KALAMAZOO, Mich.—KALSEE CU now holds the Guinness World Record for most coins tossed into a bucket by a group for one minute.
Sixty staff members earlier this year tossed 868 coins into a plastic pail, beating the old record of 289 coins.
Staff at KALSEE Credit Union set Guinness record.
The credit union set out to break a world record to build teamwork, work on process improvement, and raise money for charity. The record-setting move, however, has also generated a lot of publicity.
“That has been a surprise,” said Sheldon Faworski, vice president of human resources. “Here we are today, still talking about it. And we are getting a lot of attention locally. People walk in and ask, ‘Aren’t you the credit union that broke the world record?’”
It was a staff development meeting that got the leadership team at KALSEE thinking of how they could use an event to break out of the confines of boxed-in thinking.
“We came up with the idea of trying to compete for a Guinness World Record. At that point in time we had no idea what record we wanted to go for,” Faworski said.
Once the CU decided, with a little help from Guinness staff, leadership looked to employees for direction on how to beat the record.
“The task was to throw coins in a pail from ten feet away,” explained Faworski. “Quarters came out to be the best choice, as well as a bucket 15 inches tall so the coins would not bounce out.”
The job of solving how to best attack the record was a process improvement task for the team, said Faworski.
Not only did the credit union donate the quarters pitched to charity, but also money collected from plastic buckets inside braches one month before the event. The CU promoted that it was going after a Guinness World Record and asked for contributions that would go to charity.
“Quarters, nickels, dimes—whatever anyone could afford,” said Faworski. “A lot came from the membership, but from non-members as well who heard about us on TV. I am sure we got some new members from this.”
Combined with contributions from the staff’s charitable giving fund, the CU raised more than $7,000 to pay for ten new bulletproof vests for local police dogs.