For both public and private companies, the fourth quarter looks and feels different from the others: Teams make a collective push to reach the goals set earlier in the year. Employees anticipate upcoming holidays and well-earned time away from work. And calendars include annual traditions of giving back to the community in meaningful ways.

At KAR Global, one of our most successful give-back programs is an annual food drive, addressing the ongoing hunger problem in our community. Each year, the food drive delivers our highest participation levels and significant charitable results.

Employees are assigned to teams for a week-long competition where bragging rights are the only prize. The competition is fierce, involving employees at all levels of the company, up to and including our CEO. Historically, we’ve seen teams engage in sandbagging, sabotage and friendly trash-talking—good-natured fun at work for the sake of feeding the hungry.

Lately though, we’ve realized that our annual food drive—one in which employees donate food items purchased from retail grocery stores—no longer matches the needs of our local food-bank partner. We realized that there’s a difference between food banks and food pantries, and understanding the difference changed our approach to giving.

• Food banks like Midwest Food Bank and Gleaners Food Bank warehouse large quantities of food and distribute that food to smaller, local food pantries and hunger-relief programs. Food banks work with national distributors and grocery chains to increase their buying power, so every donated dollar yields $40+ in distributed food. For this reason, food banks generally appreciate financial gifts over donated food items.
• Conversely, food pantries are typically community-based programs, often associated with schools, churches and community centers. Neighbors in need come to food pantries to receive groceries for their families. Food pantries are appreciative of both food and money donations as they address the daily needs of the community.

Employees at KAR Global have traditionally collected a glorious mountain of donated food during our annual food drive, made up of countless different categories, brands, sizes and nutritional values. But to better serve our food bank partner, we made the decision to keep our canned goods at home this year and collect only cash donations.

We introduced this program to employees as the “FoodLESS Food Drive”—a week-long competition between teams to raise money for hunger relief. As with any other change, not everyone was happy with the new plan. The idea was met with a fair amount of skepticism from those who missed the stacked canned goods and piles of pasta. We addressed the uncertainty in these ways:

1. Information. When people understand some of the facts shared above—especially that a food bank can convert $1 into $40+ in food for the hungry—it’s easier for them to accept the new idea. We shared information through all-employee emails and other internal communications, including videos from Midwest Food Bank illustrating their operation more clearly for our employee donors.
2. Creativity. Before the contest began, we decided to address the “missing food” of our food drive by embracing the idea creatively. We renamed the program as “FoodLESS” and created a graphic of a grocery bag filled with dollar bills instead of food, which was featured in all internal communications. For optics’ sake, we used large empty food boxes from the food bank to visually remind employees of the ongoing food drive.
3. Gamification. Our previous food drives were successful because of our competitive spirit, so we knew that gamification would be critical to the success of our new format. We used those empty food boxes to “box in” team leaders, stacking them in offices and around desks at the beginning of the week. Each box was assigned a value of $100 and could only be removed once that amount had been raised by the team. We competed to see which team could hit its goal first—“unboxing” its team leaders—and which team could raise the most money in total.

At the end of our competitive week, we had exceeded our goal by more than 20%, raising over $24,000 in employee donations for Midwest Food Bank. With Midwest’s considerable buying power, our foodless program will yield more than $960,000 in food for the hungry.

Traditions are important for both large and small companies, and charitable-giving programs can provide employees an easy way to support their community. Be strategic and creative in your approach though, so your efforts make the greatest impact for our neighbors in need.