It is with a great Hoorah! that I’m excited to announce that Our Pal’s Place: Promoting the Adoption Option blog is up and going.

For those of you who don’t know, I am on the board of Our Pal’s Place, a no-kill animal shelter and education center in Metro Atlanta. My focus within the organization has morphed a bit since our first meetings almost 4 years ago. Now, my job is to develop a development and marketing strategy. I for the last 7 or 8 months I’ve been a big yapper about the role of blogs in our organization. The road to this day has been quite intriquing.

In the beginning, there was some skepticsm about blogs because of an experience that some of our board members had after they went to New Orleans for Katrina animal rescue efforts. At that time, a few bloggers drew them into a fire fight by highlighting some of the events that had occurred. Subsequently, they did not want our blog to be an organizational firestorm.

However as we have taken small steps, many of my colleagues have taken the time to learn a little bit about blogs and to visit and read a couple. The biggest winning features of blogs was that it was a way to keep people informed without having to constantly e-mail people. The idea that people could subscribe to feeds and get information on demand and in a preferred format was quite appealing to folks who got tons of e-mail for work.

We’re still working on some of the technical stuff. We decided to use wordpress due to cost issues as well as the ability to interface it with our domain. I use wordpress here so I was familiar with making edits to the template, but I’ve had to have help with some of the coding and permissions. Thankfully our web guy is a great friend, knowledgable, and has suffered me well. There is some tinkering to do, but I’m feeling ok about what we’ve got up now.

So for those of you who would like to offer some constructive tips, please drop by the OPP blog and come back here to leave me a comment on how to make it better.

Gracias Senors and Senoras-