7 Questions About Promoting Your Charity in the Federal Charity Drive We know you have many options for helping your charity raise more money in the Combined Federal Campaign. We also know it can be pretty confusing to sort through your options. To help, we’ve put together this list of questions you should ask about each of your options, as well as a comparison chart you can use to compare various options in terms of cost, number distributed, who receives them and more. These questions reflect the fact that we’ve been helping charities in the CFC for more than 25 years, being created by the Fair Share Committee, which pushed to open up the CFC to a much greater range of charities in the 1980s. Over the years we’ve learned a lot about how the CFC works – and what works to help charities raise more money in the CFC. We of course think that our guides to CFC charities are the best options for reaching people who may support your work. But we’re not the only good option, and we think these questions will be helpful no matter what you decide.     1. How many people who can actually give through the CFC are reached? Just because a publication or station is located in the DC area, for example, doesn’t mean it reaches a lot of DC-area federal employees or military people. (The DC CFC accounts for about a quarter of all the money raised in the CFC nationally.) The giant radio conglomerate Clear Channel has even started a “CFC Directory” for its DC-area stations, which include stations like “Hot 99.5,” a pop station that skews young even among children. How many federal employees or military people actually listen to these stations and go to their websites (where its “CFC Directory” will be)? Clear Channel doesn’t say in its promotional materials. The Post Express give-away newspaper does now state how many potential CFC donors (federal employees and military people) receive this paper – 31.1% of the 181,000 copies it prints each day. That equals 56,000, a good number. However, this is still considerably less than the number of potential CFC donors who receive our DC CFC Guide, which last year was more than 129,000. Our other DC-area guide, which we insert in The Washington Post, reached just over 57,000 potential CFC donors (according to the Post’s demographic information for the geographic areas where we inserted this guide).     2. Who is reached ... and who do you want to reach? The CFC solicits both federal employees and military people. So one question you need to ask is which of these two audiences will be most likely to support your work? If the answer is members of the military, you actually have many options. Nationally, both the Military Times newspapers ( Army Times, Navy Times, etc.) and Stars and Stripes reach very large numbers of military people. Locally, in the DC area, a chain of newspapers called Comprint reaches more than 100,000 DC-area military people. We also reach a lot of military people – a total of 182,000 in 2010. Of the four guides we distribute, our National CFC Guide reaches the most military people – 117,600 last year. If the answer is federal employees, you have considerably fewer options. The Federal Times goes to only about 40,000 federal employees. The Express is received by about 49,000 federal employees. This is the area where Charitable Choices really excels – last year our guides went to 240,000 federal employees, including 182,000 in the DC area. We are able to reach this many federal employees by doing things no one else does, including distributing our guides by hand outside federal agencies and mailing our guides to federal managers (using the list of the company that publishes the Federal Yellow Books, constantly updated directories of federal managers).     3. Do people who see a publication actually use it to help them decide whom to support through the CFC? This really involves two questions. The first is, How many people actually see an ad or a CFC ad book that is in a particular publication? The problem we see is that the various CFC ad books that are inserted into publications like the Express and the Times newspapers are usually printed at the same time as the publication itself, on the same newsprint. There is usually nothing on the cover of the publication that alerts readers that a CFC ad book is inside. These ad books often look good when you see them by themselves, but how many people actually do see them? This is why we emphasize the number of guides we distribute directly to potential CFC donors, either by hand and through the mail – more than 132,000 last year. This is very expensive and time-consuming, but it gets our guides directly into the hands of potential donors. The second part of this question is, of those who actually see a CFC ad book or guide, How many use it to help them decide which charities to support? An ad book is simply a collection of ads. Some of them, such as the CFC ad book put into the Express, have other articles, but they are primarily ads for charities. This is why we emphasize how the Charitable Choices guides look and how they are organized – they look like guides, with each charity getting the same opportunity to tell potential donors about its work. It is organized logically, according to the type of work a charity does – health, environmental protection, etc. It includes an alphabetical index. And it isn’t overwhelming like the official CFC catalog (more than 160 pages last year in the DC area!). We think this is why we get a lot of testimonials like this one, from the Bachmanns in Alexandria, VA: “Thank you so much for mailing your guide to us. We used it for years when we were Federal Government employees….” Surveys that charities did of their CFC donors (back when charities received the names of most of their CFC donors) found that, of those donors who had seen our guides, about 90% of them used them to help decide which charities to support through the CFC.     4. How many other charities are you competing with? Because there aren’t a lot of ways to reach federal employees and military people, many charities and their CFC federations end up using the same publications – especially, the Express, Stars and Stripes and the Times newspapers. These are all good ways to reach potential CFC donors. But they are all packed with CFC ads. Not only do these publications sell their own CFC ads, they include several CFC ad books, such as Best of CFC. This one ad book in the Times newspapers included ads for nearly 300 charities. There were 34 ads for children’s charities; 68 for health charities. The Post Express not only sells CFC ads on several days during the fall, it publishes its own ad book (more than 100 charities last year) and includes an ad book published by America’s Charities and joint ads of EarthShare, United Way, Christian Services Charities and other federations. The second part of this question is, of those who actually see a CFC ad book or guide, How many use it to help them decide which charities to support? While our guides include 100 or more charities, you are really mostly competing with charities doing similar work, a relatively small number, depending on the type of work you do. In our National CFC Guide, for example, there were only six animal and wildlife protection charities. Five faith-based charities. Only two environmental protection charities. Three hunger charities. In other words, your charity won’t get lost.     5. Is there any evidence that a CFC promotional option actually works? It’s very hard to determine what works in relation to the CFC. Every year, the order in which you appear in the official CFC catalog changes. You can be on page 12 one year, page 112 the next year. A lot also depends on what is happening in the fall – Hurricane Katrina, the Michael Vick dog abuse case, the collapse of the financial system -- all happened in the fall. But, this said, we have documented the effectiveness of our guides. In 2008, we found data for 59 charities that were new to our guides over a 4-year period. This data was very encouraging: nearly two thirds of the charities whose CFC donations changed had increases and these increases averaged 23%. We don’t want to oversell this data. It’s a small sample. But it is evidence that being part of our guides is an effective way to promote your work in the CFC.     6. Who benefits from your charity being part of this CFC promotion option? The answer to this question is obvious for many CFC promotional options – The Washington Post publishes the Post Express (and owns Comprint military newspapers), Gannett publishes the Times newspapers, we publish and distribute our Charitable Choices guides. But over the years, most CFC federations have also begun to sell ads in their own ad books or joint ads. This is fine and no doubt these federations believe that their CFC ad options are the best available. But when your own CFC federation is asking you to buy an ad in its own ad book or joint ad, you have to decide for yourself whether this is really the best option for your charity.     7. How much advice about the CFC can you get? CFC federations are obviously able to provide a lot of advice about promoting your work in the CFC – you just need to remember that they also have an interest in (and belief in) you purchasing ads in their own ad books or joint ads. But one thing that has changed a lot over the years is the number of publications and stations that are also trying to sell CFC ads because they see charities as a potential ad market. So you get huge companies like Clear Channel and USA Today trying to market CFC “directories.” We’ve been involved with the CFC for more than 30 years, initially doing the hard work of communicating why federal employees should be able to give a much broader range of charities. (In the early 1980s, only about 30 national and international charities were able to benefit from the CFC.) We know the CFC. And we know charities – working with charities and foundations is all we do. We know how to help charities promote their work. When you become part of Charitable Choices, you gain access to this expertise. Call us or email us – ask us to help you with your 30-word descriptions or your display ads, ask for our advice about how to raise more money through the CFC or about CFC eligibility issues – we are here to help you. We are a very small organization, which is why we put such a premium on good service. To learn more about our services, please look at our 2011 Charitable Choices Information Booklet. This includes a summary of how we distribute our guides. For more in-depth reports about our distribution, please go to www.CharityChoices.com/distribution. On this page you can also find invoices that document our printing and distribution. If you have questions about the CFC or about our guides, please call us (240-683-7100) or email us (Grace@CharityChoices.com or Tim@CharityChoices.com).