Author Archives: joychesbrough

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

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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 dedicated customer support infrastructure most nonprofits can’t build on their own. Through GoFundMe Pro, our team also gained fundraising software built specifically for nonprofit scale, rather than adapting consumer tools to institutional needs.

The goal leading philanthropy was never just to raise money faster, but to give supporters a real seat at the table, where they could see exactly how their generosity turned Archive projects into preserved history.

Infrastructure alone doesn’t raise money, but championing the stories of our loyal supporters does. The most successful campaigns, from the one trillion web pages milestone to the  vanishing culture collections worked because they gave donors something they could connect with emotionally: a scanning team racing against time, a nation’s slavery records finally getting global recognition, a culture’s historical record that almost vanished but didn’t. That’s the throughline connecting both campaigns. Numbers get attention, but stories and impact get donations.

What’s Next

Between the 2025 one trillion web pages milestone celebration and the 2026 Vanishing Culture campaign, we’ve proven that fundraising strategy can evolve without losing sight of mission. Crowdfunding campaigns turn supporters into advocates. Matching funds make small gifts feel bigger. Focused storytelling, like Colección Aruba, transforms an abstract preservation mission into something people can see, touch, and champion.

Philanthropy is more than a revenue stream. It is the clearest signal that our mission resonates, and it is what allows us to grow our base of support even as needs evolve. Every gift represents someone choosing to believe in the work of preserving culture and knowledge for future generations. Cultivating that belief, and giving it new ways to express itself, is core to sustaining and growing support over time.

Digital donor engagement should be a fixture of every philanthropy team’s playbook, not a periodic experiment. Donor expectations are shifting quickly, and organizations that keep innovating in how they connect, involve, and steward supporters will be the ones that earn lasting loyalty.

Looking ahead, I’m focused on the next chapter, one that builds on this same foundation: meeting donors where they are, and giving them real ownership over the projects they want to help digitize and preserve. That means continuing to think outside the box, finding new digital channels and storytelling formats to bring our work to life, and building genuine communities around it. Bringing supporters inside the Internet Archive to experience our projects firsthand, and see their impact directly, will be central to how we grow support going forward.

If the last two years are any indication, our next fundraising campaign won’t just ask for donations. It will ask people to help save something that matters to them specifically, and give them the tools to bring others along.

Joy Chesbrough, Chief Philanthropy Officer at Internet Archive

Joy leads the Internet Archive’s philanthropy department and philanthropy team.She has been managing the department and its fundraising strategy for the past seven years. If you would like to reach out to Joy, please email her at joy@archive.org. 

25 Years of Making The World A Better Place

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He drove a 1970’s Chevrolet Chevelle Concours station wagon, complete with faux-wood paneling and a rooftop luggage rack. Every summer, he’d drive our family up to our cabin in Northern Michigan to get us, as he’d say, “out of the house and into the woods.”

It was an endless adventure of learning with my father. He especially loved teaching us about animal habitats, ecosystems, and species of trees.  

His National Geographic magazine collection up on bookshelves in our living room was always a treasure trove of information. He always enjoyed spending evenings reading in his favorite chair. I’d sneak into the room after he left for work, just to get my hands on the magical picture books filled with pages of exotic animals and far away places.

Those magazines spanned a lifetime of important information that opened up my father’s world—and eventually mine. He took from his books and magazines an expansive knowledge of nature and geography, and transferred that knowledge and love of the outdoors back to me.

Then, there was my mom.  

For as long as I can remember, my mom always enjoyed giving back. She always was the first to notice needs in the community. It was during the holiday’s where I saw this gift demonstrated most. She always said, “to whom much is given, much is required.” 

This is why she packed us kids into that same wood-paneled Chevrolet station wagon and drove us downtown to volunteer at the Salvation Army. It’s a Holiday tradition I practice to this day. 

We’d spend the morning together sorting clothes and packing boxes full of canned food and toys, to make sure other little girls like me would have something special for Christmas. My mom told me that she was once one of those girls growing up in the projects of Detroit. This childhood experience motivates her today to pay it forward.

On weekends, she used to drive us to the local hospital in Rochester, where we volunteered as candy stripers. Adorned in pink and white hospital uniforms, we passed out flowers and books to eager patients looking for a good read and a kind word to pass the day. Sometimes these books were the only thing that helped sick patients escape the pain, loneliness, and longing for better days ahead. 

It was during those times that I became aware of the welfare of others and what our shared humanity could look like. About not only being open to the differences we all share, but to love and value those differences.

From my father’s passion for nature and knowledge and my mother’s generous heart, I learned that the pursuit of knowledge and generosity are inseparable.

And it’s at this intersection of knowledge and philanthropy that I have found myself.

As the Director of Philanthropy at the Internet Archive, I lead a team that educates millions of people all over the world about, well, everything. Including why it’s so important to preserve humanity’s knowledge—to preserve our collective footprint of culture and history.

And now, thanks to the Internet Archive, every day more than 1.6 million people access our nonprofit digital library. Accessed by genealogists, gamers, scientists, teachers, students, journalists and poets. The Internet Archive stores curated collections of more than 6 million books, 240,000 concerts, 5 million videos, 32 million magazines and other texts, 25 million scholarly research materials, 625 billion web pages—about everything in the world. Literally. For free. You can even access my  favorite collection from the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

This year marks the 25th Anniversary of the Internet Archive. A celebration of 25 years of fulfilling the mission of providing Universal Access to All Knowledge.

Personally, I am celebrating my 25th year in philanthropy.

After 25 years of leading philanthropy departments at some of the largest nonprofit organizations in the world with missions providing access to education, clean water, medicine, gender equity, and innovation, I now find myself serving over 100,000 contributors from all over the world. I’m grateful to be part of a vision that’s creating an online repository of knowledge—for keeping a record of history that can’t be erased, and is accessible to millions worldwide. 

Knowledge, as we know, is the foundation of everything.

Now, I invite you to take your own journey by exploring an endless reservoir of information—explore the Internet Archive for yourself.  

You never know where that journey will take you.

Please visit us at archive.org/donate and consider making an end-of-year donation by December 31st. We have a generous 2:1 match that triples your impact. Please share your own personal journey with us on social media (twitter, FB, Insta links). Most importantly, we are deeply grateful for your continued generosity and support.  

Wishing you a happy and healthy Holiday season! 

—Joy

Joy Chesbrough is the Director of Philanthropy at the Internet Archive. When she’s not reading books and magazines about biodiversity or endangered species, you can find her serving on the Board of Directors at the What If Foundation, which educates and serves school children of all ages in Haiti. She also enjoys sailing,  traveling, and volunteering in her community with her French bulldog, Napoleon.

Holiday Cheer for a Good Cause

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The holidays are the season for giving—a time when many people open their hearts and wallets to support charitable organizations. In that spirit, the Internet Archive’s Development Department collaborated with a generous donor this year to invest both in the people at the archive and in local communities led by black entrepreneurs.

The anonymous donor gave a $150,000 gift to the Internet Archive, choosing to pay a portion of it forward to IA employees. Why? Because he has witnessed firsthand how hard nonprofit employees work, and understands the critical role staff play in providing a better ecosystem to thrive in. As an entrepreneurial leader and philanthropist who has worked for the largest tech companies and launched a variety of startups, this donor feels passionately about giving back to the community and volunteers some of his time to inspire future entrepreneurs and students to reach their dreams. 

Each employee at the Internet Archive will be given a $100 gift certificate to use at one small business or nonprofit to complete the “pay it forward” wish of our anonymous donor. Every business on the list below is Black-owned and operated, and the nonprofits pursue a variety of social justice missions. By supporting both small entrepreneurs and well-respected charities, we’re giving back to our communities and expressing solidarity with groups that focus on diversity and minority equity. Our focus is on making a difference for those who keep economies and communities healthy and whole.

We encourage both our employees and supporters everywhere to please give your patronage and pay it forward in your community—because paying it forward isn’t about the size of the gift, but about the act of kindness. And we could all use a little more kindness this year.


Pay it forward: To repay a kindness received with a good deed to someone else.
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CultureFit Clothing
CultureFit is body-positive activewear for the culturally conscious woman. Founded in early 2018 by a group of West African descendent women, they believe in a place “where wellness, womanhood, and global consciousness intersect with comfort, body positivity, and the pursuit of a healthy, active lifestyle. Featuring leggings, tops, and yoga mats, CultureFit strives to celebrate not just various cultures but all shapes and sizes. They are small and still growing, but over time, you can expect to see a range of sizes added to each collection. https://www.culturefitclothing.com

Farms To Grow
Farms To Grow is an Oakland-based non-profit dedicated to working with Black farmers and underserved farmers around the country. Farms To Grow focuses on sustainable farming and innovative agriculture practices that preserve the cultural and biological diversity and the agroecological balance of the local environment. Subscribers can sign up for their Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) Program for local delivery or pickup of their non-GMO and chemical-free CSA Harvest Bag, available once a month on every 2nd Saturday. https://www.farmstogrow.com/

Harlem Chocolate Factory
Harlem Chocolate Factory is an artisan chocolate company where they convey the various cultural experiences and stories of Harlem through their chocolate products. Founded in 2015 by Jessica Spaulding and Asha Dixon, their confections feature the names of some of Harlem’s most historic sites, and ingredients sourced by Fair or Direct Trade, or locally from upstate New York. The Harlem Chocolate Factory is a featured product on the 2020 Oprah’s Favorite Things list. https://harlemchocolatefactory.com

McBride Sisters Collection
McBride Sisters Collection is not only the largest Black-owned wine company in the United States, but among the most inclusive, accessible, socially aware, and sustainable. Founded by two sisters Robin and Andréa McBride, their signature wines are inspired by the endless pursuit of all women who are making their dreams a reality and breaking barriers daily. Their wines include the fun, fab, and eco-friendly SHE CAN and the Black Girl Magic collection. https://www.mcbridesisters.com/

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OUI the People
OUI the People is a beauty brand dedicated to fighting the traditional negative tropes of the beauty industry. Rather than pursuing flawlessness, the company aims to build efficacious products, designed thoughtfully, that help you feel great in the skin you’re already in. Whether it’s dry skin, razor burn, or ingrown hairs, OUI the People’s line of sustainable beauty products aims to feel as great on your skin as it does on your psyche. https://www.ouithepeople.com/

Red Bay Coffee Roasters
Red Bay Coffee Roasters is committed to beans that are not only high-quality and sustainable, but a vehicle for diversity, inclusion, social and economic restoration, entrepreneurship, and environmental sustainability. Founded in 2014 by Keba Konte, Red Bay seeks to create unity by hiring and serving people of all backgrounds, striving to be diverse and inclusive of those who have traditionally been left out of the specialty coffee industry—especially people of color, the formerly incarcerated, women, and people with disabilities. https://www.redbaycoffee.com/

Savor Blends Seasoning
Savor Blends is a collection of savory salts, rubs, butters, and sauces. Founded by Dulani, Lisa, and Myles Spencer, each artisanal batch is handcrafted with love right from their kitchen. From the Black Garlic Vampire Butter to the “Brown Sugar, Baby” rub, these flavors are sure to spice up your meat and potatoes dinner. https://www.savorblends.com/

Uncle Nearest Whiskey
Uncle Nearest Whiskey celebrates the history and craftsmanship of Uncle Nearest, a former Tennessee slave who taught Jack Daniel how to make whiskey and is credited as Daniel’s first master distiller. Founded by Fawn Weaver, she built the company to ensure that the legacy of Nathan Green, aka Uncle Nearest, lives on through whiskey. Their premium spirit is the most awarded American whiskey two years running and is a featured product on the 2020 Oprah’s Favorite Things list. https://unclenearest.com/

Nonprofits

United Negro College Fund: https://uncf.org/
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People: https://naacp.org/
Black Girls Code: https://www.blackgirlscode.com/
Ignite Mental Health Services: https://www.ignitemh.org/
Black Thrive: https://www.blackthrive.org.uk/