Facebook has put out their GivingTuesday announcement for charitable donations. They basically promised to match up to 100 dollars per month if you do a monthly donation to a charity through them. Unfortunately they have other restrictions of donating no more then $100,000 per nonprofit and a total of $7 million in total donations.
I'm going to donate to a charity (givewell.com) no matter what, but it's easier and more cost efficient for me to donate it all at once at the end of the year if I don't get matching. So basically I want to donate through FB IFF it will lead to matching and otherwise do donating my own way. Which begs the question, will my donation actually be matched, or are the other restrictions set by FB low enough that they will hit their upper limits before my donation get's matched?
Of course this isn't limited to FB, pretty much everyone that offers to match or make donations put's some upper limit on how much before they stop, which leads to the regular question of 'will my actions actually lead to money being matched?' When it's some big company advertising they will donate money if you buy their product I generally assume their going to hit their limits and my actions will never lead to a donation - not that it matters in their case since I'd rather just donate money to a charity directly then buy something so 0.1% of it's price will be donated.
But with someone like FB where they aren't going out of their way to heavily advertise it and it's not a blatant marketing ploy just to get more units sold It's not so easy. Is there a good way to determine rather a donation will actually be matched? or should I stick to my regular policy of assuming any group that offers to match up to some value X will hit that value and thus aren't worth considering when attempting to optimize my donations?
