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 -- 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 also offer in-depth information and guidance about the Combined Federal Campaign.
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.
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 involved 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.
Obama expected to issue executive order allowing retirees to be part of the campaign
More than 3½ years after they were proposed, the new rules for the federal charity drive will go into effect for the next campaign, starting in 2017. The rules were finalized in 2014 but implementation was postponed in 2015 and 2016. The rules call for profound changes in the CFC, one reason they have taken a long time to implement.
For the fifth straight year, donations to the Combined Federal Campaign declined last fall, to $177.8 million, an 8% decrease. Since 2010, the amount the CFC raises annually has fallen by more than a third, a loss of more than $100 million a year in donations.