Welcome to 2012!

Welcome to 2012!  We’re already planning great things for the coming year, but I thought we’d take a moment to reflect on the past year.

RescueGroups.org is growing steadily every year and 2011 was no exception.  Word-of-mouth momentum is increasing significantly… and we can thank our partner rescues and shelters for getting the word out about our unique life-saving services.

Increasingly, organizations that sign-up with us are just getting started — they don’t already have accounts with websites like Petfinder and Adopt-a-Pet.com when they sign-up for an account with RescueGroups.org.  That’s good news for us because it’s an indication that we are becoming an integral part of the community — and we’re part of new organizations from their first day.  That’s more proof that people are hearing about us from their friends and other members of the community.

Our unique approach has gained attention from around the animal shelter and rescue community.  Our data sharing strategy has brought hundreds of new adoption listing websites onboard — websites like Lifesapet, Animal Ark Shelter, Northern California Pet Adoptions, Find About Pets, and the ASPCA.

Support from the large adoption listing websites like Adopt-a-Pet.com and DogTime raises awareness of our services, and we appreciate their help.  Despite the fact that Petfinder doesn’t “support” adoptable pet updates from RescueGroups.org, hundreds of organizations have switched over to using the Sync App this past year to make their lives easier — we thank the Sync App developer for their unselfish dedication to the animal welfare community.

Financial support from DogTime and the Save a Dog and Save a Cat Facebook applications continued in 2011;  most recently, we started a new service grant program that covers RescueGroups.org services.

In 2011 we completed two major projects — our new Email Marketing service, and major improvements to the Online Forms feature.  Both projects help us provide valuable services to the community.  Those updates, and the hundreds of other updates and improvements we made in 2011, all help the rescue and shelter community work more effectively.

We’ll continue to lead in the community with major new features in the first few months of 2012.  We’re excited to announce a new feature soon that has the potential to have a huge impact on the animal welfare community!

We can do all of this because of your support — please continue to tell everyone you know about us.  Please also take a close look at our services to see if perhaps there are additional ways we can help you.

Thanks again for your continued support, and we’re looking forward to a great 2012!

- Richard

Updates to the Online Forms feature coming 11/22/11

On November 22, 2011, RescueGroups.org will be releasing a set of updates to our Online Forms feature, which is available as part of our Website service.

The Online Forms improvements will include:

• Improved visual appearance to the online forms
• New field types: radio, comment, email, phone
• Default assignee for each form
• Improved method of adding drop downs, checkboxes
• Answer validation for email, phone field types
• Customizable “from” address on contact
• Email alert address per online form
• Require specific contact fields per online form
• Managing online forms from the Website interface now uses the Manage interface

If you have any questions or experience any issues after the updates please contact RescueGroups.org support.

Upcoming changes to the RescueGroups.org Campaigns Feature

The Campaigns feature (built into our Data Management and Website services) was designed to help you organize various types of campaigns, including email, direct mail, and online.  The simple capability of sending emails was added to the feature, but never intended for heavy use.

Sending large quantities of email is a very expensive and laborious task — it can cause a lot of administrative headaches, specifically related to spam, mailing list management and legal ramifications.

That’s exactly why we created the Email Marketing Campaigns (EMC) service.  There are plenty of legal and administrative reasons for us to provide the community a more effective tool for sending emails to their mailing lists.

Here’s the important part:

If your organization is actively using the current Campaigns feature to send you, you should start using the EMC service to send your emails instead.

We will be removing the email capabilities of the Campaigns feature at the end of this month (August, 2011), in favor of the new EMC service.

We are providing a free level of service (up to 500 email messages per month) specifically to help our users migrate over to the new service without additional cost.

If you need help getting your mailing list and/or email campaigns setup in the new service please let us know.  We would be glad to help.

You can sign-up for the free level of service by going to: Services > Sign up for Email Marketing service from the Manage website:

https://manage.rescuegroups.org

Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions or concerns.