Many causes have a color: breast cancer has pink, AIDS has red, and though not everyone knows it, hunger awareness has orange. Every December, the Food Bank for New York City encourages New York to “Go Orange” to help raise awareness. This year the Empire State Building, the Woolworth Building and Lincoln Center turned their lights orange, the Food Bank rang the opening bell for the Nasdaq (and brought us along too, which was really awesome), and they’re plastering the city with posters, bus sides and taxi tops that we created to help get the word out.

2008 marks the Food Bank for New York City’s 25th Anniversary. We created this campaign and the accompanying logo to mark the occasion and of course, to generate donations so with any luck, there won’t be a 50th Anniversary.

The abundance of fresh produce everywhere in the U.S., 12 months a year has forced our nation’s food banks to re-adapt. Canned food, once an easily stored and transported Food Bank staple is now on the decline. Food Banks have made the shift, and nowadays a large percentage of the food they provide to soup kitchens, pantries etc. is fresh. This is great for the people who rely on this food for obvious reasons, but it creates obstacles when it comes to acquiring donations. People have always felt good about donating cans of food because they knew that it would directly affect people in need. Whenever you make a financial donation, there’s always that possibility in the back of your mind that it’s going to go to recarpeting the Non-Profit CEO’s billiards room. The Food Bank for New York City has devised a way to make you feel a little bit better about donating money: the virtual food drive. You can go online, and in act more like grocery shopping than anything else, you decide exactly how many meals you want to give and it allocates your donation accordingly. This print campaign reinforced the notion that you’d still be giving food, even though it was digital.

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For local charities like the Food Bank, the holiday season is a big one - over half of their annual donations come in a period of two months. Luckily it’s pretty easy to donate to the Food Bank. All you need is a can of food, and it just so happens that most of us have a can or two lying around that are dying to be put to good use.