I’ve been an entrepreneur for a long time and love the idea of making a difference in this world. That’s why I’ve been writing books about animal rescue for the past eight years. Yet I believe I’m here to make an even bigger impact than I have so far and thought that it might be a good idea to learn some more skills. After about two minutes of research I discovered the Social Entrepreneurship and Change masters program at Pepperdine University. 

I never thought I’d go back to school but in September found myself at Pepperdine in a diverse cohort with 19 other people. One class this semester is about leadership and service and is an internal exploration. Isn’t knowing ourselves the first step in being able to lead others? 

And the second class is a hands-on social entrepreneurship class where we are helping an entrepreneur launch their business or a segment of their business. Luckily, my team of five was paired with Compassion for Animals (CFA) whose vision is: “A world where humans and animals can co-exist, and that humans treat all animals with compassion, care, and respect, without harming their existence.”

Image credit: Denisismagilov

On the first day of class we were tasked with coming up with a project that we wanted to work on. Anything in the pet space was fair game. We brainstormed few ideas but mostly came up blank. Then Michelle Ellena, the founder of CFA, and our team mentor, said: “There are a couple of projects that we have been approached to work on but haven’t started.” She shared them with us, and one of them sounded interesting. 

The idea was an off-shoot of the billboard slogan campaign from God. Maybe you’ve seen it. It was clever messages that were being delivered from God.

For the CFA project, the clever messages instead are authored by O-Dog. (Get it? Flip Dog and God backwards). The idea we came up with was to help spread the message of dog adoption via messaging. We started by testing the market to see which of the messages people preferred. Most importantly, we wanted to find out who our audience was, so we created and administered a questionnaire.

Image credit: Statista

After many discussions and mapping out plans we realized that a billboard campaign, while clever, might not directly impact dog adoption. Either way, it wasn’t measurable so we backtracked and narrowed down our focus asking: How can we impact the animal overpopulation and homelessness crisis using the slogans?

After a few weeks of narrowing down and more brainstorming, we decided that if we could raise money to help defray spay and neuter costs, that would help more families be able to afford spay and neuter and would help cut down on the overpopulation. While the numbers of dogs being euthanized has improved dramatically over the years, there’s still more work to do.

Image credit: portageanimalwelfaresociety

We decided to design tee shirts with the slogans that people can buy. Proceeds from tee shirt sales will go to veterinarians that offer reduced-fee spay and neuter. In class, we had to share where we were in the process so far and created a presentation. The presentation showed how many pets are still being euthanized in the shelters and how quickly unneutered pets can reproduce. 

Our next steps are to design tee shirts, and go back out and test the market with a minimum viable product. That means our goal is to create a product or a mock-up of a product and see how many people express interest. We will use the power of the Internet to help us target our audience and get feedback. We believe our target audience is people who support animal rescue, spay and neuter and maybe even have a pet already!

If there’s interest, wonderful! We will create and sell tee shirts and then decide if we want to expand our product line and/or the slogans and designs. If not, then we will have learned, without spending a lot of money, if this was a product the market might be interested in.

Anyone purchasing the tee shirts will not only be financially contributing to supporting spay and neuter but when they wear their tee shirts in public, they will be an ambassador for animal welfare as well.

Our goal as a team is to first and foremost gather as much information as we can for Compassion for Animals. By taking on this project we are doing the market research legwork for a non-profit. 

Ideally, we will get positive feedback from the market and many people will purchase our tee shirts in support of spay and neuter and animal rescue and together we can make a difference to animals. I’ll be back in a few weeks with our designs so you can let us know if you’d like to buy one and support spay, neuter and animals in need!