Facebook Donation Match

For the last three years Facebook has offered donation matching on Giving Tuesday (11/27) where the first $X to be donated is matched 1:1. In general, I'm pretty skeptical about donation matches: much of the time when someone tells you you can "double your donation" that's not really what's going to happen. Specifically, if I donate $X, the charity ends up about $X richer than if I hadn't donated, not the $2X I might have been led to believe.

In this case, though, there's a $7M pool of money that will go first-come-first-served. This is more or less distributing money to charities more or less in proportion to how organized and coordinated their donors are, and I think that's something the EA community can do really well with! Here's what you do:

• Visit EA Giving Tuesday.

• Follow the full instructions or at least the basic instructions.

• Add all your credit cards to Facebook, call your credit card company to let them know you'll be doing this, get your credit limit rasied if you need to, make practice donations, etc, per the instructions.

I expect the full match to be used up in under 10s, and definitely under a minute, so the faster you can donate the larger your chance of getting your donation matched. Testing, I can do eight donations in about eight seconds:

There's a $20k limit per person, and a $2,499 limit per donation, so I'm going to be trying to make eight donations. That's beyond the limit of my 2% cash back credit card, so I'll be doing six on that card, and two on a 1.5% card.

Update 2018-12-05: it looks like I got the maximum $20k match! I've updated the donations page to show this. It's in grey and not included in our totals, like all other donations that I feel morally responsible for but aren't strictly from us.

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