While small businesses are increasingly turning to online crowdfunding platforms for essential funding, over 40% of these campaigns may fail to raise any money, especially those from low socio-economic areas. We utilize the latest advancements in AI technology to identify crucial factors that influence the success of crowdfunding campaigns and to improve their fundraising outcomes by strategically optimizing these factors. Our best-performing machine learning model accurately predicts the fundraising outcomes of 81.0% of campaigns, primarily based on their textual descriptions. Interpreting the machine learning model allows us to provide actionable suggestions on improving the textual description before launching a campaign. We demonstrate that by augmenting just three aspects of the narrative using a large language model, a campaign becomes more preferable to 83% human evaluators, and its likelihood of securing financial support increases by 11.9%. Our research uncovers the effective strategies for crafting descriptions for small business fundraising campaigns and opens up a new realm in integrating large language models into crowdfunding methodologies.

GoFundMe's mission is to help people help each other by making it safe and easy for people to ask for help and support the causes they care about. Since 2010, GoFundMe has become a trusted leader in online fundraising, with $17 billion raised from over 200 million donations. In 2022, GoFundMe acquired Classy, the leading nonprofit fundraising software company, which operates as a wholly owned subsidiary of GoFundMe. Together, the two companies serve as a global leader in giving for individuals and nonprofits, accelerating growth and unlocking new opportunities to help more people and organizations. Our vision is to become the most helpful place in the world--join us!

Donald Trump's newest challenger is a twitterbot that was trained by Trump himself. DeepDrumpf, a chatbot trained on Trump's own words, recently announced its run for president and launched a GoFundMe for campaign donations, all of which will go toward supporting girls in STEM studies. DeepDrumpf was created in March by Brad Hayes, an MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) postdoc with a penchant for politics and neural networks. Back then, the Republican primaries were in full swing and Trump had established himself as a contender. "Trump's style of speech lends itself extremely well to these types of generative machine learning models."