HAHD event transforms the way we do things.
In the last edition of the newsletter, I spoke about several areas of the GERL daily process that needed transformation. We were on the cusp of the ASPCA’s Help A Horse Day (HAHD) contest that officially kicked off on April 26th. Since that time, there have been a whirlwind of meetings, planning and action that has helped transform the way we do things in several areas involving our horses and social media. Our Grant Writer, Donna Harrison, is the Event Coordinator for HAHD, and she was able to form a team of volunteers who are truly professionals.
This team of three traveled to all of our foster home locations to meet each horse. Those three people were a photographer who was able to capture the horses’ best angle; Autumn Tuchek, a knowledgeable trainer/farrier, who evaluated the horses’ level of training and condition of the feet; and the third person was Pollyanna Chavez, orchestrator and videographer. She had mapped out the route and made all the phone calls to arrange everything. This team spent 3 hours to do a thorough session with each horse.
After turning in their results to Donna, she started a flow of photos, videos and other information to our Facebook Coordinator, Nancy Bogardts, and our Webmaster, Steve DeMoss. This flow created excitement and started picking up followers. It also made the phone ring and, all of a sudden, there was interest in several of our horses! These horses have been in our program for over a year! We were thrilled to see what a difference it makes when we are able to present videos and updates. It was an instant success as several horses were immediately adopted into good homes.
The Department of Agriculture signed over 7 horses to GERL which had not sold in their last auction. . Many of these horses were older, but we found that people were interested in adopting them if they could just see a video. Donna organized the HAHD event at the GDA Mansfield Impound where we were able to showcase available GDA and GERL horses. In fact, we actually were able to get one adopted the day of the event!
I think I mentioned previously that Allen Brock, one of our Area Coordinators, is a former stunt man who worked for Warner Brothers for many years and also has his own production company. Allen came up with the name of our publicity movie, What Horses Dream, on one of our earlier conference calls. He later wrote a storyline, filmed and produced a wonderfully compelling movie that we think has an excellent chance of winning some of the ASPCA’s grant funds. Donna made sure that the movie was posted on Facebook and on our website and that it was kept in the spotlight, receiving over 1,000 reviews.
The HAHD committee will be dissolving on June 30th, when the ASPCA contest is over, except for Donna, who will be gathering data to complete the grant application. I feel like this wonderful team of professionals that has come into our lives has given us a whole new perspective of what it takes to adopt horses in a timely manner. It has made me revisit some of our guidelines that are out of date and need to have more details added. The success that we have already experienced during our HAHD has also had an impact on our Rescue Challenge event that will be coming up in October. Monthly meetings are already taking place and though many of the committee members are different, we understand what needs to be done to properly promote our event to ensure success. And let me say this about that…we want all the seats to be filled and lots of people interested in the six horses that will be participating in that event!
