We have been at this for 10 years. A decade ago, the team that is now DRSF was kicked out of another statewide Dachshund Rescue for being a bit too rogue. At that time, I was the youngest member of our team, social media was just taking off, and to me, we would be crazy to not have a Facebook Page or take donations via PayPal. The thought at the time was “why would we use PayPal as we have to pay fees??” To me, 97% of something is a hell of a lot better than 100% of nothing and although I had no metrics to back it up, if people could donate on line, we would get more donations. Well, my on-line shenanigans were a large part of what got us kicked out, if we were going to keep going, we would have to start our own team, and I had inadvertently positioned myself as a fundraiser.
I didn’t know squat about online fundraising. I didn’t know anything about donor development. I didn’t know anything about video, or filters, or how to build a website, or even how to buy a domain name. I knew that everything I knew about rescue was that every group I knew were always struggling, living on the edge, robbing Peter to pay Paul. I saw them using creative, but grass roots tactics like convincing pizza places to glue flyers of their dogs on pizzas that were being delivered. To me, that was a lot of work to reach a few people within a few miles of that pizza shop. We needed bigger, we needed more reach, faster, easier, with minimal effort.
I knew that if we told our dogs stories from start to finish from their photos in the cages at MDAS, through their medical journey, educating about Dr.’s and conditions and treatments, through to their adoption, I had to believe in my heart that people would support our work. If people saw their donations in action, and the miracles they made, they would donate again.
I had seen way too many rescues market with a “the sky is falling” perspective that there was no hope, the problem was too big, the injury too great, they were almost out of funds, and if we didn’t help them with this dog, their whole operation was going to fold. I couldn’t live like that and I couldn’t market like that. We had to tell their stories, but not from a place of despair, not from a place of panic, but from a place of hope, a place of solutions, a place of making the impossible possible all the while making our donors feel personally invested so that they would stand behind us for the long run.
So there it was…super easy. I just had to figure out how to re-invent the wheel and thus began my trip down the rabbit hole mainlining and digesting every book, article, pod-cast, blog post, and testing out every app I could get my hands on, taking info and listening to “experts” from business, entrepreneurship, marketing, personal development, spiritual thought leaders, anything and everything that could help me to figure out how to not just pay the bills, but to build a community.
