For nearly a decade, Cheeriodicals has partnered with Two Men and a Truck to deliver our cheer-up gift boxes and bags to hospitalized children, hospitalized Veterans, Ronald McDonald House residents, and other charities. During that time, Two Men and a Truck franchises in more than 75 offices, have volunteered their time and trucks to deliver more than 100,000 Cheeriodicals across the US and Canada.

The Movers Who Care have been a critical part of our success as they have provided the delivery function for our in-person team building activities, picking up the completed Cheeriodicals at team building events and safely transporting them to the recipient hospital or charity. Those deliveries are not just the physical movement of Cheeriodicals from point A to point B, but they always include the professional loading and delivery right to the final staging area inside the hospital or charity. Along the way, the Two Men and a Truck delivery team are always courteous and as thankful to do the work as the recipients are thankful to receive the donated delivery.  

For eight years, it was just like that. We would connect with corporations who wanted us to lead their team (100’s to 1,000+ participants) to assemble Cheeriodicals for delivery to a local hospital or charity in need of a large dose of cheer. Our team building model, with a focus on corporate social responsibility, was on overdrive. The bulk of our challenges were mostly related to executing the numerous opportunities to deliver cheer.

Enter the year 2020. We were hosting a team building activity for the Two Men and a Truck national meeting in Las Vegas on March 1st. Not only does Two Men and a Truck donate their time and resources to make our deliveries for all our clients, but they are also a client where their employees assemble Cheeriodicals at many of their national meetings and then their management team personally delivers the Cheeriodicals to kids or Veterans.

Upon leaving their national meeting on March 3, 2020, for the flight back to our Birmingham, AL office, we realized that the COVID-19 situation was quickly spiraling into a pandemic for our country.  Over the next week, all of our in-person team building activities scheduled for the upcoming year were canceled, literally back to back. Every time the phone rang or an email came through, it was another cancellation.

2020 & The Coronavirus

Consider our scenario during a pandemic – we are a business where we gather large teams of people together in a large meeting space to work closely together to assemble gift boxes/bags. Once those gifts are assembled, we then take a small group (6-8 participants) with us to a hospital to distribute these gifts to patients in their hospital rooms.  Like so many other companies, COVID-19 was essentially shutting down our business.  

One of the first solutions we considered was how we can join the virtual world, pivot our business to somehow offer our team building activities in a virtual environment to our clients. We knew that many of our current clients still needed to have events to bring their teams together, maybe even more so during a pandemic when most corporate employees were working from home. We also realized the power of virtual technology, especially with Zoom, allowed us a way to connect with our clients and potentially connect large teams assembling Cheeriodicals together (at least virtually).

Could we make the logistics work?  There were two major questions:

• Could we ship Cheeriodicals assembly kits to participants at their homes (one at a time to hundreds of people) compared to shipping hundreds of Cheeriodicals kits to one corporate office or meeting facility?
• How would we get the hundreds of Cheeriodicals once completed and shipped to our clients’ corporate office, delivered to a hospital or charity?

FedEx was the solution to the first shipping question. When it comes to domestic and international shipping of Cheeriodicals supplies, getting Cheeriodicals from our corporate office to our team building clients, FedEx has been phenomenal.

And for our second logistics question, our delivery partner at Two Men and a Truck (TMT) has come through once again. Their solution has an obvious component and a second component that is not so obvious.  

First things first, with our new virtual events, TMT continues their traditional role of picking up the completed Cheeriodicals at a corporation’s office, loading them on their moving truck, and delivering them to the hospital or charity chosen to receive the Cheeriodicals donation. No matter what happens, we always need to have the physical presence of the TMT team, their truck, and the resources to move those Cheeriodicals from point A to point B. This is that obvious component that’s always a part of what we do.

Given the new virtual environment due to the pandemic, we (the Cheeriodicals team) are not physically at a corporate site leading a team building activity. The Cheeriodicals assembly activity occurs on a Zoom call and we do not travel at all. The not so obvious role that TMT now provides is that their driver/marketing coordinator is there on-site and they have become the defacto Cheeriodicals representative. They coordinate the delivery effort, connect with the hospital contact, plan the delivery date/time, and manage plenty of other pandemic-related considerations on behalf of our Cheeriodicals team. TMT are our boots on the ground for all our virtual deliveries.  

We have shared numerous times the continued success of our partnership with TMT over the years, many times photos with our Cheeriodicals onsite team, the TMT team, and an assortment of hospital employees all standing in front of the TMT delivery truck. The element that always stands out from the photos is the smiles from all involved.

What’s so unique and special about our work with TMT during the pandemic is that we still have those wonderful photos with everyone smiling (behind masks). The only part that’s different, other than the masks, is that a Cheeriodicals is not in these photos.  

We sincerely thank our incredible delivery partner TMT for their amazing support over the last 8 years and especially the onsite support they provide during the pandemic when we can’t be there ourselves. The Movers Who Care have made our virtual events come to life!