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Facebook adds fundraising option to Safety Check, among other updates

Fiza Pirani
By Fiza Pirani

Facebook's Safety Check feature will soon allow users to start fundraisers to directly help victims of a particular crisis.

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The upgrade is one of four new updates coming to the tool, Facebook announced Wednesday.

According to TechCrunch, fundraising could potentially mean big business for the social media conglomerate.

Facebook's personal fundraisers have a 6.9 percent plus 30 cent fee that flows into payment processing, vetting and security, TechCrunch reported.

Facebook nonprofit fundraisers have fees of 5-5.75 percent. With the new fundraising update, Facebook fundraisers could get even more attention.

In addition to the fundraising tool, Safety Check will include the Community Help feature on desktop (it launched on mobile earlier this year) for users to find and give help in terms of food donation, shelter and transportation.

The third update includes a feature for people to add a personal note when marking themselves as safe during a crisis to “reassure friends” and “provide more context.”

And lastly, Facebook will be integrating informational crisis descriptions into the feature for more context about the disaster. Information will feed from NC4, a third party global crisis reporting agency.

The Safety Check feature, first introduced in 2014, has been activated more than 600 times and has notified people that their loved ones are safe more than one billion times, according to Naomi Gleit, vice president of Social Good at Facebook.