Pet Care Assurance

As you look over the Chances and read the compelling stories on Pet Chance you can see that they tend to fall into two different categories:

• Owners with pets waiting for treatment as they raise money, and 
• Owners who have already paid for treatment and are now saddled with debt. 

Owners in the latter category are often faced with unexpected, immediate decisions.  For example, when Wendy was hit by a car, her owner didn’t have time to plan for any of the life-saving procedures she needed.   But she went ahead anyway and made the right decision to help Wendy.

At Pet Chance, our philosophy is that in both categories we are empowering pet owners to make the right decisions for their pets.  By helping to fund Chances for owners who have incurred debt we are giving the next owner to face that daunting decision, the confidence to provide their pet with the care it needs.

We call this way of paying it forward, Pet Care Assurance.

How to make yourself - AND someone else - happy

One of our team members discovered some fantastic research that shows people are happier when they spend money on someone else than if they spend it on themselves.  This isn't too surprising... but what was interesting was:

It didn't matter if they spent $5 or $20 - they were equally happy doing it.

This is good news because we've been told we're on the right track asking for $10 donations to Pet Chance instead of begging for $100 donations.  We truly believe if enough people can provide $10 occasionally, we'll be able to help all the pets who come to us with medical needs.

Are Pet Chance donations secure?

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Being a newly-launched site (we went live on 9/6/12) Pet Chance still has a lot of work to do to make the service easier to use, more engaging, etc.

One thing we did not "save for later" is security!

We got some great feedback today that we need to secure our Donations page.  We're going to make the entire page secure soon, but until we do, please know this:  All Donations are made securely.

For non-technical people, here's the simple explanation:  The system we use to process payments is WePay.com.  The box where the donation form is presented IS secured by WePay.  The rest of the page (the Pet Chance part) is not secured.  So when you enter your credit card and other info, you are always sending your data securely.

For tech folks:  The WePay form is in an iFrame.  The iFrame data is 256-bit SSL-secured.  We're going to order and implement our own SSL certificate soon.


If you have questions or concerns, don't hesitate to contact us.  Thanks for your continued support!

The Saddest Place on the Internet

I was telling my friend Nate about Pet Chance tonight and he pointed out we may end up with the "saddest place on the Internet".

This was kind of alarming so I asked him to elaborate.  He pointed out we may have a competition to see who can show the saddest picture of the neediest pet in order to get Chances funded.

Well, darn it - that was not the point of creating Pet Chance.  It should be among the happiest places on the Internet because we're saving pets here!  So it got me to thinking...

What do we need to do at Pet Chance to make people smile?

Here's what I came up with so far:

• Before & After pictures - so we can celebrate the healing of a pet
• Conversations - so owners can report progress on their pets' treatment
• Encouragement - some way for everyone to send kind words to the pet (and the owner)

WHAT ELSE?

But there must be other things we can do... got any bright ideas?  If so, please post them in the comments for this post. If we use your ideas, we'll let you know!

A Different Kind of Blog

PetChance.org is about more than just raising money.  

We're also about raising awareness!

THERE'S A LOT WE CAN TALK ABOUT:

• To help animal lovers identify and support pets who need medical help
• To make pet owners aware that they have many, many options for providing the best possible medical treatment for their pets
• To enable doctors and other veterinary professionals to focus on the medicine, and not on the price

To this end, we've chosen to organize our blog a little differently.  We will post articles and information to help people use Pet Chance and learn about how to make it effective.

BUT...

To make this interesting and useful we also need you to participate in the discussion. We have ideas, but we don't know everything! With your help and participation on this blog, we can work together to make the realm of pet health that much better.

Please make comments whenever possible. If you would like to contribute a post, we'll happily consider it and, of course, attribute it to you.  Please send guest post ideas to blogideas@petchance.org.

Welcome aboard