All is not well at the Sydney Dogs Home. Seems new management have entered the place with all the decorum of a bull elephant and now some ex-volunteers are peeved: I’m not going to link out to the several dozen places it’s getting flamed, but rest assured it’s getting a very public flogging.
Now it’s worth noting this situation is nothing special; groups have been in-fighting since rescue began. What is interesting is how it demonstrates that we’re live in an age of word of mouth. People ARE talking about you and the problem is that it’s only a tiny percentage that do – and unsuprisingly it’s much, much more likely to be the people you’ve pissed off than the ones that are happy with you.
Now you can absolutely ignore that this goes on and hope that won’t effect you – but personally, I wouldn’t want my first foray into social networking to be trying to fix a giant issue caused by a bunch of unhappy campers. I’d want to have some sort of safety net in place already.
Queue your Fan Club. While it’s very easy for the happy 99% of people who deal with you to be silent – they should actually be your loudest voices. You should be asking them to help you spread the good news about what you do! People are always a little wary of speaking up – they don’t want to look stupid – but if you ask for their help directly and they feel strongly that you deserve to succeed, then they’ll go into bat for you.
Of course this only works if you actually have supporters. If you work with people to meet their needs, treat your volunteers well and wow! people with the experience they have when they deal with you. People don’t talk about average. They don’t talk about the time they were treated OK.
If you’re having trouble gaining support and the only time people talk about you is to tear chunks out of you, then that’s not about them. It’s all about you.
