I'm only 30% sure [Edit Jan 7: 90% sure] that this is actually an inadequacy made by those whose job it is to maximize donations but I’ve noticed that none of the donations pages of GiveWell, Giving What We Can, Horizon Institute, or METR have this little tab in them that MIRI has (just scroll down after following the link):
This little tool comes from doublethedonation.com.
I was looking for charities to donate to, and I’m grateful I stumbled upon the MIRI donation page because otherwise I would not have known that Google would literally double my donation. None of the other donation pages except MIRI had this little “does your company do employer matching?” box. WHY.
I would wager other tech companies have similar programs, and that a good chunk of EA donations come from employees of those tech companies, and that thousands of dollars a year are wasted in missed opportunities here. If this is an inadequacy, it’s a pretty obvious and damaging one. I wish to speak to the manager.
I did not spend more than ten minutes noticing this, and just wanted to get this out there as fast as possible. There’s a chance I’m being stupid. (Perhaps every tech employee is usually briefed on the donation matching.) But if anyone out there has an answer for this or if a GiveWell employee is conveniently walking by and says “wait a minute! We could radically improve our UI!”, that’d be great.
[EDIT Jan 6: Arvin Lagaso of GWWC has read the post and informed his team. "However, as we are a small team, we can't guarantee we can improve on this quickly."]
[EDIT Jan 7: Here is a (very commercial) document listing data from two dozen case studies of doublethedonation.com's track record: https://resources.doublethedonation.com/hubfs/Finalized%20Revamped%20PDFs%20-%20General%20DLRs/Combined%20Case%20Studies%20-%20Updated.pdf
I have not parsed through it much, but doublethedonation.com makes repeated and confident claims about increasing donation amounts by double-digit percentage points. Their lower-bound estimate (which I have not double-checked) is a 40% increase in matching gift requests. I've sent them a query to ask for clearer data.]
[EDIT Jan 12: See Kyle Scott of METR's response in comments.]
[Apr 25: GiveWell has considered the idea carefully and put it on a list of potential projects.]
One for the World has had the Double The Donation widget for a couple of years. Unfortunately, it is about to become considerably more expensive, as they are upgrading everyone to a service called Match365. The plus side of this is that it will search your database for people who could be getting matching and email them proactively, and try to smooth the process of them getting matching. The downside is that it's fairly expensive (~$4k/year), but I think it'd still be positive ROI, at least in the first year (probably with diminishing returns after that).
One thing to point out is that DTD massively overclaims its success rate. For example, it emails me every month saying "52 people claimed matching at their companies via the widget on your website", but it turns out this means 52 people searched for matching, and I would estimate 1-2 per month actually end up accessing it (based on our overall volume of incoming corporate matching).
One final note - @Neil Warren as you are at Google, is there a reason you aren't using Benevity to do your donations, which automatically adds matching? If this is new to you, see if you can log in at google.benevity.org
I did not know about benevity. High value comment overall, thank you for your contribution!