Two things are at the heart of our work to promote charities in the Combined Federal Campaign:
- Our attractive guides that function as guides to a range of CFC charities.
- Our great system for getting our guides and other CFC-targeted ads to federal employees and military personnel.
We print and distribute a lot of guides: more than 155,000 in 2024. In addition, we distributed 400,000 Military Inserts at 220 military bases and facilities in the U.S. Altogether we distributed nearly 678,000 print impressions, with most going to potential CFC donors -- more than 508,000.
We have three ways to get our guides into the hands of potential CFC donors:
- Our own distributors hand out guides to employees as they enter their workplaces. No one else does this. It’s expensive and labor intensive. But it gets our guides directly into the hands of potential donors, usually as they enter their workplaces in the early morning.
- We inserted 77,857 guides in The Washington Post, focusing on areas served by our local DC-area charities, areas with high percentages of federal employees, and areas with high household incomes.
- We use a network of distributors at 55 military bases across the country, who hand out our guides (65,000 in 2024) at commissaries.
In addition, we organize a colorful, full-page display ad in a section that wraps around The Washington Post on the morning of GIVING TUESDAY, a section that every Post subscriber will see as they open up their paper on the morning of the biggest giving day of the year. Our "Why Should I Support Your Work?" display ad was seen by more than 122,000 Post print subscribers and 150,000+ digital subscribers who read the Post's digital "Print Edition."
The number of CFC donors we reach -- 508,734 in 2024 -- is an amazing number. There is no other way to reach anywhere near that number of potential CFC donors, especially now that other ways of reaching CFC donors having disappeared, such as the Post’s Express tabloid and Federal Times.
Our distribution reports document how and where our guides and other options are distributed:
- Our Distribution Overview explains what makes our distribution so effective.
- Our Distribution Summary details how many print impressions go to federal employees and military personnel.
- Distribution Reports for our Guides lists the 119 federal offices, 34 Metro stations and 55 military bases we targeted in 2024.
Here are links to each of our 2024 Guides:
Does all of this CFC-focused promotion make a difference? Here is our analysis of 15 years of CFC data for individual charities, an analysis we updated in early 2025.