Customer Stories with Lynda Delahunt

Lynda Delahunt has run Crazy4Pawz, a nonprofit organization based in Las Vegas, Nevada, since 2019. After working with various animal rescues for over five years, she decided to set up her own rescue to help save animals, educate the public about proper pet care, and pursue her mission to stop backyard breeding. 

Overcoming the challenges of time and resource

Running any organization comes with its own set of challenges. For Lynda, some of the main struggles include insufficient funding, not enough hands to help out, and not enough time to juggle responsibilities. Here’s how she deals with these problems head-on:

Create fundraiser events

To get donations for her nonprofit, Lynda organizes donation events on a monthly basis. These include fundraisers that celebrate a specific animal’s birthday, donation drives, auctions, online fundraisers, and small-scale park festivals. The wider community supports her efforts by holding online birthday fundraisers for the animals on Facebook and other platforms, and through special events such as fundraising dinners and carnivals in parks. 

Lynda promotes all of these events online through her website and through posts on Facebook and Instagram. Combined with a strong flyer campaign, these efforts can result in as many as fifty attendees at a single event.

Running the Crazy4Pawz shelter alone means Lynda has to juggle multiple things at one time — including marketing. To promote Crazy4Pawz in the limited amount of time she has available, Lynda relies on PosterMyWall. “PosterMyWall has been such a lifesaver. It saves me so much time. With all the templates that are available, I just browse through, pick the one I like best, make small edits to customize it, add my details, and I’m done. In five minutes I’ve created a professional-looking flyer!” Lynda said.

Brand your nonprofit

Nonprofits rely on help from those around them. To make a good impression and bring in donations, your organization has to look dedicated and professional. This means you have to get your branding right. A strong brand helps ensure that the organization’s image aligns with its values and mission. A strong brand helps etch the organization into people’s minds, increasing brand recall.

Lynda found PosterMyWall while she was in the process of creating a brand identity for Crazy4Pawz. She ended up designing the Crazy4Pawz logo with PosterMyWall and now regularly uses the platform to create branded print material and posts for her social media channels. 

One of the reasons why Lynda has been so successful in growing Crazy4Pawz is that she sees herself as more of a marketer than a CEO. “It’s essential for nonprofits to maintain consistent branding and use a combination of online and offline communication tools to reach out to their audiences and keep them updated,” Lynda said. She believes that one of the ways that small organisations like hers can create professional-quality marketing graphics and designs is to focus on the components that impact the audience most: colors, fonts, and imagery.

Get the word out 

Due to time and money restraints, most nonprofits tend to not focus enough on marketing. “I think marketing is essential to the success of nonprofits and needs to be a key focus of every organization,” Lynda said.

To promote her animal rescue and get the word out among the community Lynda adopts a hybrid online and offline marketing strategy:

Offline marketing for nonprofits

For each animal at the rescue, Lynda creates a fact sheet that includes the animal’s name, age, breed, health issues, general behaviour, and a little bit about their personality. She then laminates these sheets and posts them at events so people can get information on each available animal. Showcasing the animals in this way leads to more animals being fostered or adopted. 

Lynda also designs and prints flyers, brochures, and custom sized 3 x 5-inch cards for each animal. She then hands out her printed materials at pet stores, other popular shops she knows her prospective customers frequent, and dog parks.

After a customer expresses interest in fostering or adopting, Lynda goes through extensive due diligence to vet the customer, ensuring that the animal and its new owners are a perfect fit. On completion of the process, she gives the owner a copy of the animal’s information sheet in a branded folder — so they’ll have all the information that they need in the future.

Lynda includes two of her business cards in each information pack. “I always include extra business cards so that the new owners can hand them out to their friends and family — and help me get the word out about Crazy4Pawz,” Lynda said.

Share updates on social media 

Lynda’s online marketing strategy for Crazy4Pawz focuses primarily on social media. She utilizes social media, not only as a promotional tool, but also as a platform to keep her donors, pet owners, and prospective customers updated on how each of the previously adopted animals are doing. She estimates that 80% of her posts focus on getting the animals adopted or fostered, with 20% of the posts aimed at fundraising.

Another useful trick Lynda shared is that she resizes the print collateral designs she creates on PosterMyWall for social media using the one-click resize tool. In addition to saving time, having the ability to share resized designs on Facebook and Instagram helps Lynda maintain brand consistency. She pushes out the same message across brochures, flyers, and all of her social handles.

To keep followers up-to-date with what’s happening at the shelter, Lynda posts on the organization’s social platforms four-to-five times a week. She creates multiple designs at once to make sure she always has a bank of graphics ready.

Donors want to know where their money is being used and customers want to know details about the animals. Sharing photos or videos of the dogs, which have an emotive feel to them, perform best at grabbing attention. “I’ve seen this content get higher levels of engagement from followers on Facebook and Instagram,” Lynda said.

Write from the animal’s point of view

One of Lynda’s most successful strategies is to write posts from the viewpoint of the animals, as if they were speaking directly to the audience. The result is emotive content that has worked particularly well for Crazy4Paws.

Lynda has experimented with the boost function on Facebook. Boosting posts helped give her that extra edge in increasing awareness among certain target audiences. However, she did not see much of a return on investment and decided not to use it further.

Lynda has ambitious plans for Crazy4Paws’ future. She is working day and night to promote her organization through numerous marketing channels and to find safe, secure, forever homes for the animals. So what’s next? In the coming months Lynda hopes to expand her efforts with email marketing.

Are you looking to take your organization’s marketing to the next level? With thousands of fundraising poster templates to choose from, PosterMyWall provides you with an all-in-one solution for promoting your nonprofit.