Michael Wasserman, co-founder and CEO of Tiltify, entered 2026 with a milestone that had seemed improbable when he launched the platform out of Los Angeles in 2013: his company facilitated more than $100 million in creator charitable donations in a single year. The figure is roughly double Tiltify’s 2024 total and reflects a decade-long bet that digital creators, not institutional donors or legacy charity structures, would become philanthropy’s growth engine.

Tiltify operates as a fundraising infrastructure platform, connecting creators and communities directly to more than 8,000 nonprofits worldwide. Rather than pooling and redistributing donations, Tiltify routes funds directly to each charity’s payment processor. 

“The only way you can raise money for a charity on Tiltify is that the charity has actually linked their banking information directly,” Michael says. “The money is going directly to them.” The platform now serves organizations including St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, the American Red Cross, Make-A-Wish, and Save the Children.

Tiltify’s Top 30 Fundraisers of 2025, published in January, offers the clearest view yet of who is doing the raising. Collectively, those 30 creators generated more than $70 million. Eight of them were using Tiltify for the first time. “The diversity in content that they’re all doing is, I think, what’s really interesting about looking at the list as a whole,” Michael says.

Interactive Tools Drove the Record

Tiltify’s 2025 growth did not come from a single breakout campaign or a viral moment. It came from a structural shift in how creators are using the platform’s tools. Approximately 40% of all dollars raised in 2025 could be tied directly to a creator-designed incentive, up from roughly 20% in prior years. Auction activity on the platform doubled year over year. Donation matching challenges also doubled.

“About 40% of all that money can be tied back to some fundraiser creating some sort of incentive,” Michael explains. “It could be a thank you card, a shout-out on stream, a T-shirt. But 40% of all that money connects back to that, which is a huge leap forward.”

The per-fundraiser average climbed to a record $1,344 in 2025, up from approximately $1,200 the year before. First-time fundraisers hit $1,665 on average, up from $882 in 2024, suggesting new users are arriving with greater campaign sophistication or are being channeled into more effective formats upon arrival. Returning fundraisers grew 12% year over year. The platform has maintained a roughly even split, with about half of annual fundraising coming from returning users and half from new ones.

Why Community Depth Beats Reach

Michael’s most pointed observation about the Top 30 list is what it lacks: a concentration of megastars. While creators like Ryan Trahan and a handful of others with major followings anchor the upper tier, the majority of the list comprises names most people outside their respective communities have never heard of. That is not a limitation. Michael argues it is the point.

“Content creators who have 10,000 followers raised 10 times more than a famous musician or actor,” he says, citing fundraising research. “You’d think mathematically that the biggest creators with the biggest followings are raising the most. That is absolutely not the case.”

The distinction he reaches for is one his seven-year-old niece posed unprompted: the difference between popular and famous. In his framing, fame is recognition without attachment. Popularity, at least in the creator philanthropy sense, is what happens when a community genuinely trusts someone. 

“You can be famous and not be well-liked,” he says. “The people on this list have really great communities. If you’re not in the creator space, you might not recognize 60% of the names, but they all have strong communities.”

The Top 30 Blueprint: No Single Formula, One Through Line

Among 2025’s most notable campaigns, Ryan Trahan produced a 50-day vlog series that raised $11.5 million, according to the data. TommyInnit ran an interactive whodunit livestream for Great Ormond Street Hospital, raising nearly £470,000 in a debut Tiltify campaign. CDawgVA cycled across Japan for 15 days on behalf of the Immune Deficiency Foundation, raising over $1 million. VTuber Ironmouse, who lives with Common Variable Immune Deficiency, raised $1.37 million for the same foundation. Relay FM, a podcast network, used community reward mechanics to raise over $620,000 for St. Jude.

“They’re a gamer, a fitness creator, someone did a physical challenge, someone did a gaming challenge. Some of them are VTubers,” Michael says. “You can’t go through the list and say everybody’s doing a video game livestream. The through line is that they’re all interactive, and they all have a strong community.”

Michael describes none of the Top 30 campaigns as passive. No one simply posted a donation link and waited. Every entry involved deliberate community activation, whether through live events, auctions, physical stunts, or interactive narrative formats. “None of them are what I would call a shy fundraiser,” he says.

Blending Entertainment and Philanthropy Dollars

One of Michael’s core theses, now supported by Tiltify’s own data, is that the Creator Economy has begun collapsing the separation between entertainment spending and charitable giving. Audiences attending a charity livestream are also being entertained. He notes that the financial behavior that follows resembles what people spend on movies or streaming subscriptions, not what they give in a traditional annual fund appeal.

“If somebody watches a really cool charity livestream, it is also a form of entertainment,” he says. “They’re also willing to give the amount of money they would potentially spend to see a movie because they’re being entertained. That blend is driving a lot of growth.”

The implication for nonprofits is direct. Michael contends that charities clinging to traditional donor demographics and legacy outreach tools are misreading where both attention and discretionary money are flowing. 

“If you’re not thinking of donors and fundraisers as content creators and content consumers, I feel like you’re missing the point of current society,” he says. Goldman Sachs estimates that the Creator Economy could nearly double to $480 billion by 2027, a trajectory Michael sees as a structural tailwind for creator-led giving.

Catalyst and the AI Fundraiser Assistant

Tiltify’s product direction for 2026 centers on reducing friction in campaign creation. The company’s AI-assisted tool, Beakr, prompts first-time and returning fundraisers through decisions they would otherwise have to make from scratch: platform selection, incentive design, goal structure, and integration setup.

“It’s easier to edit than to ideate from the beginning,” Michael says. “You put in that you like these five movies, eating copious amounts of chocolate, and golfing, and it will suggest incentives and rewards. People can say, ‘I like that, I don’t like that, let’s change that.’”

He draws a contrast with how AI is currently deployed in the broader nonprofit sector, which he describes as largely oriented toward administrative tasks like email drafting. “Most of the AI I’ve seen in the charity space has been focused on writing emails and relatively basic admin,” he says. “This is the first fundraiser assistant-driven tool that helps fundraisers do better.”

A New Platform and the Next Fundraising Format

Michael’s forward-looking bet is less about a single campaign type or creator tier and more about infrastructure. Tiltify has positioned itself as the connective layer between creator communities and verified nonprofits, and its value scales with the continued expansion of the Creator Economy. He expects the ecosystem to keep generating novel fundraising formats, many of which he acknowledges he cannot anticipate.

“What I find really cool is when somebody takes a tool and uses it for 12 other things and then hits us up and asks if we can adjust it because they found a cool way of using it that we didn’t think of,” he says. “If it were the same examples in 2025 that I had in 2019, I’d be concerned that nothing was changing.”

On the platform side, Michael says he would most like to see a new social format emerge, one that matches the community depth of long-form video or livestreaming but introduces a new mode of interaction. He is watching the fragmentation of livestreaming platforms, including the ongoing competition among Twitch, Kick, Rumble, and YouTube Live, as a signal of what might come next. 

“I feel like there’s got to be a new thing,” he says. “And from where I sit, that gives exciting ways of saying, what’s the fundraising strategy there?”

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