When a challenge is made during these drives, eg a wealthy patron will give $10,000 if 100 new members sign up in an hour–are the “rules” strictly adhered to? Will Ms. Liberal Bigbux really not fork over the 10 large if only 99 new members sign up? If near misses count in horseshoes, hand grenades, and pledge challenges, how near must the station get for a challenge to be honored? Are there any laws that cover this?
It would be up to Ms. Liberal Bigbux - I can’t imagine and judge in the world forcing someone to cough up $10k when the agreed upon amount wasn’t met.
I suspect most of those matching challenges are issued to get people to donate faster. You feel like your $100 is going further if you know it is going to be doubled (or whatever).
I remember in 2008 the Obama campaign had a fairly sophisticated matching campaign that could be done on the individual level. It certainly made you feel like you were doing more - and you could even write a note to the person you were matched up with.
Generally, when a challenge is issued, the money has already been pledged by the challenger. It’s more of an incentive than a hard and fast make-it-or-lose-my-money deal. I don’t know anything about the legal aspects, but the donor money is basically already in the bank when the announcement is made.
In my experience, they are not very nitpicky about those ‘rules’. [ul][li]Often the donor has/will give the money regardless; the matching or time-limited ‘rule’ is just to encourage more donations.[/li][li]Often the charity has fine print in the agreement with the donor which allows ‘stretching’ that rule. When I was working with a scholarship organization, we had donors who wanted to give a very limited scholarship, like ‘given to a student from small town X’. We generally persuaded them to change that to “preference will be given to a student from small town X”, which left room to still award the scholarship if nobody from that town applied.[/li][li]The volunteers working the phones are committed to the charity, and may ‘cheat’ to meet the rules. For example, if they get 99 of the needed 100 new donors within the hour, they will back-date the next one to make it fall into that hour. Or pay to sign up their child as a new member.[/li][li]There is generally no independent way for the donor to know if the ‘rules’ were actually followed or not. And most don’t care that much.[/li][/ul]
So they are generally followed in spirit, but not necessarily to the letter.
About laws on this, all that I can think of are statutes about fraud (where it would be hard to prove how you were ‘injured’ by this) or false solicitation (which are mostly about whether your donation is actually getting to the named charity, and whether they are spending it on legitimate charitable business). Hard to see much of a case here.