The Case for Crowdfunding at Scale: How Donors are Fundraising With Us and Creating a Path to Lasting Preservation

Preserving humanity’s memory isn’t cheap. Servers need power, storage needs upgrading, and physical collections need scanning teams working around the clock. Leading a philanthropy department and building a high-performing team to fund these projects and meet that challenge is no small task. Since leading this department, we have grown our fundraising by 350%, guided by a commitment to nonprofit best practices and sustainable, donor-centered growth. Over time, that discipline has paid off: a loyal community of supporters emerged, expanding our fundraising base to hundreds of thousands of donors worldwide. That growth prompted the launch of a new fundraising strategy in partnership with GoFundMe, one designed to leverage crowdfunding fundraising tools and build a community of supporters who could engage firsthand with our work and see, up close, how our programs come to life. In 2025, that strategy took shape as a full-scale platform launch that has become a strategic funding and effective tool for turning individual passion into institutional impact.

The 2025 Launch: A New Way to Give

Rather than betting on a single approach, there has been a focus in philanthropy to diversify fundraising, and it’s resulted in establishing nine funding channels, including estate planning, workplace and monthly giving, institutional and transformational giving and crowdfunding. The GoFundMe Pro crowdfunding rollout was created to increase engagement, loyalty and long-term impact. Embedded with a/b testing and key peer-to-peer strategies, it resulted in prompting people to give. Traditional, centralized fundraising ran alongside peer-to-peer (P2P) campaigns, where individual supporters created their own fundraising pages to rally friends, family, and online communities around what they cared about. It became a grassroots effort where supporters could create personalized campaigns to raise funds for Archive projects that mattered most to them.

The centerpiece of last year’s fundraising effort was an event celebration on October 22, 2025. The Internet Archive celebrated an extraordinary milestone of reaching one trillion web pages preserved and accessible on the Wayback Machine. This prompted the creation of a cross-departmental collaboration to launch a GoFundMe campaign with our community and celebrate the achievement. It was evident that the fundraising campaign would be a huge success due to all the great work that went into engaging our loyal funders and the work of the teams who captured and preserved one trillion web pages. The Web We Built campaign was paired directly with a P2P fundraising push, inviting supporters to help preserve the next one trillion web pages.

To sweeten the deal, a generous foundation was asked to layer in $1 million in matching funds to stretch every dollar further. Through the campaign window, every dollar raised through The Web We’ve Built P2P campaign was matched 2:1, tripling the impact of each donation, and supporters had until the end of 2025 to help the campaign reach its $1 million match goal. For a $500 donor, that meant their gift effectively became $1500 for the Archive’s ongoing work. This was a simple, tangible incentive that turned casual supporters into active fundraisers running their own campaigns on our behalf.

The result was hundreds of thousands of dollars raised through a combination of milestone storytelling, grassroots P2P energy, and matched giving, all proof that the GoFundMe crowdfunding platform could do more than collect donations. It could turn a technical achievement (one trillion archived pages) into a shared community celebration people wanted to be part of.

2026: Saving Our Vanishing Cultures

Building on that momentum, 2026 brought a sharper, more emotional focus: Saving Our Vanishing Cultures, a campaign built around four collections that would have been lost forever without the efforts of the Internet Archive’s scanning teams. Where the 2025 campaign celebrated scale, this one told stories about specific communities, specific histories, and the very real risk of culture and its stories and artifacts disappearing without a trace.

The campaign echoes a broader concern the Internet Archive has been raising through its Vanishing Culture initiative, one that corporate interests, shifting distribution models, and malicious cyberattacks are increasingly threatening public access to shared cultural history. Because web pages are ephemeral and link-rot is so prevalent, it means that information online can disappear at any time. This highlights the importance of how fragile digital culture can be when it isn’t actively preserved. It’s also important to note that the four collections featured in this year’s GoFundMe campaign were chosen because each one represents a story of culture nearly lost, and a team that refused to let that happen. The four featured collections in the 2026 campaign gave donors a concrete way to fight back against that fragility and capture the spirit of the effort, while supporting its achievements.

Backing Up an Entire Island: Colección Aruba

Of the four collections featured in the Saving Our Vanishing Cultures GoFundMe campaign, the partnership with Aruba stood out as the campaign’s heart. In 2024, the Internet Archive officially partnered with the country of Aruba to digitize and preserve the nation’s complete history, working alongside Aruban officials, the National Library, and the National Archive. The effort, launched as Colección Aruba, digitized roughly 100,000 items of the island nation’s cultural heritage and made them freely available to the public, an achievement that brought together unified support from Aruba’s Prime Minister, Minister of Culture, and Minister of Education, a level of governmental buy-in we had rarely seen.

Aruba’s National Librarian, Astrid Britten (left),signs the Four Rights, alongside National Archivist, Raymond Hernandez (middle), and Brewster Kahle (right), Internet Archive founder and digital librarian.

The moment captured in that photo says as much as any statistic could. This wasn’t a quiet backend migration, but it was a public, ceremonial commitment from a nation’s top cultural stewards, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the Archive to put preservation principles into writing.

The partnership was significant enough that Aruba received the Internet Archive’s Hero Award, an honor given annually to individuals, organizations, or nations that show exceptional leadership in expanding access to knowledge and supporting digital preservation, joining past honorees like the Biodiversity Heritage Library and public access advocate Carl Malamud.

The collection’s impact has only grown since. Materials documenting the history of slavery in Aruba have since been designated part of UNESCO’s Memory of the World International Register, which is a global recognition that these records now stand alongside some of humanity’s most significant documentary heritage. It’s a powerful reminder of why digitization matters: these documents aren’t just preserved, they’re now protected on the world stage, ensuring future generations can learn from them regardless of what happens to the physical originals.

Aruba also made history in another way by becoming the first country to formally sign onto the Four Digital Rights of Memory Institutions:

• The right to collect
• The right to preserve
• The right to provide access
• The right to interlibrary collaboration

These four rights have since become a rallying point for libraries and archives worldwide, and Aruba’s early commitment gave the framework real-world legitimacy right out of the gate. You can explore the full collection yourself at archive.org/details/aruba.

Why GoFundMe, and Why It Worked

It’s worth pausing on why the platform choice mattered. GoFundMe Pro brought the philanthropy department access to a giving community of people worldwide, along with donor protections like the GoFundMe Giving Guarantee and…