HRN Spotlight: A Look Back at a Decade of HRN
This year HRN will be celebrating our tenth anniversary, so now is a great time to look back at our organization and see how we have changed and how much we have accomplished. We started in February 2000, a small group of bunny-lovers who wanted to make a difference in the lives of rabbits. We had lots of ideas and plenty of drive. Initially we had a handful of foster homes and a few rabbits. First thing we did was to get a website set up and start advertising our rabbits.
My have we grown since then. We have a top-rated website that shows up quickly in search engines. We have over eighty articles on rabbit behavior and care, and we have had over 1.5 million page hits! Our “Bun of the Month” has been with us from the very beginning, and since then we have added Sponsor a Rabbit, a Blog and Videos of adoptable buns.
Our first year we were thrilled with 44 adoptions; the second year we had 67 rabbits and one guinea pig adopted. Lightning, the guinea pig, is the only non-rabbit ever adopted from HRN. From our inception until the end of last year, we have placed 1,265 rabbits into good, indoor homes. Our adoptions have steadily increased and in 2009 we were thrilled to have 193 adoptions, a new record for us. We hope to have 200 adoptions a year soon…
Does anyone remember our original logo? We wanted to show a pair of rabbits, so we had a picture of them in an abstract house. We connected the words of our name with rabbit tracks, and that idea led to the rabbit tracks background on our web pages and the name of our newsletter. After a few years, we decided we needed a new logo. Working with pictures in a logo is difficult, and too many people thought our house was a doghouse. So we modified the house to make it look more real and went to drawn rabbits. The essence was still the same, but we think our new logo is quite nice!
We have consistently published three newsletters each year. We named our newsletter Rabbit Tracks, and try to have a mixture of articles on rabbit health, behavior/care and a feel-good article. To help educate the public and reach out to the community, we continue to do many education events. We’ve become regulars at several large events each year, including the Tufts Open House, Pet Rock, and the Boston Vegetarian Festival. We’ve been at town fairs and even hung pictures of our adoptable buns at some local Starbucks.
Rabbit people love to get together and socialize. Before we were the House Rabbit Network, there were many bunny parties for local rabbit people. We continued that tradition – every summer we have a Bunny Bash, a potluck where HRN friends get together, trade bunny stories and have a fun day together. In 2006, we had our first Flatbread Benefit Night, which has turned into a wonderful dinner and prize night, usually attended by about 250 people. It raises over $3,000 for HRN. Last year we did our first benefit at Giggles, and this year we are celebrating our tenth anniversary there!
We’ve always wanted rabbit people to communicate with each other, and we want to communicate with our fans. This is accomplished in many ways. We started with our phone line, answering questions, and also with email, responding to many questions each week. Later we added a Chat group where bunny people can post about their rabbits and ask questions of each other. In order to get regular updates to our supporters we started an e-bulletin. For the e-bulletin, once a month we send a brief email to our list containing HRN news and events. Recently we started a Facebook page and quickly had over 700 fans. It is nice to know we have so many supporters!
In the first few years we had to practically beg for any media exposure we could get our hands on. As our reputation has grown, HRN has received national exposure, appearing in Dear Abby and Life magazine. We’ve appeared in local television programs and were even on the Secret Lives of Animals last year. Stories of our rescues have appeared in many newspapers, including saving Joey from a vent in Wakefield and capturing strays in Plymouth. Most years we are able to do stories about rabbits near Easter. The media is starting to get to know us!
HRN has had a very successful first decade. We’ve come a long way! It is thanks to all our volunteers and supporters that we have accomplished so much. We wouldn’t have been able to do it without you. Together, we are making a difference for the rabbits. Here’s to the next decade. We are looking forward to the next ten years!