Hide table of contents

It's giving season and some charities are offering donation matching again. For this to work as an incentive, I feel that I should be able to use them as a "donation discount" on my pledge. So for example if I pledged 10% of my income of 100k, then if I donate 5k to a matching scheme, thereby achieving 10k donated, I would have fulfilled my pledge of donating 10k. How do others treat this?

3

0
0

Reactions

0
0
New Answer
New Comment


3 Answers sorted by

@Larks. Further to Jason’s above comment (noting it’s roughly equivalent to tax deductible donation calculations), you count Gift Aid if you count your pre-tax income. If you can’t claim Gift Aid then you count your post-tax income.

Thanks so much! Interesting that they count GiftAid and not employer ones, that seems contradictory.

Agree on the counterfactual impact of the person offering donation matching otherwise donating to other effective charities.

It mostly makes sense to me. Gift Aid has much the same purpose and ultimate effect in the UK as the US' tax deductions for charitable contributions, I think.

In the US, if I give $10,000, I will (often) be able to deduct a certain amount from my tax bill -- the amount depends on my marginal tax rate, but let's say $2,200 for this example. So the "cost" to me of directing $10,000 to the charity is $7,800.

In the UK, I can give $8,000, and the UK government will kick in an extra $2,000. I think that is seen as coming from my tax payment (in that if the charit... (read more)

The GWWC FAQ says that employer matches do not count:

Do I count employer donation matching towards my giving pledge?

We think it's wonderful when employers offer donor matching and encourage donors to use this opportunity as it results in more money going to high-impact charities! However, when it comes a giving pledge, we only count the donation that the donor makes themselves. This is because the spirit of the pledge is to voluntarily forego a certain portion of your income and use it to improve the lives of others.

However, gift aid does:

Does Gift Aid count toward my pledge?

Yes! If you are a UK taxpayer and claim Gift Aid on your donations, we recommend counting both the Gift Aid as well as your original donation toward your giving pledge. If you donate via Giving What We Can

we can automatically claim the Gift Aid for you. If you report donations

with the Giving What We Can dashboard it will automatically calculate the Gift Aid amount for you.

If you are counting Gift Aid towards your pledge it is recommended to calculate your pledge amount based on your pre-tax income. If you are not claiming Gift Aid or any tax benefit then it is recommended to calculate your pledge amount based on your post-tax income.

My guess is that most charity-offered donation matches are not counterfactually valid - the person supplying the 'matching' grants would have given anyway - which seems like a good reason not to count it. Yes, this means it doesn't work as an "incentive", which is the right outcome, because it matches the pledge-compliance incentive with the real world outcomes. In fact the case for counting employer-provided donation matches seems stronger than charity-provided ones, since they are more likely to be target-agnostic and hence have more counterfactual validity. 

Curated and popular this week
Paul Present
 ·  · 28m read
 · 
Note: I am not a malaria expert. This is my best-faith attempt at answering a question that was bothering me, but this field is a large and complex field, and I’ve almost certainly misunderstood something somewhere along the way. Summary While the world made incredible progress in reducing malaria cases from 2000 to 2015, the past 10 years have seen malaria cases stop declining and start rising. I investigated potential reasons behind this increase through reading the existing literature and looking at publicly available data, and I identified three key factors explaining the rise: 1. Population Growth: Africa's population has increased by approximately 75% since 2000. This alone explains most of the increase in absolute case numbers, while cases per capita have remained relatively flat since 2015. 2. Stagnant Funding: After rapid growth starting in 2000, funding for malaria prevention plateaued around 2010. 3. Insecticide Resistance: Mosquitoes have become increasingly resistant to the insecticides used in bednets over the past 20 years. This has made older models of bednets less effective, although they still have some effect. Newer models of bednets developed in response to insecticide resistance are more effective but still not widely deployed.  I very crudely estimate that without any of these factors, there would be 55% fewer malaria cases in the world than what we see today. I think all three of these factors are roughly equally important in explaining the difference.  Alternative explanations like removal of PFAS, climate change, or invasive mosquito species don't appear to be major contributors.  Overall this investigation made me more convinced that bednets are an effective global health intervention.  Introduction In 2015, malaria rates were down, and EAs were celebrating. Giving What We Can posted this incredible gif showing the decrease in malaria cases across Africa since 2000: Giving What We Can said that > The reduction in malaria has be
LintzA
 ·  · 15m read
 · 
Cross-posted to Lesswrong Introduction Several developments over the past few months should cause you to re-evaluate what you are doing. These include: 1. Updates toward short timelines 2. The Trump presidency 3. The o1 (inference-time compute scaling) paradigm 4. Deepseek 5. Stargate/AI datacenter spending 6. Increased internal deployment 7. Absence of AI x-risk/safety considerations in mainstream AI discourse Taken together, these are enough to render many existing AI governance strategies obsolete (and probably some technical safety strategies too). There's a good chance we're entering crunch time and that should absolutely affect your theory of change and what you plan to work on. In this piece I try to give a quick summary of these developments and think through the broader implications these have for AI safety. At the end of the piece I give some quick initial thoughts on how these developments affect what safety-concerned folks should be prioritizing. These are early days and I expect many of my takes will shift, look forward to discussing in the comments!  Implications of recent developments Updates toward short timelines There’s general agreement that timelines are likely to be far shorter than most expected. Both Sam Altman and Dario Amodei have recently said they expect AGI within the next 3 years. Anecdotally, nearly everyone I know or have heard of who was expecting longer timelines has updated significantly toward short timelines (<5 years). E.g. Ajeya’s median estimate is that 99% of fully-remote jobs will be automatable in roughly 6-8 years, 5+ years earlier than her 2023 estimate. On a quick look, prediction markets seem to have shifted to short timelines (e.g. Metaculus[1] & Manifold appear to have roughly 2030 median timelines to AGI, though haven’t moved dramatically in recent months). We’ve consistently seen performance on benchmarks far exceed what most predicted. Most recently, Epoch was surprised to see OpenAI’s o3 model achi
Rory Fenton
 ·  · 6m read
 · 
Cross-posted from my blog. Contrary to my carefully crafted brand as a weak nerd, I go to a local CrossFit gym a few times a week. Every year, the gym raises funds for a scholarship for teens from lower-income families to attend their summer camp program. I don’t know how many Crossfit-interested low-income teens there are in my small town, but I’ll guess there are perhaps 2 of them who would benefit from the scholarship. After all, CrossFit is pretty niche, and the town is small. Helping youngsters get swole in the Pacific Northwest is not exactly as cost-effective as preventing malaria in Malawi. But I notice I feel drawn to supporting the scholarship anyway. Every time it pops in my head I think, “My money could fully solve this problem”. The camp only costs a few hundred dollars per kid and if there are just 2 kids who need support, I could give $500 and there would no longer be teenagers in my town who want to go to a CrossFit summer camp but can’t. Thanks to me, the hero, this problem would be entirely solved. 100%. That is not how most nonprofit work feels to me. You are only ever making small dents in important problems I want to work on big problems. Global poverty. Malaria. Everyone not suddenly dying. But if I’m honest, what I really want is to solve those problems. Me, personally, solve them. This is a continued source of frustration and sadness because I absolutely cannot solve those problems. Consider what else my $500 CrossFit scholarship might do: * I want to save lives, and USAID suddenly stops giving $7 billion a year to PEPFAR. So I give $500 to the Rapid Response Fund. My donation solves 0.000001% of the problem and I feel like I have failed. * I want to solve climate change, and getting to net zero will require stopping or removing emissions of 1,500 billion tons of carbon dioxide. I give $500 to a policy nonprofit that reduces emissions, in expectation, by 50 tons. My donation solves 0.000000003% of the problem and I feel like I have f
Relevant opportunities