How do we reach those outside of the traditional rescue/shelter network? That was where the Coaster Project started. We can share dogs on instagram, facebook, and other social media but if it's only to those already in our network we are missing so many new people who may overlook shelters and rescues.
I started to think about how we could accomplish this, and one idea that kept coming up was coasters or posters of dogs in high trafficked areas like restaurants or bars. They brought in a lot of people, we had their attention for an hour or two, and in smaller businesses we might be able to get our coasters and/or posters in front of their audience.
I posted this idea on instagram and the CEO for Hawaii Island Humane Society , Lauren Nickerson reached out immediately. So we put together a plan for a pilot. The plan was to highlight some long timers at @hawaiiislandhumanesociety and put their faces in front of those at some local breweries in Hawaii. We started to look for printers that did coasters and found @stompstickers. We reached out to see if they could help us out with costs for the pilot and they generously covered half of the project! With the support of @stompstickers we produced 5000 total coasters for two dogs, but actually only needed one set as one of the dogs was adopted while we were rolling this out(yay!)
We have plans to roll this out with other rescues and shelters to get more faces in front of more...faces.