Preparation for growth…
With the annual meeting behind us, I have plenty of areas that I want to concentrate on to tighten things up in preparation for growth. We have so many great programs that we offer and do so many things to help horses, but we don’t do such a great job at promoting ourselves. We haven’t had a Public Relations person on board for years and the rest of us are jumping in and doing what we can with the time available.
When I was preparing the presentation for the GERL annual meeting I was going through a copy of GERL’s 2017 P&L (profit and loss) record. Though our income was about the same as last year, there are several areas where we had a decline. One of those areas is our membership. Membership dues were not all that much lower than they were in 2016, but that are way down compared to 2015. We have need to do a membership drive, which is the reason for the higher number in 2015, but there hasn’t been extra time for our Treasurer, Lynne Robinson, to do it and because of our database situation, nobody else could.
Of course, I’ve already started to think and plan what we’re going to do to improve in these areas, starting with finishing the job of getting our infrastructure into the 21st century. Our current process for memberships and donations is so complicated and labor intense that anything we did would be an improvement, at this point. Our webmaster, Steve DeMoss, has spent hours getting us moved over from a membership stored in a spreadsheet over to a real membership application that offers more automation with letters and even the capability to do a membership drive. This is really going to make a difference for Lynne, not to mention our secretary, Cynthia Anderson.
Another area where I’d like to see improvement is more profit with our fundraising. We did very well in 2017, with a whopping $31,232 being raised for our efforts. That was $7,000 more than 2016; however, we spent $18,200 putting on our events last year, which only netted a profit of $13,000. It’s not hard to see that we are going to have to start securing sponsors for all our events to help to pay for our overhead.
Why do I worry about all these different line items? Simple. Supporting the horses that are picked up by the Department of Agriculture cost GERL $92,000 last year. Had it not been for two people who each donated a large amount of money through their family foundation or trust, it would not have been possible. The GDA didn’t pick up a lot of extra horses in 2017 that would account for the large increase in hay and feed. In fact, they were within 2 horses of being the same number as the previous year (and the year before that). The increase is simply because the horses that come in are staying longer.
We have the same situation with GERL’s foster’s. We spent more money on our foster horses last year than in 2016, but actually took in less horses. Again, the reason is because the horses are staying longer. We must do a better job of turning our horses to help more. The upcoming Help A Horse Day contest, sponsored by the ASPCA, is all about adopting horses and making money and I am very excited about refining our process and even learning some new processes that will help us achieve our goal. They have already shared success stories from other rescue organizations who are adopting out large numbers of horses every year. And let me say this about that, the biggest hurdle for GERL will be promoting the horses through social media on a consistent basis and in such a way to tell the horse’s story.
We recently had our first Help A Horse Day conference call and there was a lot of knowledgeable people on the phone who may be the answer to our prayers. Allen Brock, one of our Area Coordinators, attended the meeting and he also happens to be a former Hollywood stunt man who worked for Warner Brothers. Allen and his dad have years of experience setting up a scene and filming the storyline. Another great resource on the conference call was Autumn Tuchek who created a great presentation that she is going to turn into a webinar that will provide viewers with chock-full of information about GERL. I’m feeling very blessed with all the volunteers who have stepped up to help make GERL shine!
