The Combined Federal Campaign (CFC) Is Going Dark. Your Donors Don't Have to Disappear With It.
If any part of your budget shows up every year through the Combined Federal Campaign, I need you to hear this now, in July, while you still have time to do something about it: that money is not coming back the way it used to.
For more than sixty years, the CFC has been the quietest, most dependable giving stream in the nonprofit world. Federal employees, military personnel, postal workers, and retirees pledged gifts through payroll deduction, and those gifts arrived month after month like clockwork. We call it workplace giving, but for the organizations receiving it, CFC money functioned like planned giving. The gift that was pledged in advance, paid on schedule and renewed year after year by donors who rarely missed a beat.
Organizations built budgets on it. Since its inception in 1961, the CFC has moved more than $8.7 billion to charities, according to The NonProfit Times. At its peak in 2009, the campaign raised $282.6 million in a single season. When OPM floated pausing the campaign last fall, Rosie Allen-Herring, then president and CEO of United Way of the National Capital Area, put the stakes plainly: "A pause in CFC giving will be devastating for hundreds of area nonprofits that rely on this essential funding each year. Many of United Way of the National Capital Area's partners receive between $100,000 and $700,000 yearly." Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Council of Nonprofits, made the same point about the organizations furthest from big-city fundraising machines: "The CFC is an important source of funding for many smaller and rural nonprofits that depend on this campaign to support essential services."
This king of dependence took decades to build and now it’s unraveling in a matter of months.
What Actually Happened
By 2024, annual CFC pledges had fallen to just under $66 million, the lowest total in the program's formal history, per historical data compiled by Nonprofit News Feed. The number of participating charities dropped from 7,515 in 2017 to about 4,400.
Then the dominoes started falling fast. In September 2025, OPM Director Scott Kupor allowed the campaign to proceed "only because many charities have already spent time and money preparing for this over the course of this year," while warning that administration costs had grown out of proportion. "This means for every $1 a federal employee donates, about $0.33 (or 33%) does not reach the charity for which it was intended," he wrote, per Federal News Network.
In early 2026, OPM froze new charity applications for the first time in the program's history. Then, in March, the CFC Charity Portal was decommissioned with roughly two weeks' notice, taking self-service access to donor and pledge data with it. "Today's abrupt notification should raise questions for charities who participate and federal workers who have contributed," Ann Hollingsworth of The Nonprofit Alliance told The NonProfit Times.
OPM's official position, posted on the CFC decommissioning FAQ, is that "a formal decision has not been made for the CFC overall." Existing pledges are still being processed and disbursed. But when a program freezes new applications, retires its portal, and publicly questions its own reason for existing, you don't need a formal announcement to read the room.
So the question is not whether to replace this revenue. It's how. Here's the part most organizations get wrong: your CFC donors are not gone. The pipeline is going away but the people are still there. Your job right now is to figure out who they were and give them a new way to stay connected to your mission. Here are the three moves that I would make if I were managing fund development for a non-profit organization.
Strategy 1: Recover Your Donor Data Before It Disappears
For years, your CFC reports included the names and contact information of every donor who checked the box to release their information. If your organization downloaded its pledge reports, disbursement summaries, and donor lists before the portal went dark, pull them out now. If you didn't, all is not lost. OPM says it remains the custodian of historical campaign data, and federations still receive monthly member distribution reports. Request everything you're entitled to, in writing, this month.
Then get every name into your CRM and tag it. Not in a spreadsheet on someone's desktop. In your database, coded as a CFC donor, so this list survives staff turnover and shows up in every campaign segment you build from here on out.
Strategy 2: Run a Raise-Your-Hand Campaign
Here's the hard truth about the CFC: most of these donors gave to you anonymously. The money arrived, but the names often didn't. You cannot steward people you cannot see, so you have to invite them to identify themselves.
Start inside your own database. Search for .gov and .mil email addresses. Look at employer fields for federal agencies. Flag donors in heavily federal zip codes. Those are your likely CFC givers hiding in plain sight.
Then go public. Send a dedicated email, put it in your newsletter, post it on social: "Did you give to us through the Combined Federal Campaign? We may never have gotten the chance to thank you. We'd love to know who you are." Give them a simple form and frame the whole thing as gratitude, not an ask. People who quietly gave through payroll deduction for years will respond to being seen. They will not respond to being ambushed with an ask.
Strategy 3: Build Them a New Home and Steward Them Like Major Donors
What made the CFC work was convenience and rhythm. A donor decided once and the gift ran on autopilot. So the replacement has to feel the same: a monthly recurring giving program, set up in two minutes, promoted specifically to your identified CFC donors as the new way to keep doing what they've always done.
And treat these folks with the weight they deserve. The average CFC pledge was nearly $1,000, according to The NonProfit Times. That's not a small donor. That's a mid-level donor with decades of loyalty, and loyal recurring givers are also your best future legacy donors. Every identified CFC donor should get a personal thank-you call. Decide now who's making those calls, by name, with a deadline. Then fold this entire segment into the end-of-year campaign you started planning this month. Same theme, same story, delivered to people who have already proven they'll show up for you.
The CFC gave organizations something rare: predictable, planned, faithful giving. The program may be ending, but the faithfulness lives in the donors, not the paperwork. Go find them, thank them, and build them a new front door before December.
Need help recovering your CFC donors or building your recurring giving program? I'm here. Reach out at christina@commandjoyco.com. I'd love to help you get your joy back.
