Thanks for this comment Jason, you raise a valid point. I do think this will be challenging — part of the motivation behind this bounty was that friends and I don’t think we could facilitate large-scale corporate donation matching through our own connections. However, there is some precedent for companies matching non-staff funds, and I can imagine a few theories of success:
Last year, Walmart launched a campaign to match up to $2.5M in customer donations to the Red Cross. Amazon, Google, Facebook and others have run similar matching programs for specific nonprofits that are open to the public. PayPal has run public Giving Tuesday donation matching campaigns similar to Facebook’s old Giving Tuesday format.
There is a law in India requiring certain companies to donate at least 2% of net profits to registered nonprofits; many US companies set aside a pot of resources (in tech it is often 1% of profits) for giving. So in some cases, CSR leadership merely decide how to allocate existing resources for corporate philanthropy (though in other cases, encouraging a company to give could grow the total amount they donate). With low confidence, I would guess that causes are often chosen by a single passionate senior leader at a company or by an internal champion persuading a small group of senior decisionmakers.
I’m unsure about the extent to which retail donors’ matching funds incentivize companies to give, but I would guess that it helps at least somewhat. Executives might be excited by a $10M company-branded initiative that only “costs” the company $5M. I also think there are ways to frame retail donor co-funding as coming from community members or customers, rather than from strangers.
I don’t have a view on whether it’s more tractable to persuade companies to pledge a pot of matching funds or to change their employee donation matching policy. I could imagine that an initiative allowing employees to lend their unused donation match for an org-wide giving event would be meaningful to many staff members, and could lead to greater orgwide morale gains than a “use-it-or-lose-it” donation match policy. I could also imagine that certain early-stage startups may be openminded about designing their donation match to include a public matching component.
Ultimately, I’m unsure about how realistic this idea is or how likely the bounty is to get claimed. But we wanted to offer this bounty in case it might cause someone reading this post to work some magic and grow the set of resources going to great nonprofits!
A friend recently shared this reason for not giving (fear of an expensive medical crisis). I think if a good resource existed with the base rates of events that can cause financial hardship and solutions for reducing their likelihood (e.g., long term care insurance), this might help some people feel more comfortable with giving.
I passed this along to someone at GWWC and they said this is on their list of ideas to write about.