Facebook is again going to be matching donations on Giving Tuesday:

  • $7M total
  • $20k max per donor
  • $100k max per organization
  • First-come first-served
  • Processing fees covered by FB
  • 8AM Eastern, Tuesday 12/3

I participated last year, and while the match ran out in seconds I was able to direct the full counterfactual $20k by being (a) prepared and (b) lucky not to get any declines. As with last year, I'm planning to donate more than $20k across several cards, so even if I get declines this year I'll still have a good chance of getting my donation matched.

There are good instructions on the EA Giving Tuesday site. One way things are different this year is that by confirming your identity ahead of time you can get FB to raise your per-donation limit. This means instead of twelve $2,499 transactions I'm planning to do three $9,999 ones.

I did one test $2,501 donation a few days ago to verify that confirming my identity worked, and three $9,999 donations yesterday to check if I got declines and practice. My guess is that this year the donation amount runs out in 1-2s, which means there's probably only time for one $9,999 donation before the $7M is gone. Very curious how it goes though!

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4 comments, sorted by Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 1:51 PM

Colm put together specific recommendations for people who want to help MIRI get matched on Giving Tuesday: https://intelligence.org/2019/11/28/giving-tuesday-2019/.

Other EA orgs that want to get matched might benefit from something similar; I haven't looked at the specific suggestions other orgs are making.

Those instructions are not as good as the EA Giving Tuesday ones. They don't tell you to confirm your identity 1d+ before, or to click the green button 30s+ before.

I agree, Jeff. I've updated the page accordingly.

Thank you for your identity confirmation investigations. How confident are you that individual donations of more than $2,499 will be matched during the event itself?

Pretty confident; I did three $9,999 donations as a test run without getting any declined. The EA Giving Tuesday team (which I'm not on) has thought a lot more about this, and you could ask them?