The federal charity drive, already delayed, won’t open its website for collecting online donations until “late October,” according to an Office of Personnel Management (OPM) press release issued Friday, Sept. 29.
Officially, the CFC campaign began Monday, Oct. 2, about a month later than normal. But there is still no official list of eligible charities.
The OPM release states that some charities responding to the hurricanes “will require additional time before they may accept solicitations.”
Given that the application process ended in March, this may mean that these charities (and perhaps many others) haven’t yet paid the new “listing fee.” This fee is paid after a charity is approved. It is the largest fee: $2240 for national charities with annual budgets over $1 million. The CFC is relying on this fee to help cover the CFC’s costs.
Until this fee is collected, approved charities can’t be added to the list of 2017 CFC charities, which is most likely why the list still isn’t available. (In the past, the list was usually released in mid-summer.)
This list is needed for the new central CFC website (where employees can make online donations or pledges). It is also needed to allow the 37 regional CFC campaigns to print their regional directories of eligible charities.
The CFC has already announced that the campaign will run later than normal, until January 12. It would be hard to extend this date again since payroll deduction pledges need to be made before the first 2018 payroll checks are issued. But given the many delays this year (the application deadline was also delayed twice), there is no way to know for certain.
In relation to the new regional campaigns, contact information is still not available, except for the DC-area campaign, whose staff didn’t change. Eventually this information is supposed to be on the CFC’s “campaign locator.”
Earlier we reported on the slow implementation of the major changes in this year's CFC campaign. Click on "About the CFC" to see more of our coverage of the CFC.