EA #GivingTuesday fundraiser matching retrospective

Abstract

For #GivingTuesday this year, Facebook had announced that Facebook and the Gates Foundation would match donations made on Facebook up to $2 million. A number of us saw this as a rare opportunity to get donations to EA nonprofits counterfactually matched, similar to employer matching programs that match employee donations to any registered nonprofit. We created a Facebook group, a Facebook event, and a spreadsheet to help coordinate our efforts to capture as much of the match as possible. In the end, we had ~$379k in donations. Unfortunately, because the matching funds were exhausted at 1 minute and 26 seconds into the match, only ~$48k (~13%) of these donations were matched. As a result, it’s plausible that the most important effects of our efforts may have been indirect, and these effects may have been a mix of positive and negative. We consider some of the lessons we learned, whether we should try this again in 2018 (polls suggest yes), and some questions regarding the implementation in 2018. We also briefly discuss our follow-up work with nonprofits, which show that, in general, nonprofits received amounts similar to or greater than the amounts we had estimated.