Hi Carol, we did start a scheme called 'Gimmie Shelter' about 2 years ago, basically this was GAL's sponsor a dog scheme, you could donate as little or as much as you liked each month by Standing Order and in return you got updates, letters, pictures and cards telling you all about the latest GAL homeless dogs..Sadly after promoting this for about 6 months we only had about 7 members donating about £50 per month, as the overheads were quite high (i.e. getting all the pictures and letters and cards together) we scrapped the scheme and set up the 100 Club instead, we thought this would attract more people as there's a chance of winning some money, there's now 253 entries in the 100 club so thats £126 per month to GAL and a lot of folk actually donate their winnings back to GAL.

Think the problem we have is we're quite aware that it's the same folk over and over again that we ask to donate, we're kinda embarrased, once someone has adopted a dog, to start asking them if they want to take out membership and join the 100 club!

One thing we have been thinking about is a 'sponsor a kennel' scheme however looking at that we start getting into the realms of BIG money. It costs us £5 per day for 1 kennel so I guess it's really 'corporate' sponsors we're looking for for that if we decide to persue it.

Even our other big money earner, our Sponsored Walk, has suffered from a real dip in attendance, 5 years ago the first Glasgow sponsored walk raised over £3500, last year's walk raised just over £700 and to be totally honest £400 of that was raised by myself and Denise harrassing our various work colleagues..

To be honest it's a tough one for us to try to keep our momentum going however I've got to say with the forum and the monthly dog walks the GAL 'community' is certainly drawing closer together which is real nice to see.

Maybe we should be a bit more open about GAL's finances (or lack of them!) you may have seen my post earlier about the can collection, I put some 'interesting' stats on that post which may or may not surprise some folks. It's hard to get a view from 'outside' GAL when the committee are so wrapped up in our work, certainly when we came to GAL about 5 years ago looking for our first dog we certainly thought it was really proffessional, maybe thats our problem in that we look dead professional and folks maybe think we don't need the donations, OK I'd say we are professional but that doesn't keep the creditors from the door! Bottom line with so many homeless dogs to look after at the mo we're pretty much living from hand to mouth...

Anyways that post turned depressing all of a sudden! I'd be really interested to hear other peoples views or opinions on how to raise more money for GAL or what peoples perception of GAL is....

cheers

Dave