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 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 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.
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 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.
One of the most noteworthy developments in the CFC during the past few years has been the rise of the Wounded Warrior Project, which has come from nowhere to raise the third most in the 2013 CFC -- $4.6 million.
For more than 30 years, Charitable Choices has been helping charities raise more money in of the federal government's on-the-job charity drive, the Combined Federal Campaign (CFC).