How important is it that I pursue matches? I can catch the month-long ones and potentially the week-long ones, but it takes more attention than I'd prefer. Shorter is too short for both the DAF turnaround and for me getting to something when I'm busy. Should I bother to wait for these kinds of two-for-one deals? How important are matching campaigns to organizations' bottom lines? Do matching offers mostly meet their limits for larger organizations?
I can't speak to how much these matching campaigns matter, but personally, I don't concern myself with it. Keeping track of when they're available sounds too much like work. I make donations when I have the time and when it seems good to me to do so.
Is it likely that my DAF donation even gets counted toward a matching campaign? How would I know or help it to connect?
I know that for Fidelity Charitable, which is where I have my DAF, when you put in a donation to a charity, there's a line where you can specify its purpose - whether you want it to go to the organization's general fund, or whether you're contributing to a specific campaign, and if so, which one.
It seems like most organizations do not make the connection between a donation coming from the Crocheted Stache Fund and me as an individual who has donated in previous years, with the result that I end up a paper thank-you and a year's worth of email about, "We don't have a record of your donation." Do I need to contact each individual organization to tell them I'm me? Do I have something set up wrong?
Again speaking for Fidelity, there's an option to label your DAF donation with your full name and address, or just the name of your giving fund, or stay anonymous. However, I can promise that they don't care about this. No large charitable organization is keeping personal track of each of their donors, and no one's feelings will be hurt if you don't donate.
You're just a name on a list to them. When they send out their regular solicitations, there's a computer algorithm that looks up your details and picks whether to send the "We missed you!" letter, or the "Keep up your giving streak!" letter.
As an anecdote: there are some charities I've supported for a long time. To this day, I get letters from those charities addressed to me, at my parents' address - where I haven't lived for almost twenty years - begging for more donations, even though I do donate to those charities from my current address. Whoever's running the charity's fundraising doesn't know or care that I'm the same individual who used to live at one address and now lives at another. Once a name + address pair is on their solicitation list, they never delete it.
Does every organization on the planet pester people to sign up as a monthly donor because they can convince more people to donate $10 per month than $120 per year, or does a monthly structure also make a real difference in their bottom lines? The DAF has a minimum grant, and also I'm curious what if any difference it makes.
As others have said, it's probably easier for their budgeting if they get donations as a predictable income stream, rather than one-time donations that may come in at random times during the year.
However, there's also a "stickiness" that's attractive to them. People are lazy, and once you're signed up for a recurring donation, you'd have to actively decide to cancel it. Obviously, charities prefer that giving, rather than not giving, is the path of least resistance.
