Mike Sankey believes that a great deal of good can come of his presence outside a West Des Moines grocery store in below-freezing temperatures with his dog at his side and a bell in his hand.

“I think it’s a sympathetic donation when you’re sitting out there freezing your behind off,” he said. “People think it’s easier to give a dollar than to stand out there in the cold.”

Sankey, vice president of Pointdexter Flooring Inc. and Cost Containment Strategies LLC, is one of more than 700 volunteers who ring bells and collect donations as part of the Salvation Army’s annual Miracle of the Bell operation in Greater Des Moines. Despite numb fingers and toes, he said, bell ringing is always the start of the Christmas season for him.

“It’s fun when I see people I know, and I don’t dare let them go by me,” Sankey said. “And they don’t put small amounts in. I work them pretty hard.”

In this his sixth year as a bell ringer, he has assembled a small army of volunteers who cover 20 one-hour shifts at Dahl’s Food Mart, 5003 E.P. True Parkway. Sankey’s goal is to form a team large enough to cover an entire week’s worth of shifts. Every year, he and his colleagues take pride in topping their collection totals from the previous year.

“I learned after the first year that once we get halfway through the day, somebody needs to get a butter knife to keep forcing the money in,” Sankey said. “It has absolutely topped off every year. When we have new volunteers, I’ll hand them a stick. They ask why they need it, and I say, ‘Trust me, you’ll need it.’”

Sankey always calls the Salvation Army after his team’s collection drive to find out how much they collected, which he then reports to his team. He attributes that attitude to his inner salesman.

“I need to know how much is in our kettle because I need to report to them,” he said. “Being a competitive person, it’s important for me to know and it’s important for them to know because it encourages them to come back.”

Sankey’s team, many of them co-workers from Pointdexter Flooring and Cost Containment Strategies, volunteer on their own time and do not receive incentives for doing so. They have all become familiar faces among Dahl’s customers, Sankey said.

Major Nelson De La Vergne, the Salvation Army’s city coordinator, said there are several other groups, particularly service clubs and churches, in the area who volunteer as a team each year for the kettle drive. More than 700 volunteers were a part of this year’s bell-ringing campaign, the organization’s largest, which accounts for approximately 25 percent of the annual budget. The campaign provides funds for such programs and services as rent and utility assistance, baby formula and diapers, youth programs, disaster services and meals for the homeless.

“Some people just like to meet people and this is an easy way to do it,” De La Vergne said. “Some just enjoy the opportunity to serve in that manner.”

And despite the often frigid temperatures, the bells keep ringing. Sankey showed up for his shift recently and found the volunteers had moved the kettle into the store’s vestibule. That didn’t fly with him. De La Vergne said donations are always higher when people are outside.

“People feel sorry for them or they get the idea that there are people living outside in this weather and they should help,” he said.

Sankey said that before he began his involvement with the Salvation Army, he was “more of a donator, not a volunteer.” But his volunteer experience has made him a passionate advocate for the organization and the programs and services the kettle campaign supports. He will never stop volunteering, he said, and hopes others choose to do the same.

“The question has been, are we going to continue to do bell ringing, because it doesn’t raise money as easily as some other programs,” De La Vergne said. “It would be difficult for me not to, because people know that when the bells start to ring, Christmas is on its way.”