Food Drive Ends with Huge Success!
“There is no such thing as a simple act of compassion or an inconsequential act of service. Everything we do for another person has infinite consequences.”
Caroline Myss
Keizer Co and Mid-States Utility are no strangers to charity and service work. The companies set up or participate in a number of service projects throughout the year with a number of service organizations. This year, we wanted to try something new: a food drive.
The idea started simple, and at the Sioux City branch. Let’s do a food drive. The idea grew into wanting to involve the Sioux Falls and Omaha branches as well. How could we do it in a way that really promoted the charity and also increased the potential for donations to truly support our communities. This is when the idea for a competition came into play. Each branch was known to have a strong competitive nature. We all enjoyed trying to beat one another in various sales and service challenges in the past. So we decided we would do the same with this particular charity as well.
After contacting and confirming the rights to hold the challenge with each of the respective food banks: Food Bank of Siouxland, Feeding South Dakota and Food Bank for the Heartland who were all as excited as we were to kick off this competitive food drive. They were incredibly easy to work with and immediately sent us all the resources we would need to handle the charity.
We officially started the food drive on Monday, October 28. Our plan was to go through the month of November, ending the week before Thanksgiving (the final day being Friday, November 22), to ensure the food banks had enough time to receive, process and distribute the food by Thanksgiving Day. We began advertising the drive on social media in hopes of reaching out to many of our customers and other followers to offer them the chance to get involved and help their communities.
The first set of stats came in on Friday, November 8 and were posted that following Monday with Sioux Falls holding a sizable lead in the competition.
The second week began to get very competitive, especially between the Sioux Falls and Sioux City branches. The second sets of stats were posted on Monday, November 18.
Sioux City managed to take a small leap ahead of Sioux Falls with Omaha silently filling up their boxes in the background. Sioux City made sure not to get too comfortable in their slight lead and continued to build up.
Word started going around that some employees were “sandbagging” or otherwise bidding their time until the last minute to collect every possible item that they could to donate. The branches became fairly secretive of their numbers, hoping to surprise everyone with their final scores. An email was sent out shortly after the numbers were posted reminding people that Friday, November 22 would be the final date to bring in items for the food drive before the items were all taken to the various food banks.
Finally, Friday came. All of the employees who had been saving up their donations began bringing in those final food items. Each branch did their best to hold off on making the delivery to the food banks until the very last second in hopes of giving every employee enough time to bring in every item possible. But, by the end of the day, the final scores were tallied and locked in with the results to follow that Monday.
It was a somewhat close, but decisive, victory by the Sioux City, IA branch. We were incredibly blown away by the fact that, between the three branches, we managed to collect over 3,500 items! Everything was taken to the respective food banks who were incredibly gracious for the resulting donations.
The competition even sparked some interest from one of Sioux City’s local news stations who contacted us for an interview about the food drive and produced the following news story to detail it!
We want to say a huge thank you to all the food banks we worked with for making the process of setting up the drive so easy. We also want to send out a massive thank you to everyone who got involved in donating various non-perishable food items. Every single one of those items will go on to make a difference in the lives of those living in our communities.