For more than 30 years, Charitable Choices has been helping charities raise more money in the federal government's charity drive, the Combined Federal Campaign (CFC).
We produce and distribute guides to CFC charities. We also reach military personnel through our Military Insert. Our page in The Washington Post's Giving Tuesday special section reaches both thousands of DC-area CFC donors as well as a total of more than 122,000 Post subscribers, 79% of whom have donated in the past year. Our website gives charities a chance to tell potential donors what they do and why their work needs support.
No one else reaches anywhere near the number of potential CFC donors that our printed materials reach: more than 678,000 in 2024. Our Distribution Summary shows how we did this. Our Distribution Overview explains why our distribution -- much of it done by hand directly to federal and military employees -- is so effective. Our Impact Report summarizes the data that show how effective being part of Charitiable Choices can be.
In 2025, we will be targeting more retired federal and military employees, the CFC's one growth area. Millions of retirees who receive retirement payments can have their donations deducted from each payment, just like payroll deduction works for active employees and military members. As a result, the average retiree CFC donation is $1,331!
Here is our 2025 Contract, which summarizes how we will continue to reach active federal and military employees while also targeting retirees.
- Our attractive, photo-filled CFC Charity Guides look like guides, being organized by the types of work charities do ("Children," "Medical Research"). People use them to learn about charities they can support through the CFC, especially now that the CFC has phased out the "catalogs" of charities it used to print and distribute to employees and military personnel. We get our guides in the hands of potential CFC donors, as our Guide Distribution Reports explains. It lists the 119 federal offices, 34 Metro stations and 51 military bases we targeted in 2024.
- In each guide, in addition to their listing, charities can add display ads or charity stories. Charities can also be part of our "Why should I support your work?" pages. Each charity gets up to 75 words to answer this question, plus their taglines, logos, small photo and CFC number. This allows charities to explain why their work is so important and needs support.
- Our Military Insert, a page of full-color display ads on the inside cover of Military Family magazine, went to 400,000 people at 220 military bases and facilities in the U.S. More than three quarters are handed to people as they enter commissaries on these bases.
- Our "Why should I support your work?" display ad was a full page in a section that wrapped around The Washington Post on Giving Tuesday, which means it was seen by every Post subscriber (122,000+) as they opened their newspapers on the biggest day of the year for charitable giving. It was also part of the Post's digital “print edition,” which has more than 1150,000 daily readers.
Does being in our guides and other options make a difference?
For years we’ve tracked our guides’ impact. In early 2025, we updated our summary of the data we've collected: Does CFC Promotion Still Pay? The answer is that is still clearly does pay for many CFC charities, though not all. The report discusses in detail which types of CFC charities benefit from promotion as well as the many factors that can affect how much a charity receives year to year through the CFC. A report we published in 2024 both shows the impact of CFC-focused promotion for one charity (the Make-A-Wish Foundation) over six years, as well as the sometimes dramatic impact that certain factors can have on how a charity does year to year, in this case the broad order of CFC charities (Local, National, International). This order changes each year. For many national charities like Make-A-Wish, the years when local charities come first can have a big impact on their CFC donations.
We've been publishing reports on CFC data for individual charities since this data first became publicly available, in 2009. An early example is this article that summarized some of the most dramatic impact data we've seen, data that involved three related CFC charities that dropped out of our guides in 2014, then came back in 2015. They went down dramatically the year they left our guides, then went up when they came back.
The details
Here are the specs for our guides, Military Insert and our website. Here's the form to use for your charity's page in our site. Here are the seven questions each charity answers.
If you have questions or need more information, please e-mail or call us: [email protected]; 240-683-7100.