Activate your community for good on your next live stream with GoFundMe’s Live fundraising tools. Whether you’re streaming with the squad on Apex or getting ready for a night out with followers, with our events & streaming tools you can embed a live progress bar, donation alerts, and a QR code for viewers to visit the fundraiser page you’re fundraising for. This can be any of the thousands of fundraisers for people and nonprofits on GoFundMe—from crisis relief to a friend’s fundraiser to your favorite nonprofit. Because our tools use Open Broadcaster Software (OBS), you can feel confident hosting your livestream fundraiser on many platforms, like YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Instagram Live, and more. With just a few simple steps, you’ll be ready to work towards your fundraising goal with your followers or subscribers.
Gaining access to the Live fundraising tools
Start by logging into your GoFundMe account. Once logged in, follow these steps:
- Search for your fundraiser of choice (You don’t have to start your own fundraiser to use the streaming widgets, but you can use your own fundraiser as well.)
- Click “Share”
- Click on the “Events & streaming” icon
- You’ll land on the following screen:
Choosing and embedding your Live fundraising tool
Copying your unique fundraiser link
Be sure you're signed into your GoFundMe account, and your tools will generate a unique fundraiser link. Whenever you’re streaming and sharing it’s important to use this specific link, as this is what will track your impact - your donations and shares that you and your viewers bring to the fundraiser or Nonprofit Page. This will be the link for your QR code as well, and when you click “Copy link”, the URL will be copied to your clipboard. You can use the copied link to pin in the comments of your stream and when sending directly over chat.
Embedding Live fundraising tools
Each of the three embeddable components can be embedded with the following steps:
- Click “Copy URL” under your desired component and the URL will be copied to your clipboard
- Open OBS and find “Sources”
- Click on the “+” in the bottom, left corner
- Select “Browser” as the source, give it a name, and click “OK”
- Paste the widget URL you copied, and set the height and width you want your widget to be on your stream, and click “OK”
A few things to note about the different components
- Once you’ve set your widget size and clicked “OK” you can drag and resize the widget on the OBS however you’d like.
- Live progress bar: The Live progress bar has a minimum height of 165 px.
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Live donation alerts: The Donation alert widget will grow to fit the content of the alert, so we recommend dimensions of W 500 px x H 250 px.
- You can add “&test=1” at the end of the Donation alert widget URL on OBS to receive a constant flow of test notifications, appended by (TEST) to help you with testing and positioning. Be sure to remove the “&test=1” from the URL before going live!
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Donation QR codes: The QR code widget will generate as a square, so it will always grow or shrink to fit the smallest of the two measurements, so we suggest making them the same. Ex: W 300 px x H 300 px.
- Your stream viewers can hold (long-press) your QR codes from their smartphones to directly scan and open your fundraiser, even without using a separate camera.
With just a few clicks you’ll be ready to go live to support a fundraiser you’re passionate about. Whichever platform you stream on, encourage your followers and subscribers to share, donate, and visit the link to learn more about the cause you’re supporting. Just one stream can make a huge impact for the fundraiser or nonprofit you care about. You can see the total impact of your efforts by visiting Your Impact page after you stream.
FAQ
How to prevent caching issues on OBS?
We’ve seen that OBS may run into caching issues with these widgets if they’re instrumented in advance. (Caching is the process of storing data in a temporary location to make it easier to retrieve.)
In order to avoid caching issues with the streaming widgets, we recommend the following steps:
- Add a browser source that contains the asset your page requires. Put it in some otherwise empty screen that you do not intend to use.
- When you start OBS, go into that source's properties and click the "Refresh cache of current page" button.