Are You Going to Eat That? Using Food Drives to Help Your Community

Dave Rudd

We just concluded our annual IAT SmartDial Food Drive and donated all the collected food to the Utah Food Bank.

If you haven’t held a Food Drive at your office, then you should consider it. Food drives are really easy. According to the Utah Food Bank, “a food drive is a concentrated effort to collect money, commercially-packaged, non-perishable items to aid families and individuals facing a food crisis. Food drives can last a few days or a few months—it’s up to you. Be sure to allow enough time for grocery shopping and plenty of reminders.”

IAT chose to conduct our food drive during a two week period, which gave those individuals who were out of the office on travel an opportunity to participate upon their return.

To make the food drive just a little more interesting, we made it a competition between departments to see which team could donate 1) the largest quantity of food and 2) the highest average number of individual food items per person. This year the Sales/Marketing team won in both categories with an average of 129 items per person.

The recently published study “The Impact of Third-Party Debt Collection on the National and State Economies” conducted by Ernst & Young, highlights charitable contributions made by third-party collection agencies. This study stated that during 2010 approximately 652,000 hours of charitable activities were donated, along with an estimated $85.2 million in charitable donations!

I take this opportunity to thank our employees for their generosity in helping the needy in our community. It has been a fun two weeks as we watched employees haul in their donations.

Since 1986, IAT SmartDial has been blessed. Just like you, we’ve certainly plowed through difficult times, but we’ve always felt it important to give back, in one way or another, to our community.

Share with us how your organization is giving back to your community. Perhaps you’re doing something that we would like to try in our office.

Dave Rudd is DialerFan, a champion of the collection industry, focused on improving collection capabilities through technology and political action. He energetically participates in lobbying efforts for the industry through donations, writing letters, making phone calls, participating in seminars and attending events in Washington D.C., including the most recent ACA International Fly-In. Well acquainted with debt collection, Dave spent two years debt collecting before joining IAT in 1990. He has held a variety of positions at IAT — a provider of collection-specific dialing technology — including President/CEO and most recently Senior VP of Finance & Administration.