10:34pm
CWA's ZooToo Journey: the Numbers Tell the Story
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Eight days after the official close of the ZooToo contest, I still find it unbelievable that Cat Welfare is in the Top 20 of a national competition! As of February 24, CWA had 299 registered members supporting it on ZooToo. At that time, we were ranked #30. Our wonderful Kindra Hill tirelessly sent out press release after press release, but the major media outlets in Columbus showed very little interest in airing the story of CWA and ZooToo. Without the help of the local media, how could we possibly compete with the other shelters that had thousands of members? It seemed like a battle that could not be won by us, a battle of epic proportions between David and Goliath. But, you see, we LOVE the cats of Cat Welfare. Everything we do, we do for them. So, we at CWA decided to do what we know best: return to our roots, the grass-roots, to elicit support. Many of us sent e-mail after e-mail to families, friends, colleagues, encouraging them to join ZooToo. We talked to people on the streets, at work, over coffee, at the dinner table about ZooToo. We advertised on Craigslist and Facebook. We walked around our neighbourhoods, going door-to-door asking for support. By February 28, our membership increased to 339. By March 4, we were 416 strong. By March 13, we grew to 525, and 7 days later, we reached 599. We won membership in the most painstaking fashion possible, one at a time, and we ended the contest with 870 supporters. Our final membership is still small compared with most of the other Top 20 shelters.
Despite the mathematical improbability of CWA being in the Top 20, we made it! We made it because our members, as few as they were and without much support from the local media, worked fervently on ZooToo for what they love the most: the cats. In those moments when our hopes for being in the Top 20 faltered, when we were plagued by doubt, members in the group would send mass e-mails of encouragement and motivation, to remind us why we are in this race in the first place: for the cats. When March 31st came around, many of us ZooToo'ed tirelessly to keep Cat Welfare in the Top 20. We watched as we started the day at #19, then climbed to #17, then fell to #21 with 5 hours left in the race. It would have been easy to give up at that point, because many shelters below us had two or three times more members, but we did not give up for one reason: for the cats. Tired as we all were, we stayed in that race until midnight struck. We emerged...victorious...#20!
CWA's ZooToo experience is like one of Aesop's Fables, with a moral at the very end. And the moral is that there is no such thing as the impossible, if you only have the heart and the will to turn your dreams into reality. As improbable as it seemed based on the numbers, the CWA members saw the invisible, and therefore did the impossible!
"Only those who see the invisible, can do the impossible."
