This seems to have very low cost and a nontrivial chance of a very substantial positive effect. If nothing else, if you're on Twitter anyway it's probably worth the few seconds it takes to search for #NoFees4Charity and like a bunch of the tweets.

I'm happy to do this, but I want to note that it seems to me like you may be overselling the opportunity with your post title ("Opportunity to increase EA org funding by ~$200K/year if a couple hundred EAs take 1 minute on Giving Tuesday") since:

(a) VISA may very well not eliminate fees for payments to charity even if 200+ EAs do what you ask on Giving Tuesday, and

(b) The fraction of donations (made by EAs who filled out the EA survey) made using VISA credit cards may be substantially less than necessary to make the total fees amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. ("EAs in the survey reported total donations of $16.1M USD in 2018." However, not all of this is donated by credit cards, and VISA has 50% of the credit card market by purchase transactions.)

So my questions for you are:

• How likely do you think it is that VISA will do this conditional on 200 EAs fulfilling your request on Giving Tuesday?

• What fraction of donations reported on the EA Survey do you estimate are made by VISA credit card donation? (Or what's the total amount donated to EA nonprofits using VISA credit cards each year?)

Because it's the sort of thing I do, I wrote a metaculus question on whether this will succeed. It would be cool to see the people discussing the potential success of this plan put numbers on their claims.

 

I like it! Good job finding a small one-time change that would add up to a big difference over time.

Visa, PayPal, and some others already have discounted credit card processing rates for charities. How do you plan to respond to a boilerplate reply saying they’re already providing a discount for charities? I’m concerned that the existing nominal discount will “check the box” for some people that the credit card processing companies “care”.

Do you have a plan for negotiating if you get an interested response? In my limited experience with vendor pricing negotiations at work, counterparties are usually more amenable to a narrowly limited ask that demonstrates you understand the value they are providing. “Can I get a discount on the oversize box fee?” or “Can I get a discount on these 7 standard items?” are easier to say yes to than changing a whole category multiplier, where they would have to actually do the math.

This might look like asking for

• transaction fees to be waived on only Giving Tuesday
• a specific, deeper discount that still covers their expenses for providing the service
• a fee rebate program that could be. implemented separately from their payment processing

Also, if you target multiple processors, you might be able to play them against each other.

Good luck!