Nonprofits will be crossing their fingers this Giving Tuesday as Facebook's $7M match is again ... [+]
A year after its $7 million Giving Tuesday match was exhausted in a matter of seconds, Facebook is adding several new donor-focused functionalities to its flagship applications – but sticking to the same first-come, first-serve matching model.
The world’s largest social media platform announced that it will match up to $100,000 per nonprofit organization, and each donor can have up to $20,000 matched on Giving Tuesday.
While these figures may seem lucrative, experts strongly caution nonprofits not to rely on these matching figures. In 2017, the company’s $2 million match, with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, was gone within less than 30 minutes; in 2018, donors flooded the site so quickly that the $7 million pledged jointly by Facebook and PayPal was allocated “within seconds.”
“Yes, the match creates a lot of excitement and hype, which leads nonprofits to focus their GivingTuesday fundraising efforts around the Facebook match, but it can leave many disappointed right at the start of the global giving day,” said Molly Trerotola, Director of Strategic Engagement for Give Lively. “We do caution against relying solely on the Facebook match because last year it ran out in seconds, and this year is expected to be no different.”
The details of the match were a hot topic in the “Giving Tuesday Learning Lab,” a Facebook group run by the Giving Tuesday leadership team. Members like K.T. Cannon-Eger, founder of Friends of Lili’uokani Gardens, voiced their skepticism in the comments section.
“In Hawai’i, that means we get up at o’dark o’clock. Even with donors across the mainland United States willing to get up early and make a donation through Facebook, our small nonprofit succeeded once in gaining a $100 match,” Cannon-Eger wrote. “We concentrate on finding donors willing to match contributions the whole day.”
Some users were more supportive of Facebook’s efforts.
“We should be applauding an easy platform to reach your friends which may be supporters in your view, but any social network is geared for reaching your friends,” wrote Marie Stanich LaBrosse, a Florida-based talk show host. “Facebook originally charged a 5% fee and after #GivingTuesday, Facebook realized that nonprofits needed help and dropped all fees to nonprofits.”
And while it’s true that 100% of donations on Facebook go to the recipient organizations, nonprofit consultant Julia Campbell was unequivocal in her criticism of the Facebook match.
“While it’s definitely helpful that Facebook is attempting to draw attention to the spirit of philanthropy and giving back, every year this match makes nonprofits froth at the mouth and go into an absolutely hysterical tizzy,” Campbell wrote in her blog. “I encourage all of you, my readers, my clients, my friends – NOT to focus on the Facebook match this Giving Tuesday.”
Around the U.S., community leaders who coordinate their own annual giving days have worked for years on finding solutions to maintain donor momentum throughout the day. This September, the Community Foundation of Louisville introduced ‘match minutes’ to its giving day strategy.
“During Give For Good Louisville, we broke our matching dollars into ‘match minutes’ where a certain portion of the matching pool was released during select minutes during the giving day,” said Molly Melia, Senior Associate of Marketing & Communications for CF Louisville. “This created peaks during the day where donors could give and be matched dollar-for-dollar, up to a certain amount. A standard minute with this model raised approximately $1,800, while (an average) match minute raised over $33,000.”
Louisville’s giving day donations jumped from $5.4 million in 2018 to more than $6.8 million in 2019 – part of a broader growing trend of giving day growth around the U.S.
While Giving Tuesday 2019 is likely to set new records for worldwide giving, the first-come, first-serve model on Facebook left some professionals wondering how much more could be done.
“In order to maximize the matching gift, it would have been nice to see Facebook restructure the gift to benefit the nonprofits and help them strategize their marketing efforts to build momentum around giving for the entire day,” Melia said.
In its official announcement of the $7 million match, Facebook VP of Product Management Naomi Gleit also officially unveiled a fundraiser sticker for Facebook Stories; a Donate button on Instagram business profiles; and expanded charity live-streaming tools for gamers on Facebook.
Disclosure: the author has worked with the Community Foundation of Louisville for Give For Good Louisville since 2016.
This article has been updated to correct a grammatical error in the third paragraph.
