help after tweeting. It’s great for tapping into an IT savvy group of animal lovers. Our success is growing all the time and with more people looking at the site and more supporters retweeting appeals, social media is becoming a very useful tool.” More and more Cats Protection branches and adoption centres are joining Facebook and Twitter – why not try searching for your local one? Just go to www.facebook.com and www.twitter.com.
Viva la video
Phones for mew We’re even communicating with supporters via their mobile phones! Last year, we had an amazing success as 6,000 people downloaded our miaowing and purring ringtone – which is also the ‘on hold’ tone when you phone the National Cat Centre! This is still available to download now and you can listen to a sample on our website. We plan to develop mobile phone communication further and have plans to launch iPhone – and Facebook – applications. Who knows what the future holds for digital communication? Perhaps you’ll be able to download a hologram of a cat to your front room, or we’ll have an online live chat system with our Helpline staff! Whatever happens, digital media has been so successful in Cats Protection’s communication approach to date – from recruiting volunteers, raising awareness of cat care, sharing news of fundraising events or neutering campaigns plus directly rehoming cats – it’s allowed us to connect with thousands more people. So get involved, get online and come say hello to us! As the expression goes, strangers are friends you’ve yet to meet… Visit our sites at: www.cats.org.uk www.facebook.com/catsprotection www.twitter.com/catsprotection www.youtube.com/catsprotectionuk
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Illustration: Rasoul Hudda
Cats Protection’s web 2.0 presence doesn’t stop there though. More and more recently, we have been exploiting YouTube, which is a website that allows users to upload videos. To give you an idea of YouTube’s potential, the age range of its users spans from 18-55; there are over 24 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute and people are watching two billion videos every day. These are amazing statistics and show that this website is too good not to be a part of! Last year we put together a short viral video to promote neutering. The video portrays men in cat costumes playing football with a non-existent ball – with the message being ‘you don’t need balls to have fun’. The video has received a staggering 6,600 plus views on YouTube. In fact, it received hundreds of views within its first few days online and, rather surprisingly, was among the leading videos featuring sport watched in Poland for a month! We’ve realised that using videos to get our message across is such an important part of communicating with our supporters: we are currently working on a viral video to promote The Cat magazine, which we intend to post up on YouTube too. As well as making low-budget – well, no-budget – short advertising campaigns, we have videos about caring for cats and of the Rescue Cat Awards on YouTube. We are encouraging branches to adopt this tool too and use it to promote the cats in their care which are ready for a home. We have recently started writing a monthly blog for the website of children’s national newspaper, First News. We will be writing the blog for children aged 7-14 years old, allowing us to connect with a new and wider external audience. We can use this opportunity to deliver information, start polls and ask questions. Children are the Cats Protection volunteers and fundraisers of the future! Sponsorship of a Cat Cabin now has an interactive element too. Each month, two members
of the Communications Team go to one of our adoption centres to film a short video featuring one of the cats in need of a home. This is sent straight to the email inboxes of people who have signed up for online Cat Cabin sponsorship and seems to be remarkably successful! Who wouldn’t love a mini film of cute kitties to greet them when they access their email first thing in the morning? Another way of connecting with supporters by delivering information straight into their inboxes is via our newly revamped e-newsletter. We’ve designed the new e-newsletter to be a little more user friendly and we’ve called it @CatsProtection to tie in with our Twitter account. We’ve decided that this won’t be a scheduled e-newsletter as such – we don’t want to bug you with unnecessary emails unless we really have something to tell you! To take a look, sign up at www.cats.org.uk