Rather than post a Caturday Cat this morning, I thought I would catch everyone up on the happenings around Mandarin’s Retreat. The Retreat has had to spend a bunch of money – into four figures – fixing the HVAC system in the Retreat’s Office. We remodeled our back porch into a home office and IT center about 10 years ago. It has since morphed into a cat medical center/transition site for sick or new cats in the Retreat.
Our mini-split in the office has been acting up for several years, mostly I think from the large amount of cat hair that gets captured in its filters. April was time for its scheduled maintenance and it had stopped working. The maintenance team came it, worked on it and left; but the HVAC didn’t work at all. We were sweltering in the heat and Tabz and her four kittens were not having any fun either. I called a new HVAC team who very promptly identified the problem, offered several solutions and we decided to toss out the old system and get a new one. Two days later the system was installed and we were cool. This came at the cost of about 1.5 months of operating expenses for the Retreat. Sigh…we can’t receive enough donations to cover vet costs, how are we going to cover the cost of the new system?
This leads me to ponder on what encourages folks donate to charities like ours? We take in old cats, sick cats, and cats that need help. We also try to house cats from families who have been evicted from their homes and domestic violence victims who whose emergency shelters won’t accept their cats. While this service is not used very often, we would like to think having a place to put their feline pets enables them to leave an unsavory situation.
But that goes back to the heart of the question; is doing “good things” enough? What do donors want to see in return for their hard earned cash? We don’t have mugs or t-shirts we can provide to donors (at least not yet); so what “value” do donors need in return. What should we post? Are pictures of cats enough? I personally don’t want to try to pull at the heart strings and write about sob stories involving our cats. Mandarin’s Retreat is suppose to be a happy place, a resting and healing place for the sick and handicapped. We had our logo designed to show a happy place and we want to continue in that vane.
My wife and I fund Mandarin’s Retreat out of our own pockets and in our own home. We don’t mind the cost, but in these days of inflation and product downsizing, we need help. We’ve looked into fund raising experts and those who say, “For only $3,500 a year, we can provide you with multitude of grant opportunities.” Yah, right. You want me to spend 10% on my yearly budget in hopes of getting a grant. I know you have to spend some money to make some money but where does one begin and what do donors want for their contributions?
If you have any ideas, suggestions or comments about this diatribe, please email us at meow@mrhwc.org.
