"We are a non-profit animal organization, so fundraising is a daily activity for us. The biggest problem we faced in the beginning was how to stand out in a huge sea of other animal organizations. We started out using the normal fundraising avenues through social media, and we had some success, but our biggest success came when we made a significant change to our message.

That change was storytelling. We found that when we focused on individual dogs within our rescue, people started to respond more. By bringing them into the daily life of a single dog, they were able to form a bond with that dog that then made everything much more personal.

We started to see people coming back on a daily basis to our social media accounts in order to see if “their dog” was being featured that day. If they didn’t see anything for a few days, supporters would reach out to us and ask for updates. This allowed us to form a core of devoted supporters that have continued to follow our program dogs for nine years now.

So the biggest change we made that up-leveled our organization was to bring people inside our organization on a personal and individual basis."