Former Senior Advisor to President Obama Joins GoFundMe

Longtime White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer will serve as the popular crowdfunding platform's VP of communications and policy.

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By Kim Lachance Shandrow •

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Former White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer announced today that he has joined GoFundMe as its new vice president of communications and policy.

The move, which the 39-year-old Delaware native announced earlier today on his Twitter feed, underscores the growing allure, power and popularity of crowdfunding, now even amongst the country's elite opinion spinners.

Related: How Taylor Swift Changed Another Tech Company's Policy

Pfeiffer, best known as one of President Obama's most-trusted and longest-tenured advisors, departed the White House back in March. He later joined CNN as a political commentator. In his new post at GoFundMe, a fast-expanding personal cause-based crowdfunding platform founded in 2008, he will focus on drumming up publicity for the startup's heartstring-tugging success stories, something the San Diego-based company doesn't seem too shabby at doing already.

Successful GoFundMe campaigns make headlines often, highlighting emotional tales of hundreds of thousands of dollars -- and sometimes even millions -- raised, for example, to help pay for sick children's medical expenses or to support ailing military veterans, including one of the last remaining survivors of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Related: The 1 Thing Your Crowdfunding Campaign Must Have

We'd say Pfeiffer has his work cut out for him, but there's certainly no shortage of feel-good stories to be harvested from GoFundMe's vast database. The Georgetown University alum says he looks forward to telling them in this next phase of his budding private-sector career.

"When I left the White House, I didn't know what my next chapter was," Pfeiffer told Re/Code today. "I was hoping to find something that was consistent with my experience working for Barack Obama for so long … That came down to the idea that our campaign was about empowering people to help their country."

Related: Which Tech Billionaires Donate the Most to Charity (Infographic)
Kim Lachance Shandrow

Former West Coast Editor

Kim Lachance Shandrow is the former West Coast editor at Entrepreneur.com. Previously, she was a commerce columnist at Los Angeles CityBeat, a news producer at MSNBC and KNBC in Los Angeles and a frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Times. She has also written for Government Technology magazine, LA Yoga magazine, the Lowell Sun newspaper, HealthCentral.com, PsychCentral.com and the former U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. C. Everett Coop. Follow her on Twitter at @Lashandrow. You can also follow her on Facebook here. 

Related Topics

Social Media Crowdfunding Communications Barack Obama Politics White House Kickstarter Indiegogo president obama GoFundMe

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