Sarahs convo with Lynn from Maddies fund

HI!
I just called Maddies Fund!
I talked to Lynn!
It was VERY encouraging.

she said that WTR sounds like a prime candidate.

I asked several things that I had questions on.

1) We want to showcase many strategies rather than one- is this ok? she said yes.
2) hard to adopt issue-- I explained that our whole mission is the hard to adopt dogs, so alot of our marketing was not specifially pointing to 'hard to adopt waggys, because that IS us. She GOT it and said fine, if we can document how and why our dogs are hard to adopt, all of our innovative marketing strategies will be ok.
3) Blog/hard copy.. They said fine to have a blog as well as hard copy.. I want them to have ALL materials in front of them on paper (good idea to screen this trish) but blog form too so they can interact with our website, my space page, yahoo groups, google groups, blogs, etc.

SHE SAID
-If possible, she wanted us to say WHAT the results were for EACH strategy-- like which worked and why.
- she wants SPECIFIC stats of what dogs we pulled and how many we placed (every detail needs to be precise, have to be careful that we are completely meticulously honest about euth rates or ones we were going to place but some how the owner took them back or whatever.
-for each dog, we can go through and say which we would consider 'hard to adopt' and why.
- she checked to make sure I was talking about Marketing Strategies that WERE in place, not were invented for the grant to exist.

Based on this I think we should go easy on a TON more u tube videos- but some is cool, and mainly spend my/our efforts on things we HAVE done.

I have in mind a questionnaire for waggy owners-- I realize even making a list of owners will take days and I am down to do it, asking why they chose waggy-- networking, friend with waggy, eyecatching petfinder profile, event, whatever..

It seems that Maddies fund wants to know that, for an agency with a great rate of placement and hard to adopt dogs (LIKE WAGGY TAIL), WHAT WORKS AND HOW WE KNOW IT WORKED. We can also like Holly suggested have a new blog just for waggy tails and ask owners to submit happy tails directly on blog if they are savvy..

but I think, based on what she said, that it is not going to be about happy tails (although they will be helpful correlary material, but STATS about HOW many adopted, what their conditions were, and HOW they got adopted.

Very exciting!!!

I am prolly done for day b/c pt coming up-- but will work more on Trish'es draft tomorrow with these ideas in mind..
xo