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Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Preparing for Strut Your mutt, 4 days and counting down!

      My familiy and I are very excited to be participating in the Best Friends Animal Society 2010 NYC Strut Your Mutt charity walk. This walk is raising money to help BFAS continue lifesaving adoptions, spay/neuter programs, to rescue at-risk animals and to find new homes for them. These types of events allow BFAS to continue to save animals from the misery of life in puppy mills, a world with no more homeless pets.  

       This has been a very interesting journey to prepare for our first charity event as the Just Pawfect team. It all began a month ago with rallying up the troops , making the commitment to pledge the funds, $30 to walk $20 to sponsor the team and take home an event t-shirt. It was the first time since high school that we did anything like this and really had no idea the entire world that is behind this kind of fundraising. Then we began spreading the word which involved our big jump into social media. You can now follow us on Twitter, which we have alot of fun connecting with all the active members in our industry and you can become a fan on Facebook. There is a wonderful community out there that is just so passionate about animal wellfare and we have felt right at home because of them.


        The making of our team T-shirt was an experience all on its own.  I could not imagine the work to make your own t-shirt. A handful of shirts took my husband several hours when your include the time it took to come up with a design graphic and the application. *Be on the look out for a group in bright yellow with puppy face and bone patches on their sleeves. By the way, because of this I owe one of our team members a new set of bedsheets, (Note to self: do not leave iron and husband unattended!)  It was all part of the experience of finding our voice and making our group a reality outside of the virtual world of the Strut your Mutt web page.



we will call these version 1.0 and 2.0 in hopes of future improvements :)


       The next step was printing up flyers with all the information of the event and taking some plays from the guerrilla advertising handbook. Talk about pounding the pavement! Our whole neighborhood now knows about our event. Local businesses, bulleting boards, co-workers no one escaped without flyer in hand. Hopefully we will see results from this work, as of today we have collected $190 , 63% of our $300 goal. We will be collecting donations up until the day of the walk.


     We ,and by we I mean the wonderful small group of friends and family I drafted for this event, really could not have imagined how much it would change our way of seeing what is important.  I recently saw a video of key note speaker Mike Arms at the 2010 BlogPaws west conference where he said it was "not enough to love animals"  he went on to say we need to "care about animals". I have always said I love animals and I now realize that was not enough, yet I stood up and did something which led to taking the second step and then the third, all leading towards making this world a better place for our beloved companions. Maybe I can not change the world but my world did change and I welcome you all to share in this experience and take your first step.

The breakdown: These are just a small number of examples of all the good things your contribution makes possible:

--$5 feeds 5 dogs a day

--$25 is enough to fix a dog or cat to prevent
unwanted litters

--$50 can provide five cats with microchip IDs
to help them find their families if lost

--$100 is enough to get a homeless dog or cat
out of a shelter and into a forever home

--$200 can provide bottle feedings and TLC
for two orphaned puppies

--$500 is enough to save 10 dogs from the misery
of life in a puppy mills

--$1,000 can provide shelter and care for 50 animals
displaced in a natural disaster


So if you are in the Tri-State area come out and walk with us, sponsor a walker or make a donation! We are looking forward to see you all!

For more information:
Follow us @JustPawfect on Twitter.com 

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