A Resource for Donors
Charitable Choices emerged out of the effort in the 1980s to open up the world's largest workplace charity drive (the Combined Federal Campaign) to a much greater range of charities. We've always worked to give all charities -- large and small, well-known and unknown, national and local, old and new -- an opportunity to communicate to donors why their work is important. Our website -- which we began in the 1990s -- is an extension of that commitment.
Our charity guides are very engaging and easy to use, being organized by the type of work charities do (animal protection, medical research, etc.). We have a unique system for distributing our guides, handing out many of them to federal and military employees as they enter their workplace.
We offer all charities very low-cost ways to communicate with potential donors, especially CFC donors. We allow small charities (annual budgets under $500,000) to be part of our website for free. We also offer charities in-depth information about the Combined Federal Campaign.
Learn about How to become part of our guides and website.
Learn about our 2017 options for promoting your charity in the CFC. Here are the 2017 options for DC-area charities.
Learn about how we distribute our charity guides. Here you'll also find invoices documenting our printing and distribution.
Here are the options/costs for National/International charities. Here are the options/costs for DC-area charities.
Does being in our guides and website work? We recently looked at data for several charities that had long been part of our guides, dropped out, then came back the next year. This data strongly suggests that our guides and website have a big impact on CFC charities.
To encourage charities to try our guides and website, we are offering special packages for national charities and special packages for DC charities.
Several charities have told us that they are receiving significantly less of the donations pledged to them during the 2016 campaign. One charity reported receiving just 57% of their pledged amount, far less than normal. Why is this?
Charities have never received all the CFC donations they are pledged, for two reasons.
This fall’s CFC campaign will be starting about a month later than normal and run into early January for the first time. The official start date is October 2. The actual start date in at least some of the CFC’s 37 regions may be later than this. Normally the campaign starts right after Labor Day.
Over the years we’ve tried many ways to reach Combined Federal Campaign donors, by far the biggest challenge of raising money through the federal charity drive. Besides our own CFC charity guides, two ways have stood out.
One is a great way to reach federal employees: Recreation News, a monthly that focuses on things to do in the mid-Atlantic region.
It’s the federal government’s diversity that makes it so hard for charities to reach the people who can give through the government’s workplace fund-raising drive.
Federal and military employees are spread across the world. They do all kinds of tasks and have all kinds of interests – military policy, agriculture, weather, health research, medical care – the list is long.
As a result, it’s very hard to find ways to reach very many of these people, especially federal employees.
A good way to reach Combined Federal Campaign donors in the DC area is the Post’s Express daily newspaper. We’ve used it ourselves.
A better way to reach many more DC-area CFC donors is through Charitable Choices. If you can do both, that’s great. If you can’t, please consider becoming part of Charitable Choices’ CFC charity guides, website and our other CFC promotional options.
Here are the differences:
This fall’s Combined Federal Campaign will be run in a completely different way, the biggest changes in the federal charity drive in 30 years.
How will all this impact the CFC and your charity this fall?
The latest report on how much individual charities get through the CFC included striking data about the value of Charitable Choices' guides and website.
In the past, the most difficult part of the CFC application process has always been documenting a charity’s services and benefits, especially for a national organization, which had to document its services in at least 15 states. At the CFC’s 2017 application training, the CFC’s Marcus Glasgow talked a lot about how a charity should document its services, responding to many questions.
One of the biggest changes in the 2017 Combined Federal Campaign involves the application process. Most of the changes will help CFC charities.
Charities that are already part of the CFC will only have to do a full application once every three years. In the other two years, they submit a “verification application,” which is much simpler.
If your charity is new to the CFC, you must file a complete application your first year, then you won’t have to file another full application for three years.
For many CFC charities, deciding to re-apply is a deceptively difficult decision. One factor: as many as half the charities in last year's CFC may drop out because of the new fees.