Two- Day Connecticut Children’s Toy Drive

Brief

To streamline the seasonal sporadic toy drop offs into a two day drive through event with two major objectives: communications and safety. The communication objective was to ensure the community of workers, donors, volunteers and neighbors were kept in the loop. The safety objective was to put in place a system for vehicle and pedestrian traffic flow and ensure safety of volunteers at outdoor work stations.

Challenge

● Hold a first-ever drive-through toy drive.
● Provide a safe traffic flow through industrial park with other businesses (DHL trucks in and out).
● Ensuring that there were no traffic back-ups with numbers of cars.
● Needed buy-in (approval) from the industrial park neighboring businesses.
● Ensure that appropriate toys were being dropped off.
● Securing enough volunteers for each day and making the sign up easy.

Solution

● Create a map of the drive-through.
● Set up designated stations (check-in, directing traffic, hiring police, etc.).
● Face to face communication with the neighbors to get their “buy in.”
● Schedule drop-offs at specific times to avoid traffic back-ups.
● Communicate with the donors via online form (Smartsheet).
● Creating an online sign-up form for volunteers.

Outcome

● There were 12,870 toys collected in two days.
● Developed a baseline framework for future toy drives to be able to scale to larger numbers.