Charity Choices

A Resource for Donors

For Charities

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 2019 options for promoting your charity in the CFC. Here are our options for local DC-area charities.

Learn about how we distribute our charity guides. Here you'll also find invoices documenting our printing and distribution

Does being in our guides and website work?  We just published a report on data for more than two dozen charities that documents the impact that our guides can have for many charities.  This report builds on data from earlier this decade that looked at what happened when several carities that had long been part of our guides dropped out, then came back the next year. 

Why our hand-to-hand distribution is a great way to reach potential CFC donors

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.

Comparing Charitable Choices Combined Federal Campaign promotion with the Post’s Express

            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.

How to document your charity's services and benefits for a Combined Federal Campaign application

            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.

How to apply to the Combined Federal Campaign

CFC Charity Home Page

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. 

New CFC rules will finally be implemented in 2017

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.