A Resource for Donors
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?
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.
For the Combined Federal Campaign, 2017 is the year of change -- major changes first proposed in 2013 and finalized in 2014 will finally be implemented. These include:
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.
One reason many charities’ CFC donations have gone down so much during the past two years has been poor search engines on CFC websites. This poorly functioning search engine has been fixed, at least for the DC CFC.
While we at Charitable Choices are not part of the CFC, we still believe that it is an excellent way for federal employees, military personnel and postal workers to support charities.
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.
The new rules for the Combined Federal Campaign will cause major changes in the CFC, especially how the campaign is run and paid for.