North American Food Drive - Ideas
 

So I just obtained the philanthropy position and my goal is to raise 20,000 pounds of canned goods this year. I would like to hear how much other chapters have raised and how they collected that amount. What events have been done? Any small activities to help raise cans before the big event? How early do you start collecting cans? How do you go about getting sponsors?

Something that a lot of chapters do is collect monetary donations and find a food bank that will give you the most pounds of food for every dollar. Thats the secret to those chapters that get 200,000 pounds. Something that my chapter does is we have a contest with campus groups on who can get the most cans and donations. We schedule a day for the contest and we break up the groups into different busy street intersections in town and they have signs and ask for donations. We sponsor lunch for them through whoever donates the meals. At the end of the day we tally up all the can food and the donations we collected and give the winning team a trophy as NAFD winner. We pay for t-shirts and banners through sponsors, you put their name on your shirt and tell them a whole bunch of college kids will be wearing them, small price for lots of advertising.

Our chapter is broken into teams. The leader of the team that wins gets a big prize (a new digital camera, tv, etc). We only go for one week every semester and raise about 12,000 lbs. Best idea is to talk to grocery stores (whole foods is the best), and stand outside and ask for cans of food, trust me, you will collect a lot in a short amount of time. Also talk to local schools and hospitals, they will help you out alot.