Meta’s donation match starts at 9:00 AM EST today
The $7 million Meta Giving Season donation match starts at 9:00am EST today, November 15th, 2022, according to an email I just got in response to a help form request from a Meta Payments Support Specialist.
Meta didn’t publish the start time of their match anywhere as far as I’m aware, so I’m sharing this information as a post so EA participants know to wait until 9:00am EST to setup their recurring donations.
For other information about the match, see:
Meta’s About Giving Season at Meta page.
EA Giving Tuesday’s website (they’re officially organizing this on behalf of EAs this year; I’m only posting this because I think the 9:00am EST start date is new information others don’t have yet and wanted to broadcast it so others don’t set up their new recurring donations early and not get matched as a result).
The EA Giving Tuesday team’s post Major update to EA Giving Tuesday.
My comment on that post about why I don’t think anyone can be >90% confident their donation will definitely get matched even if they donate right at 9:00am (only if you’re curious).
The comment section of this post if anyone adds more information.
Some quick, highly-uncertain forecasts, in case they’re useful to inform your decision-making:
If you donate precisely at 9:00am EST (Nov 15), I’d guess an ~80% you get matched. (Only ~80% not because the match may run out extremely quickly, but because by chance, first-donations made hours after yours may have their corresponding second-donation go through before your second-donation, thus getting matched (and potentially exhausting the match) before your second-donation goes through December 15th.)
If you donate at 3:00pm EST (Nov 15), I’d guess a ~60% chance you get matched.
If you donate at 9:00pm EST (Nov 15), I’d guess a ~45% chance you get matched.
If you donate on Nov 16th at 9:00am EST (i.e. 24 hours after the start), I’d guess a ~25% chance of getting matched. This could be way off; it might not run out for a days.
Background on EA’s Participation in Meta’s Donation Matches
For those who don’t know, several hundred EAs have previously directed over a million dollars in matching funds from Meta/Facebook to effective charities on past Giving Tuesdays from 2017-2021 (see the EA Giving Tuesday topic on the Forum).
This year they’re doing a whole Giving Season match instead of a one day match, and you have to set up a monthly donation to get matched, which is annoying because you need to set a reminder to cancel your monthly donation (for December 16th or later) after your second donation goes through if you don’t want to continue donating monthly on Facebook.
But if you’re looking to donate anyways it’s a good opportunity to direct another $100 (or more, if you donate to multiple charities, or if you “donation trade” with other EAs to donate to each other’s preferred nonprofits in addition to your own) for only a modest amount of time. I’d guess it probably works out to a couple hundred dollars directed to your nonprofit of choice per hour in expectation for most people reading this, which is a lot more than the rate most of us earn the money we’re donating.
Trying this now, thank you for the timely heads up. One thing I wanted to elevate from giving Tuesday website and one question.
First: it may be possible to set up multiple recurring donations to multiple orgs and so get multiple matches. No guarantees, but that’s a possible read of the meta rules the Giving Tuesday website mentions. I’ll be trying this, I’d encourage others to as well.
Second, do folks have recommendations for longtermist charities set up to receive more funds this way, especially those that might’ve been hit hard by FTX fallout ? There aren’t any mentioned I immediately recognized here: https://www.eagivingtuesday.org/eagtnonprofits. I would think these are good opportunities for people to be especially efficient given the FTX news; also, some people leaning more longtermist may be more likely to use this platform if they have options made clear to them. I’d do some digging but have to go to work now.
I can’t say whether they’ve been “hit hard”, but some candidate longtermist nonprofits include the following.
Facebook fundraiser / nonprofit links:
Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute
Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative
(May add more as I think of them / have time)
Source for the 9:00am EST start was this email I received from Meta:
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Are the matches just starting to be announced now? I just got messaged that one had been matched
I just got notified that my December 7th test donation was matched. This is extremely unexpected to me, and leads me to believe I got my forecast wrong and that the EA community actually could have gotten ~$1M matched this year with the donation trade scheme I had in mind.
By “messaged” do you mean you got an email, Facebook notification, or something else?
I’m not sure. I think you are the first person I heard of saying they got matched. When I asked in the EA Facebook group for this on December 15th if anyone got matched, all three people who responded (including myself) reported that they were double-charged for their December 15th donations. Initially we assumed the second receipt was a match, but then we saw that Facebook had actually just charged us twice. I haven’t heard anything else about the match since then and just assumed I didn’t get matched.
Here’s what it looked like (I cut out the information about the fundraiser I donated to):
What was the date of your donation?
Is this only for US residents?
I believe it’s for non-US residents as well, based on the fact that I haven’t seen see anything in the Meta Donation Match Program Terms & Conditions (“Terms”) or Meta’s About Giving Season at Meta page saying that only US residents are eligible.
The one relevant restriction is that donations just have to be made to US-based nonprofits.
For example, the Terms say:
I’d expect the Terms to also say “be a US resident” or “be located in the US” or similar if that was an additional restriction, but they don’t seem to say that.