Video Testimonial – Jill Groves – Golden Bond Rescue

Hi, my name is Jill groves. I'm president of Golden Bond Rescue, which is a retriever rescue that's here in the Pacific Northwest. So I became acquainted with Dogpaw Studio, about 10 or 11 years ago. We had this horrible, horrible website and it was being maintained by a volunteer who left Golden Bond. So none of us knew how to maintain this monstrosity and our treasurer at that time was using Dogpaw and she suggested contacting the owner of Dogpaw Studio, Chijo, which we did. And it was I feel a match made in heaven for me. When you go to our website, you should be able to go there and get the information you want and get it easily and understand it. When our supporters and adopters and applicants came to our website, it was, it was like an Easter egg hunt.

 

They really couldn't figure out how to get to the dog information that they wanted and, it could be what dogs are available or what dogs were just adopted. Another problem with our website, besides not being able to get the information about the dogs, people wanted was being able to donate. We just really didn't have an easy way for somebody to come to the website and just find a button where they could push it and donate. Dogpaw created this wonderful button. It's shaped like a bone that says, "Donate Now." And it's not just on the homepage. It's on every single page of our website, whether you're looking at Skippy or you're looking at a Memorial or you're in our store, that donate button is always there, and click on it and they can make the donations that they wanna make.

 

We had an issue with people coming to the website and looking for a specific dog and they'd have to go through pages and pages because we keep all pictures of every single dog that we've ever put on our website. And they'd have to scroll through pictures and pages and pages and of these dogs, but now we've got a really cool search feature. And all you have to do is put in the dog's name, click the search button, and it'll bring up all the dogs with that name. And it could be that it's the dog's pages, their own pages, or it could be their Memorial, or it could be an article with that dog's name in it.

 

In the rescue business, we're competing against all the other rescues that are out there in the United States. And it's not just retriever rescues, but it is any rescue, even the humane societies or the shelters, the local shelters that are possibly bringing in retrievers. So we're competing with them and the way for us to get the attention that we really need to keep functioning and bringing in dogs and bringing in donations is by Google searches. So if somebody is doing a search on a retriever or Goldens, what we want is for us to be at the top of that Google search, and we weren't getting that.

 

But because of Dogpaw and their expertise in SEO searches, we're heading up that way. They were able to change our website around, create some pages that are gonna bring us up to the top of those searches.

 

Here's an example of how successful the new SEO pages that were created for us have helped. Since 1991, which is when we started rescuing golden retrievers until last September, we've always been known as a golden retriever rescue. So we can go out and bring in labs, but if people don't associate us with Labrador retrievers, we're not gonna get people 1) donating to support labs and 2) wanting to adopt them. But because of these new SEO pages, when somebody does a search on labrador retrievers or lab mixes or black labs, any combination we're popping up at the top, and we're now seeing, I'd say a 40% increase in the number of applicants wanting labs.

 

And that's true. That's true.

 

It's exciting because when you change your mission to include another breed, there's always that fear, okay, we're gonna bring in all these labs and nobody's gonna want 'em and then what are we, what are we gonna do? But Nope, we're getting people that want labs and black labs and lab mixes. It's an exciting time for Golden Bond. Donations are great to get.

Golden Bond is run 100% by donations. And getting a donation here, a donation there, you know, I'm never gonna turn those down. That's great, but what's even best is getting those recurring donations. Somebody who commits $20, $50, whatever it is, even $5 every single month, that's the best. And with our new donation program on the website, they can choose to do that with just a few encouraging words. We now have, we went, I'd say two years ago, we probably had a dozen donors who would donate every month. Now we're up to when was the last, now we're up to about 750.

 

People who were donating every month. A lot of them are, you know, $5 donation, maybe $10 donations. But my thought is, sure, it's $5 now, but maybe in a year or six months, it's gonna be boosted up to $10, maybe even $20.

 

So getting work done on our website with Dogpaw, it's so easy. I've developed over the last 10, 11 years, a really wonderful working relationship with the company's owner Chijo. So I work with him and we've met face to face. But because of COVID, we started meeting on zoom and there's telephone calls and we text. So the communication is wonderful. I never feel like I'm out there just flopping around, not sure what's happening. And even when something goes wrong on the site, cuz I make changes to the website and I make things happen that make things go down or need to be corrected. So I reach out to Dogpaw, Chijo, and they get it fixed.

 

It's so easy and it's not just Chijo that helps, but he's got this wonderful group of staff. Working with Dogpaw has been so easy. And everything that they've done for me for Golden Bond Rescue has gone so smoothly that I don't lose sleep at night, worrying about our website. I know that it's our website's in good hands and whatever happens, they're gonna take care of it.

 

So I think the happy ending to this whole story, our relationship with Dogpaw is that they've taken this little rescue 11 years ago and by redesigning our website and giving us these beautiful colors on our website, reorganizing our dogs' pages, putting in a wonderful donation system.

 

We're getting more money now than we've ever received before. And that equals more dogs that we can save. Without the donations, we don't have money to save the dogs and Dogpaw did that for us. And I thank you for it.