Two things are at the heart of our work to promote charities in the Combined Federal Campaign:
- Our attractive guides that function as guides to a range of CFC charities.
- Our great system for distributing our three guides (National Guide, DC Guide, Holiday/Post Guide) as well as our Military Insert and our CFC Section in Recreation News.
We print and distribute a lot of guides: more than 201,000 in 2023. In addition, we distributed 400,000 of our Military Inserts at 220 military bases and facilities in the U.S., plus 78,955 of our CFC Section in Recreation News (Oct. issue). Altogether we distributed nearly 817,000 print impressions, with most going to potential CFC donors -- more than 619,000.
We have four ways to get our guides into the hands of potential CFC donors, plus we started a new way for our charities to reach CFC donors and many other donors through our half page display ad in a special, GIVING TUESDAY section in The Washington Post:
- Our own distributors hand out guides to employees as they enter their workplaces. No one else does this. It’s expensive and labor intensive. But it gets our guides directly into the hands of potential donors, usually as they enter their workplaces in the early morning.
- We inserted 51,985 guides in Recreation News, a monthly that is the official publication of 55 Government Employee Associations. It is distributed inside nearly 200 federal government and military offices in the DC area.
- We inserted 79,074 guides in The Washington Post, focusing on areas served by our local DC-area charities, areas with high percentages of federal employees, and areas with high household incomes.
- We use a network of distributors at 55 military bases across the country, who hand out our guides (55,000 in 2023) at commissaries.
- In 2023, we began using a new section published by The Washington Post that wraps around the printed paper on the morning of GIVING TUESDAY. We'll be doing this again in 2024. Our half page "Why Should I Support Your Work?" display ad was seen by more than 137,000 Post print subscribers and 185,000 Post digital subscribers who read the Post's digital Print Edition.
We reach a huge number of potential CFC donors: more than 155,000 federal employees and 464,000 members of the military in 2023.
This is an amazing number. There is no other way to reach anywhere near that number of potential CFC donors, especially now that other ways of reaching CFC donors having disappeared, such as the Post’s Express tabloid and Federal Times.
Our distribution reports document how and where our guides and other options are distributed:
- Our Distribution Overview explains what makes our distribution so effective.
- Our Distribution Summary details how many print impressions go to federal employees and military personnel.
- Distribution Reports for our Guides lists the 119 federal offices, 34 Metro stations and 55 military bases we targeted in 2023.
We also document our distribution by posting invoices for our printing and distribution:
- These are the distribution invoices and advertising invoices.