standards of the federal government's charity drive. We tell you how much
each spends on overhead. You can make an online donation to nearly all.
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How to Become Part of the Charitable Choices Guides and Website
For more than 25 years, Charitable Choices has been producing and distributing guides
to charities that have met the accountability requirements of the federal government’s
on-the-job charity drive, the Combined Federal Campaign (CFC).
Part of our guides’ appeal is the number we print and distribute – more than 778,000 in 2010. Inevitably our guides are seen by people who have an interest in the work of your charity. In particular we reach a huge number of federal employees – more than 240,000 in 2010. Federal employees account for about two thirds of the money given through the CFC (a total of $281 million in 2010). There is no other way to reach anywhere near this number of federal employees. We reach many potential donors directly -- by mailing our guides to federal managers or by handing our guides to federal employees, often as they enter their workplaces. No one else does this kind of direct distribution -- it is very expensive and time consuming. But it gets our guides into the hands of potential CFC donors. Also important is that our guides look like guides, not collections of ads. Each charity gets the same opportunity to explain its work. It’s organized logically, according to the type of work each charity does. There is an alphabetical index. The guide looks great, with compelling photos, good design and good printing, on white paper, not newsprint. As a result, people use our guides. As the Bachmanns from Alexandria, VA, recently wrote us: "Thank you so much for mailing your guide to us. We used it for years when we were Federal Government employees ..." We keep the cost of being in our guides as low as possible – smaller charities can be in the guide we distribute in The Washington Post – and have two pages in this website for a full year -- for just $500. We’ve never raised this price since we first offered it in the mid-1990s. We know many charities simply don’t have the money to invest in telling potential donors about their important work. “The Charitable Choices guides give us equal billing with the big charities and lets our simple, effective mission shine through,” says Ann C. Keep, the executive director of the Visitors’ Services Center, a small charity in Washington, DC. The cost of being in our guides compares very favorably with the cost of other ways of promoting your work in the CFC, as this chart shows Comparison of 2010/11 CFC Promotion Options. As you consider your options, here are 7 Questions to ask about promoting your charity in the CFC. Many charities that want to reach CFC donors in the DC area use the Post Express give-away newspaper. It’s a good option. But it doesn’t go to nearly as many potential CFC donors as do our DC-area guides. The impact of our guides has been documented both by surveys of CFC donors that individual charities have done as well as by data on how much charities raise the year after they come into our guides or leave our guides. One study completed in 2008 found that, of 59 charities new to our guides that had a change in their CFC donations, nearly two thirds (63.5%) had increases. The average increase was 23%. A more recent study (2011) focused on 32 charities that had left our guides between 2006 and 2008. It found that the majority of these charities raised less money the following year and that the overall impact on all 32 charities that left our guides was an average loss of $15,254, or 16.4%. To read more about these studies, see Measuring the Impact. Here is the link for the data for these 32 charities. We don’t want to oversell this data – there are many factors that affect how much an individual charity raises from year to year, including its placement in the official CFC Catalog (a charity can be on page 10 one year, page 110 the next year), what is happening in the fall when the CFC takes place (Hurricane Katrina, President Obama’s decision to freeze federal pay in 2010, etc.), other promotion a charity may do and whether the charity’s overhead percentage changes. But taken together, this data does underscore the value of being in our guides for most CFC charities. Our four guides differ according to how they are distributed:
To learn more about why so many charities choose to be part of our guides, please glance at our 2011 Charitable Choices Information Booklet. This booklet includes a summary of how we distributed each guide. To learn more about how we distributed our guides, please go to www.CharityChoices.com/distribution. Here you will also find documentation of our printing and distribution. The deadline to sign up to be in our guides and website is in the summer. Once our guides are produced, CFC charities can come into our website at any time. The cost of doing so ($250) can be deducted from the cost of being in the following year’s guides. To learn more or to apply, contact us at 240-683-7100 or info@charitychoices.com. Charitable Choices is an information service, not a “federation.” As a result, charities from any CFC federation (or independent CFC charities) are welcome to participate in our guides and website. Because we are not a federation, we do not receive any part of the donations that a charity gets through the CFC.
For more information or to sign up, please e-mail or call us:
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