Problem and Purpose Statement Revision

A slight alteration, but nonetheless the same goal

Problem Statement

There is a growing number of dogs given up on due to their owner’s inability to care for financial, social and relocation reasons; however they do not know how to safely re-home them.

Purpose Statement

The purpose of this study was to design a communication tool for individuals, who have to give up their dog but are uninformed on how to find and evaluate good potential adopters.

Contacting Craigslist

After receiving feedback from my presentation and the roadblocks encountered by Craigslist, I decided to modify my thesis a little bit so that not only Craigslist users can benefit, but communicate to anyone re-homing their dog (the internet has been a rich and easy resource as a classifieds medium), that way, the banners are not just limited to distribution on Craigslist. I will have to modify my content a bit to speak to a wider audience but set my scope to an online target audience. My channel of distribution would be social networking sites (according to the PR manager for SFSPCA this is a cost efficient and wide-reaching way to distribute and get the word out), dog forums and blogs, and posting it on Craigslist as a user post similar to how Rocket Dog, Family Dog, Muttville, SFSPCA and other rescues/fosters/shelters etc advertise their cause.


Craigslist has been a difficult one to contact if no one is on the other end but an answering machine or an email that never responds. Unfortunately, I cannot put my project on hold until I hear from them so I have to move onwards and keep working until or if they ever respond.

I found their info from contacthelp.com since the actual Craigslist site does NOT post any information to contact them at all besides the "help" email

Phone:

800-664-0633

How to reach a live person:

Dial extension 4357

Hours of Operation:

Mon - Fri: 8:30am - 4:30pm PST

Email:

help@craigslist.org

I also found craigslistfoundation but they're a separated organization from the site
on their about page "We are unable to respond to inquiries or issues regarding craigslist.org."

Suite 200, 989 Market Street, San Francisco, California -

(415) 278-0404

MY FINAL IDEAS!!!

It's mostly an orange, yellow and brown color palette. Here's my justification:

Warm color scheme: evoke emotions of warmth and comfort

White: white space with bright colors adds salience and creates focus. (thus I used this for the opening paragraph)
Safety, purity, cleanliness. Positive connotation. Represent successful beginnngs. Appropriate for charitable organizations. Use for background color.

Black: strength and authority. Use as type face color.


Brown: suggests stability. Use as main design color.

Orange: joy, sunshine, enthusiasm, happiness, determination, attraction, success, encouragement, stimulation. Symbol of strength and endurance. Use as main design color.

Yellow: attention getter; good for highlighting the most important elements of design. Pleasant and cheerful. Unstable and spontaneous (not for promoting stability and safety). Use minimally for accents and highlights.

My typeface!
Verdana:

It is a web-safe, humanist, sans serif typeface that is widely available and known to be easily readable. It was designed to be used on the pixel-based screen. Its pixel patterns have a wide body which makes it good at both small and large sizes. It is characterized as modern, friendly and professional.

Recommended font size: 11pt type size and 13 pt leading
According to webstyleguide.com this size and leading is the most balanced and comfortable to the eye for body copy read through the screen. The more comfortable your readers are, the higher your reader retention will be for your website. However the site also suggests that larger type and spacious leading are good for smaller amounts of text

In addition

(above: suggested changes to Craigslist, you can click on the image to get a closer look)
(what a Craigslist post form looks like )

So I thought, in addition to advertising for awareness and information, my research led me to think that Craigslist should be more specific when addressing their issues to their target user instead of having a long list of text with a brief un-categorized sentences of what is and isn't allowed on their site. I took inspiration off of Ebay Classifieds and how effective their policies, agreements, requirements and reminders were. It would take it to the next level if Craigslist could modify a specific posting form for the pets section's dogs. Dogs are the most commonly exchanged pet on their pet section every single day. Several rescue groups, shelters, foster homes and non-profits post their events their, their dogs up for adoption etc. The upside about that is that they can promote their causes for free due to Craigslist's convenience. The downside is that you get individuals as well who are most likely giving up their dog for the first time and they're not familiar with the process unlike the volunteers and professionals who do this on a frequent basis. They most likely use other amature posts as a reference, but overall there's no direct source of information they can go to to give them advice. You can try googling dog re-homing and you'll find very little information out there because until recently (such as the recession) people did not anticipate changes in their lives that would lead to this. They don't know what questions are necessary to ask, information to look for, warning signs etc...besides their gut instinct and general knowledge. I called up Wonderdog Rescue and asked them if they had people coming in asking them about advice giving up their dogs and they do get it all the time. They have long detailed screening forms on their website which is something most shelters and rescues have their potential adopters fill out for them.

Ebay Classifieds vs Craigslist

Craigslist's main competitor is taking a more active approach in terms of communicating to the public about precautions and awareness with transactions involving animals on their site. See the comparison below:

This is the only thing that relatively addresses the pets issue on their site. And it mainly talks about why users should ask for a re-homing fee when giving their pet away. This link is also not easy to find and it could easily be overlooked by users. You have to start a post, and it is in the post category section, so someone looking for information but not necessarily putting up a post won't be able to see it.

http://www.craigslist.org/about/PETA




This is a portion screenshot of Ebay Classified's partnership announcement with the Human Society regarding pets on their site. It looks lengthy but it does cover more topics and more depth to their content in comparison to Craigslist.

You can find this page here:
http://info.ebayclassifieds.com/About_us/responsiblepetownership.html?mpt=1&mpch=ads

(I was easily able to spot this link due to the placement and design of it. See the last image below with the #2 label)








This is what a generic Craigslist ad post fill-out form looks like. It could be for anything, and anyone can put anything, lack mentioning a lot of things, and such. It allows you a lot of freedom in terms of what text and photo content you put in there...


Ebay Classifieds is more specific. They have a subcategory for dogs and puppies under their pets section.Their post form also asks specific questions in relation to dogs and has a specific warning advertisement on their right side (#2). And they have *REQUIRED fields which makes the user consider the information they put in there instead of carelessly putting whatever the first thing comes to their mind.
The page ends with a terms of use with a reminder of their policy.

http://www.ebayclassifieds.com/m/PostAd?scrid=10155869-7003690373122449459



According to my one of my survey monkey result questions, sites such as Craigslist with poor advertising/policy exposure and awareness regarding policies and regulations



it shows that more than half the people are unaware of Craigslist's banning of pet sales.
My survey takers were a mix of social network users, Craigslist pet section users (I posted an ad there with a link to this survey), a few dog forums and the DAI department.

Draft Developments/Ideas

What my ads would look like in a proposed Craigslist spot. Banner ads are usually designed with a call to action to lead to a website with more information. But brief slogans, logos and imagery also help promote the subject as well.

Inspirations

While searching for inspiration, I found that commercial and sponsored companies tend to have nicer graphics promoting their causes compared to most rescue and shelter sites which are minimally or barely designed at all.

I saw potential in online advertising spots for my 505 project such as Dogster's top banner (pictured below) where they follow the 728px x 90px standards. It has good exposure and communicates to visitors immediately and may entice them to click on it to learn more. This has potential on Craigslist as well, if they start to include advertising in their otherwise, all-text and uploaded photos html site.

Besides the presence of social networking, word-of-mouth promotion is also one of the best forms of PR and marketing. So while someone may not be currently in a situation in which they need to re-home a dog, their memory recall of the ad may become helpful in the future in case the viewer may know someone who is in that situation.