Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Commons Campaign Proposal: Good Dog Rescue


Rhetorical Media and Civic Life
Paige Osborne, Kalyn Calhoun, Alex Flint
Campaign Proposal
February 24, 2015

Campaign Proposal
Good Dog Rescue in Palmyra, Nebraska is a no-kill animal shelter who partners with the No Kill Advocacy Club on city campus. A non-profit organization, Good Dog Rescue has placed over 55 dogs in happy homes. We hope to make that number grow. Our goal is to raise awareness of the foundation along with upgrading the adoption pictures and ultimately, get five dogs adopted through our commons campaign. The organization has a network of foster homes, but these are not their forever homes, which brings us to our exigence.
Our goal is to get the University of Nebraska-Lincoln community directly involved in creating a solution for these lovable pups. The rhetorical audience that we are aiming to target includes students, faculty and members of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln community. A “fitting” response is dictated by the situation. The better the speaker understands an audience’s background, expectations, and experiences, the better they will be able to determine a “fitting” response in analyzing whether the audience agrees or disagrees. We have chosen to work with city campus because students are at an age where they begin taking on more responsibilities and one may include owning a pet. It is also the perfect age for students to begin volunteer work, which may be added to a resume.
There are many great opportunities that can come from this campaign. Since the organization is volunteer-run, there is a small fee when purchasing a dog but this fee does not pay for the dog itself, it goes toward the cost of maintaining facilities and providing food/shelter to the animals. Not only will these dogs be going to good homes, but also the money they make will help the organization continue to operate. For these dogs, there is no other alternative.
Homeless animals outnumber homeless people five to one, this statistic is very saddening. Only one out of every ten dogs will find a permanent home in his or her lifetime. The ASPCA website states that approximately 2.7 million animals are euthanized annually and of all dogs entering shelters about 35% are adopted. Which brings us to some of our constraints. There is potential that we will not get the dogs adopted and that the organization will be unwilling to adapt to our new set of communication strategies. If the organization does not agree with our social media campaigns we will raise our goal of getting five dogs adopted to eight and focus on our finale of bringing the dogs to campus and make sure students are viewing our advertisements.
It is very apparent that the growth of this organization will plummet if outside parties do not take action. Which is why we have already taken the first step in our campaign by directly talking to the owners of Good Dog Rescue. The next step is to visit Good Dog Rescue, which we plan to do next week. After having a one-on-one meeting with them, we will have a better understanding of what the organization directly needs. We plan on creating advertisements to advocate Good Dog Rescue and its social media, which will be placed around campus in areas of high traffic to gain attention to our campaign and the media pages. Next, we will get the dogs cleaned up and ready for a “photography booth” style photo shoot. These pictures will be added to an Instagram page we will be rebuilding for them. We are going to be creating a twitter page using a specific hash tag; GoodDogNE and our grand finale will be bringing the dogs to campus. We will be filming and documenting each and every activity that we do to create a short film using iMovie that will be shown to the class at the end of the semester.
    The whole group will be accountable for most of the responsibilities of this project. Kalyn will be responsible for bringing attention to their Facebook page via likes and shares with her Facebook friends. Collectively, we’ll work on the photo-shoot and bumping the organization’s Instagram account from its current state of zero followers, six posts, last updated 82 weeks ago to creating a whole new account, GoodDogNe. Paige will be responsible for creating the advertisement to disperse on campus. Alex will be handling our Twitter campaign, and creating tweets to bring more awareness, and linking them with our Instagram account. Finally, we’ll bring the dogs to campus. We’ll set up a booth by the student union and encourage students to take a picture with their favorite pup and put it on Instagram using our hash tag; GoodDogNe. Getting the students to interact with the dogs will be one of the last steps in getting them adopted. Kalyn will be documenting each step in this process to collaborate a short film, which will be presented to the class at the end of the semester showing our work. We’ll continue to maintain our social media and get interested parties directly in touch with Good Dog Rescue.
            Meeting our goals for this project will contribute to a lasting impact on Good Dog Rescue. Our goal is to build on their success as well as spread awareness of this local non-profit organization. If the Lincoln city Animal Shelter gets can 10,000 likes on their Facebook page, why cant Good Dog Rescue?

Work Cited
Pet Statistics. (n.d.). Retrieved February 24, 2015, from https://www.aspca.org/about-us/faq/pet-statistics


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