Meanwhile... Back at the Ranch... Episode 210 (Audio)

Tonights podcast is a discussion about the state of the union of the rescue, the difficulties, the overwhelming onslaught of French Bulldogs that need help and the struggles we have in trying to continue to do our work the way we want it done.

I want to speak to the village personally for a moment, I spoke last week about this exact subject and the out pouring of donations was heartwarming, it felt like you heard me when I described the downturn of donations and how we continue to operate at a loss that isn’t sustainable. I feel like I need to ask for donations more and anyone that knows me, knows that is hard for me. I don’t have all the answers but I will continue to work hard and fight to raise funds. We used to always have a big once a year auction, last years was not as successful as I had hoped but I choose to learn from that, and regroup rather than give up.

This is what I have decided, and we discuss this in this podcast. We need to seek 10 small ways to raise funds and not count on one big way to raise funds. Ricky and Lorie have a huge inventory of difficult to find liquors of all kinds of varieties, we will most likely have a few raffles up our sleeves. I am open to ideas from the village about this as well, but I need everyone to understand that we are only allowed to have 4 raffles a year per the IRS…. Period.

When it comes to auctions here is how it works, we are allowed 48 hours a year to collect funds from one auction without paying sales tax. This is why when the auction ends we need people to pay their invoice within 48 hours, if it’s not paid we have to pay sales tax for anything paid after that.

I would like to have multiple small auctions during the year, maybe 125 to 150 items max. But…with that being said we will have to pay sales tax on all of the proceeds from each auction. The auction website we use does not collect sales tax so I would either have to find another way or ask people to donate the sales tax to their invoice and hope that they would.

I am currently building two auctions, the one is an all handcrafted artisan auction and right now we are up to about 85 items. The second is donated items that people have been sending to us all year, I worked on that all day yesterday and have about 50 things in it now. I will also sprinkle in a few things from my Mom’s treasures to add a little interest to each auction.

In addition to that I am getting ready to sit down and start creating things to sell in the rescues store, shirts, tumblers, mugs, calendars, note cards, hoodies, all of the things. I would love opinions on what you might want to see or purchase. We have so many big rescues that people love to love and I think using their pics to help the rescue create revenue would be fantastic. By the way if you have or do this kind of work, please reach out to me, I would love some help with a producer and or creator of swag.

It takes a village to continue to do what we do, and we are counting on the village to help, its a big task and requires all our hands on deck for donations, auctions, raffles, and merchandise that we can muster.

We hope you will hear us in this podcast when we talk about all of the details of this subject, and we want to personally thank all of you who donate, 1.00, to 5,000 we appreciate all of you and know that we cannot do anything without your help.

If you have anything to donate for either of the auctions discussed above, either the artisan handcrafted auction or the second auction that has a vast array of items included please reach out to Laura at mailto:dogranchrescue@gmail.com and she will help you find the link to the process.

Thank you everyone and Good Night