Delta Blog

DELTA Game board Program Assists the Central Missouri Food Bank SCORE Against Hunger Campaign

Hundreds attended the Central Missouri Food Bank’s 2003 Club Out Hunger Luncheon as part of the 2003 SCORE Against Hunger Campaign.

The Central Missouri Food Bank (CMFB) hosted the Club Out Hunger Luncheon on Friday, April 22, as part of their 2003 SCORE Against Hunger Campaign. The event is an annual fund-raiser for the Food Bank.

Donors heard Coach Gary Pinkel discuss the upcoming Missouri Tigers football season while they munched on grilled hot dogs, hamburgers, bratwurst and side dishes, all in the MU Tailgate tradition.

New for this year was “Pinkel’s Pigskin Trivia Challenge,” a game that gave teams a chance to demonstrate their knowledge of Mizzou football and to raise money for the CMFB. In exchange for donations to the CMFB, each team could pre-purchase penalty flags they could use to impeded the progress of other teams. In total, thirty-two flags were purchased.

Seven teams competed for prizes such as autographed footballs and MU Tiger media guides; Truman the Tiger, Marching Mizzou, MU Cheerleaders and the Golden Girls were all on hand, generating excitement and an atmosphere charged with good-natured competition.

Players stood on a giant football field and moved up- and down-field as they answered questions correctly. While fun and exciting, this posed a problem: how to let the crowd see “all the action” without the Faurot Field’s video replay screen?

Sportscaster Chris Gervino (left) poses questions while MU Tigers Coach Gary Pinkel looks on.

At the request of CMFB’s Tim Rich and Peggy Kirkpatrick, Delta Systems Group responded quickly with software to display a graphic of the game board on a TV screen with icons representing each team. As the teams’ fortunes changed on the “field” below, the display was updated in real time to show their exact positions.

Reatha Templeton, a staff member at CMFB, commented, “It was difficult to see the markings on the floor with such a large crowd. The game board really tied it all together and helped to keep the crowd updated on the action.”

Competition was fierce, and those penalty flags came in handy: the Purple team got off to a slow start, but was able to capitalize on the eight penalty flags they’d acquired. Two teams crossed the goal line at the same time, but the Purple team answered the tie-breaking question correctly to win the game!

Delta Systems Group – Red Cross Partnership: Using technology to speed up donations

As many Colleges and Universities do around the country, the University of Missouri – Columbia hosts a Homecoming celebration every fall and a Greek Week every spring. In an effort to expand community involvement and provide an outlet for student charitable giving, coordinators of these annual events began incorporating an American Red Cross blood drive as part of the festivities.

Twice a year, an army of volunteer nurses, student workers, and American Red Cross staff drain thousands of students of a pint of blood each in a one- or two-day sprint to a record-breaking blood drive.

Through the years, the drives have continued to grow in size and have even spawned simultaneous satellite drives in St. Louis, Kansas City, and on other Missouri campuses.

Of course, coordinating the collection of blood products from more than 4,000 people in one or two days can be overwhelming. Trying to funnel that many students into and out of one collection center created a logistical nightmare when the line of donors stretched around the outside of the University’s Hearnes Center. Frustrated students and community members spent hours waiting to donate a single pint of blood. Many students were forced either to skip class or abandon their donation efforts.

In April 1997, Delta Systems Group was called in to help alleviate the problem. With advice from American Red Cross staffers and MU students, DELTA designed a check-in database application that allows Mizzou student associations to schedule their members’ donation times. To make the system practical for students, DELTA created the www.donateblood.com website so each student organization liaison could register their members from anywhere at anytime. The system also allows organizers to ensure that a continual stream of donors is being processed throughout the event by alerting coordinators when too many people have registered for the same time slot.

The MU Homecoming Blood Drive Committee devised a point system to reward organizations whose members showed up on time and, more importantly, successfully donated blood. This point system was then incorporated into both the Greek Week and Homecoming festivities as a major point-gaining event.
For one or two days, the Hearnes Center is converted into a blood collection factory, driven by thousands of students.

With the help of the systems that Delta Systems Group custom-tailors to every Homecoming and Greek Week blood drive, Mizzou has been able repeatedly to host some of the largest blood drives in the world. Time spent waiting to donate has been reduced to minutes, and in most cases, eliminated.

In addition to reducing wait time, the system monitors the flow of donors in real time during the drive, showing administrators hour-by-hour breakdowns of the number of donors checked through the donation center. After the blood drive, detailed reports are provided to the student organizations and committees showing exactly how many students arrived for their appointments on time and how long it took each student to donate.

Every year, DELTA continues to refine and improve the Homecoming/Greek Week Blood Drive systems to maximize blood donations. And thanks to the generosity of the UMC-Columbia community, it’s a world-class success: In 1999, the blood drive collected 3,156 pints to capture the Guinness Book world record for the largest number of useable units collected in a single day at a single location.