And like all sorts of just stuff, some snacks, some granola bars and, you know, water bottle and gloves and whatever.
And they put together these bags.
And then I brought them up to New York City, which is a couple hours away from me.
And we drove into New York City and we're like, okay, we're going to like give these bags away.
And they were so excited, you know, Pre-teens or 14, so a little older, but super excited, young teenagers.
And we pull up to a stop sign and there's some homeless people on the side.
So they roll down their window to this one guy standing there and they kind of motioned him to come over and he comes over and they hand him this bag and they're so excited and nervous and all of that.
And he looks in it and he digs around in it and then he's like, eh, and he throws it back in the car.
Oh no.
Their hearts were broken because they had spent all this time.
But it was a really good lesson because I was able to say, listen, You were never responsible for someone's appreciation or thankfulness.
You do what God's called you to do, and you don't have to worry about it.
You did the right thing there.
You can't be responsible for him being thankful.
You can't do something just so that you get the thanks of people.
Because when we just do things so that people go, oh my gosh, you're so nice.
Thank you.
We lose half the blessing right there because we're getting it...
In our thanks.
And to be able to say to my kids, listen, you're doing this.
You weren't doing this to get thank yous from the homeless people.
You were doing it because you saw a need.
So let's keep going.
And you don't need to even be thanked.
So it was an interesting thing, though.
It was a fun, funny.
Yeah, life lessons there.
That's great.
I love what you're teaching your kids.
It's very, very valuable.
And there are all kinds of boundaries that need to be explored in this.
Like, why are we giving?
What does that do for us and how does that serve the greater purpose of why we're here?
And why are there people in need?
This is one of the big questions that I think atheists have.
They would say, well, if God is so great, why do people suffer?
Well, so you need to read the word.
You need to understand that we have free will and God doesn't run us like puppets all over the planet.
But it gets into philosophy very quickly.
I'm glad you're exploring that with your children.
So anyway, final thoughts, Heather?
It's been a joy talking with you.
We're almost out of time, but what are your final thoughts?
No, I'm thankful to be here and I'm thankful to just share who Give, Send, Go is.
And my final thoughts is if you need to raise money for anything, come to GiveSendGo.com.
You can start now and create a campaign very quickly.
If you want to bless somebody this Christmas, go to GiveSendGo.com.
Look through the campaigns.
Do it with your family.
It could be a family tradition that on Christmas Eve that you guys go and say, we're going to donate something to somebody that's not expecting it.
And then read through and ask God, stop me on the person that you want me to give to this Christmas.
And then lastly, remember, the line's not red and blue.
The lines narrow and wide, and our whole goal here is to share that hope of Jesus.
No matter what we do, whether you're a crowdfunding site, or you're a newscaster, or whatever you're doing, a plumber, whatever God's called you to do, do it with the focus of sharing the hope that we have found in Jesus.
And that will change the hearts and minds of man quicker than any debate will.
Well said.
And nobody gave more than Jesus himself.
I mean, he gave his life for the sins of man.
And, you know, the greatest gift in life is that that sacrifice was made for you so that you can still enter heaven, even though you may have made mistakes along the way.
I mean, what an incredible gift.
So, yeah, we should live our lives in thanks and in giving and in creating abundance.
He has created that opportunity for us.
I'm sure you would agree with that.
100%.
100%.
So thank you again for having me.
Absolutely.
It's been a pleasure, Heather.
Have a great day.
God bless you.
Take care.
We'll meet up again.
Sounds good.
Okay, bye-bye.
And thank you for watching, folks.
This is Mike Adams here, brighteon.com.
Feel free to repost this anywhere you'd like.
And check out givesendgo.com.
This is a really exciting platform for all the reasons we've just talked about.
Thank you for watching today.
God bless you all.
Be well.
Get prepared.
Interesting times.
Okay, take care.
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