An Estimated $4 – $7 Billion in Matching Gift Funds Goes Unclaimed Per Year

The article: “An Estimated $4 – $7 Billion in Matching Gift Funds Goes Unclaimed Per Year”

An estimated $4 – $7 billion in matching gift funds goes unclaimed per year. How do we better take advantage of this?

• Convince friends at work to allow you to send money to them and have them donate it to your selected fund to take advantage of their matching that they are not using.
• Create an organization that incentivizes others not convinced by EA to take advantage of their unused matching funds. You could even pay people to do this because with the matching benefit we would still be making money.
• Make sure GWWC members know to check with their company to see if they have matching opportunities.

As far as impact realistically I don’t think we could fully take advantage of the $4 - $7 billion because companies would start to alter their matching criteria if donation requests increased that much. I do think that there is still a lot of money though especially if we tried to spread the campaign across as many companies as possible. In the best scenario I imagine a positive impact of an additional billion dollars being funded towards EA aligned organizations. The worst scenario I could imagine is this campaign negatively impacting the EA brand, it breaking the law without us knowing, or we would lose money by sending it to individuals and they would not end up donating with it. I believe we could take precautions to easily avoid these pitfalls though.

So far the only impact I have generated is through sharing the post, talking with a friend at work who has agreed to let me use their unused match, and reaching out to the GWWC team through email to see what they think of the idea so that I can collaborate with them.

I think only I can take responsibility for this idea and it’s impact. I talked with friends about the idea and had one edit my post for grammar but I don’t think anyone contributed further to the idea. The posts under my forum post were helpful but again nothing very groundbreaking.

My minimum valuation is $0 for selling this idea to EA.

If I didn’t get a reward I would of just left the idea on the forum and my one email that I sent to a GWWC community contact. If I got a prize I would think this was a better idea than I previously thought and make the effort to reach out to the director of GWWC because now I would know it would be worth his time. I would continue to try to push this idea harder to see if I could build any traction.

As far as feedback, I think you could make the forum post simpler. The terminology and details made it hard for me to understand at times.

This article is 100% owned by Tyler Smith.

Thank you,

Tyler Smith