I haven’t encountered any donors complaining that they were misled by donation matching offers, and I’m not aware of any evidence that offering donation matching has worse impacts than not having it, either in terms of total dollars donated or in attempts to increase donations to effective charities.
However, I haven’t been actively looking for that evidence—is there something that I’ve missed?
I haven’t encountered any donors complaining that they were misled by donation matching offers
When I was at Google, I participated in an annual donation matching event. Each year, around giving Tuesday, groups of employees would get together to offer matching funds. I was conflicted on this but decided to participate while telling anyone who would listen that my match was a donor illusion. Several people were quite unhappy about this, where they told me that it was fraud for me to be claiming to match donations when my money was going to the same charity regardless of their actions. They were certainly not mollified when I told them that this was very common.
I think the main reasons you don’t see complaints about this from the general public is (a) most of the time people do not realize that they are being misled (b) people are used to all kinds of claims from charities that do not pass the smell test (“$43 can save a life!”) and do not expect complaining to make anything better.
I haven’t encountered any donors complaining that they were misled by donation matching offers, and I’m not aware of any evidence that offering donation matching has worse impacts than not having it, either in terms of total dollars donated or in attempts to increase donations to effective charities.
However, I haven’t been actively looking for that evidence—is there something that I’ve missed?
When I was at Google, I participated in an annual donation matching event. Each year, around giving Tuesday, groups of employees would get together to offer matching funds. I was conflicted on this but decided to participate while telling anyone who would listen that my match was a donor illusion. Several people were quite unhappy about this, where they told me that it was fraud for me to be claiming to match donations when my money was going to the same charity regardless of their actions. They were certainly not mollified when I told them that this was very common.
I think the main reasons you don’t see complaints about this from the general public is (a) most of the time people do not realize that they are being misled (b) people are used to all kinds of claims from charities that do not pass the smell test (“$43 can save a life!”) and do not expect complaining to make anything better.