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?
The GWWC FAQ says that employer matches do not count:
However, gift aid does:
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.