I didn’t do an exhaustive search, but was a bit surprised to find zero EA organizations registered with the Combined Federal Campaign, the US federal government employee charitable donation drive. I think the federal HR office (“OPM”) is exaggerating a bit when it calls the CFC “the world’s largest and most successful annual workplace charity campaign,” but it is true that there are several million federal employees out there. Admittedly, CFC numbers are down over the last few years, but there are still about 80K donors a year.
There are some user fees, red tape, and overhead costs, meaning the CFC is not a great way to move a lot of money. But it might be worthwhile for certain organizations with potentially broader appeal (e.g., AMF, GiveWell) to experiment with an application as a form of low-cost advertising and see if they get (m)any bites. I’m less confident in that after seeing the decline in CFC participation over the last six years. And maybe perhaps some orgs have done so in past years and found out it wasn’t effective enough for the investment.
I see that IPA (which is on the EA organization list) is registered. Maybe organizations considering going through this process should ask IPA how it’s worked out so far.
Is it normal for nonprofits to initiate this? Rather than employees of the Federal gov’t who are invested? Most employee giving programs I’m aware of have primarily employee-initiated ways of adding charities.
I didn’t do an exhaustive search, but was a bit surprised to find zero EA organizations registered with the Combined Federal Campaign, the US federal government employee charitable donation drive. I think the federal HR office (“OPM”) is exaggerating a bit when it calls the CFC “the world’s largest and most successful annual workplace charity campaign,” but it is true that there are several million federal employees out there. Admittedly, CFC numbers are down over the last few years, but there are still about 80K donors a year.
There are some user fees, red tape, and overhead costs, meaning the CFC is not a great way to move a lot of money. But it might be worthwhile for certain organizations with potentially broader appeal (e.g., AMF, GiveWell) to experiment with an application as a form of low-cost advertising and see if they get (m)any bites. I’m less confident in that after seeing the decline in CFC participation over the last six years. And maybe perhaps some orgs have done so in past years and found out it wasn’t effective enough for the investment.
I see that IPA (which is on the EA organization list) is registered. Maybe organizations considering going through this process should ask IPA how it’s worked out so far.
Is it normal for nonprofits to initiate this? Rather than employees of the Federal gov’t who are invested? Most employee giving programs I’m aware of have primarily employee-initiated ways of adding charities.
Only the nonprofit can initiate it, see the “user fees” link above.