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"Information Is the Key to Thoughtful Giving" For nearly 20 years, Charitable Choices has been helping charities jointly promote themselves in workplace fund-raising campaigns, especially the federal government's Combined Federal Campaign (CFC). Each year we publish four photo-filled, easy-to-use guides to charities
that are eligible to receive gifts through the CFC. In 2005, we printed and
distributed more than 830,000 guides! Our goal has always been to give charities -- including smaller, less-established charities -- a very cost effective way to promote their work. Both in our guides and on our website, small charities get the same opportunity as much larger charities to tell you about what they do and why it’s important. We also give smaller charities a very low rate for being in our California guide or in the guide we distribute in The Washington Post (plus, by being in any or our guides, a charity also gets two pages in our website for a full year). To learn about being part of Charitable Choices guides and website, go to: www.CharityChoices.com/joinus.asp. Our goal has also been to provide federal employees and many other people a simple way to learn about a broad variety of trustworthy charities. Every charity in our guides and on our website has met the federal charity drive’s 10 accountability standards, such as not having excessive fund-raising and administrative costs. We tell you exactly how much each charity spends on administration and fund raising. As a result, you can focus on other important questions about a charity, such as which needs it is addressing, how it is addressing these needs and what it is accomplishing. We have asked each charity on this site to answer six straight-forward questions that can help donors develop a deeper understanding of how a charity will be using their donations. “What I like about your website is that I can learn what these charities really do with my money,” commented Julia Collins of Boyds, MD. Our guides and website make it easy for donors to find charities doing work they want to support. You can search for charities by category (“Health,” “Military/Veterans Services,” “Environmental Protection,” etc.). You can also search by where a charity works: internationally, nationally or locally (for now, in the DC metropolitan area and in Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego). Our guides and website also make it easy for donors to compare charities. They don't have to wade through dozens of separate appeals for help. Several surveys of federal employees have shown that our guides are both useful and quite effective. “We bring the Charitable Choices guides home from work and use them to teach our teenage children about philanthropic giving,” commented the Jordan family of suburban Washington, DC. The Charitable Choices Website We began our website in 1997 as a way to provide more information about the charities in our guides. It is an additional, free service for these charities. We wanted our website to be a way for people to really learn about the charities. We didn't want to simply post each charity's basic description and PR materials. To do this, we have asked each charity to answer six questions about its work, such as “How can I be sure that you will use my money wisely and won’t waste it?” You learn a lot about a charity when you read the answers to the questions," commented one user of our site, Linda Failey. "I've read some of these charities' annual reports and newsletters over the years, but I got much more out of those questions." How To Give To Charities on This Website When you find a charity that you want to support, on its page in our website you will find a link that will take you to that charity’s online donation page. There you can make a donation that will go directly to that charity. Charitable Choices will receive no part of your donation. You can also mail a check to any of these charities to that charity’s address (which we provide). Again, we receive no part of these donations. If you are a federal employee or member of the military, you can give to these charities through the Combined Federal Campaign. We have provided each charity’s 4-digit “CFC” number. We also explain why it makes sense to give through the CFC. If you are an employee of a company that has a United Way campaign, you can give to any of these charities even if they are not United Way member agencies through “donor option.” You will need the charity’s name and address (which we provide). We have also tried to make our website useful in other ways: · People in the DC area, for example, can find a list of charities that will accept donations for a wide variety of items, such as furniture, cars, computers, clothes, etc. · Anyone can use our 5-step guide for checking out any charity, or our information about how much you will save in taxes by making a charitable donation, or our advice about responding to a natural disaster. If you have questions or comments about our guides and website, we welcome them: info@CharityChoices.com.
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