I meant to mention this a week or so ago, but we have posted our spring/summer 2011 newsletter on the website as a PDF. It went out in the mail in mid-April to our donors, and as nonprofit bulk rate mailings go, it can take the Post Office up to three weeks to deliver them. Some people get them within a few days, others take much longer. It's never been clear to me why the Post Office has such variable delivery times.
Now, invevitably when we send out a print newsletter, we get suggestions to just do "online" newsletters, "save a tree," etc. That would be great, except we would lose most of our donations. The fact is that while more and more people are giving online, i.e., making credit card donations online, the print newsletter remains far and away the key communication piece that motivates people to give. We do send out a monthly email newsletter, but the actual giving response is very, very low compared to the print newsletter. This is true across the board for nonprofits in general. Our monthly email newsletters bring in a fraction of the gifts that our three print newsletters do.
One thing we don't do is direct mail, i.e., buy mailing lists of donors who've given to other animal welfare groups and send solicitations to them. You know, those envelopes with the animal photo on the cover with some kind of tagline that's supposed to get you to open the piece. Most people would be shocked to know how many of the animal welfare nonprofits (well, most big nonprofits) sell their lists of donors so they can make more money. Want to see how this works? Here's where you'd buy a list of donors to the ASPCA, the HSUS, PETA and North Shore Animal League.
This is "standard" nonprofit practice — it's not unique to animal welfare charities at all — but it just seems to us that there's a violation of trust with your donors to turn around and sell their names, addresses and giving history to a mailing list firm, just to make some additional, marginal revenue. At the very least, you should have your donor's permission to sell his or her name to someone else. Which, of course, isn't going to happen, and thus why the typical donor isn't asked for permission.
We only send our print newsletter to people who've made a donation or who've asked to receive it. This keeps us much smaller in terms of donors than we would otherwise have been, and makes us rely on media coverage, word of mouth, web searches and other "free" ways for people to find out about us. But overall, we're much more comfortable doing it this way.
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In the spring/summer newsletter, you'll see a P.S. at the bottom of our letter on page 2, mentioning that we are changing our name to Rolling Dog Farm. Yes, indeed. After living here for a year now, we realized that being a "ranch" just doesn't work in New England — we get funny looks when we say "Rolling Dog Ranch," and everyone calls us a farm anyway. In fact, any property with acreage is a "farm" in this part of the country. We know some people will want us to stick with our heritage, but the name change is as much about the future as it is the present or the past. Five years from now, people will really wonder why we’re called a ranch, since the move from Montana and our beginnings on the Ovando ranch will have receded into distant memory. So this was as much about shaping our future identity as a sanctuary based in New England and acknowledging it in our name. We will be rolling out an updated website with the new name in a couple of weeks, and making other changes as we go. It will be gradual, so don't expect everything to be changed all at once.
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The current Shelter Challenge started on Monday, April 4th, and ends at midnight on Sunday, June 19th. Grand prize in this round is $5,000, plus $1,000 for weekly winners and $1,000 for state winners. There are also other categories … please see the Shelter Challenge website for details.
And remember, you can vote every day, so consider bookmarking the voting page to make it easy.
You can vote in the Shelter Challenge here.
Please note: Use Rolling Dog Ranch for our name and NH for the state and our listing will come up.
Because of your votes, we won $1,000 as a weekly winner in the Shelter Challenge that ended in March. Please help us win more money for the animals here by voting every day, and by encouraging your family, friends and colleagues to vote every day, too. Thank you!
Rolling Dog Farm Blog 
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