FB had a limit of $20k/​donor this year, and I think that’s much more likely to go down than up. So depending how much you’re donating there’s not much reason to save more than than for Giving Tuesday.
There’s also the 1% PayPal match (plus 2% cash back) that’s been in December each year. At a 16%/​year discount rate it’s worth waiting a couple months for that 3% but not all year.
It’s also notable that PayPal announced that they were doing a dollar-for-dollar match of up to $500k in donations through the PayPal Giving Fund on Giving Tuesday, separately from the Facebook match.
That post was made on Giving Tuesday itself and the details there are very limited, but I found this post by an organization with a date of Nov 23, along with the match start and end time. I’m going to dig into this some more. Maybe we can ask some EA-aligned organizations signed up for the PayPal Giving Fund if they can keep an eye out for this and give us an early tipoff.
Note that, strictly speaking, the formula is the value of a given dollar if invested until GT. So, if we’re referring to the 20,001st dollar, then we should probably adjust the probability of it getting matched down, way below my 30%. (Due to the time it takes to make several donations on Giving Tuesday morning, that probability should curve down before that anyway). But if you still assign it a probability of 12%, it’s worth doing now.
My personal credence that donations above $20K would be matched is probably much lower than this for the reasons you identify, though.
FB had a limit of $20k/​donor this year, and I think that’s much more likely to go down than up. So depending how much you’re donating there’s not much reason to save more than than for Giving Tuesday.
There’s also the 1% PayPal match (plus 2% cash back) that’s been in December each year. At a 16%/​year discount rate it’s worth waiting a couple months for that 3% but not all year.
It’s also notable that PayPal announced that they were doing a dollar-for-dollar match of up to $500k in donations through the PayPal Giving Fund on Giving Tuesday, separately from the Facebook match.
That post was made on Giving Tuesday itself and the details there are very limited, but I found this post by an organization with a date of Nov 23, along with the match start and end time. I’m going to dig into this some more. Maybe we can ask some EA-aligned organizations signed up for the PayPal Giving Fund if they can keep an eye out for this and give us an early tipoff.
There’s also other counterfactual matching opportunities that tend to arise around the same time though.
Thanks Jeff. I agree.
Note that, strictly speaking, the formula is the value of a given dollar if invested until GT. So, if we’re referring to the 20,001st dollar, then we should probably adjust the probability of it getting matched down, way below my 30%. (Due to the time it takes to make several donations on Giving Tuesday morning, that probability should curve down before that anyway). But if you still assign it a probability of 12%, it’s worth doing now.
My personal credence that donations above $20K would be matched is probably much lower than this for the reasons you identify, though.