Hope Rescue was set up in 2005 to help stray and abandoned dogs in South Wales. We currently
take all the stray dogs from three local authorities. We also take dogs from owners who are facing
a crisis and can no longer keep their pets. We bought our first rescue centre here in
Llanharan this year (2017) and it’s got 51 rescue kennels, 20 boarding kennels, 18
acres of woodland, 2 paddocks and it is a fantastic location, really improving the welfare
and opportunities for the dogs that come into our care.
We also have a charity shop in Pontypridd and that is a really important form of income
for us, to help us run the rescue. This was quite a huge step forward for us
as a small charity, having a rescue centre and operating a charity shop in a separate
location. So, it was really important that we had the technology in place that would
not only support those two different aspects of our business but link them both together.
We had some capacity for broadband here on this site but we’ve now upgraded that significantly
to have really superfast broadband. We do an awful lot of our admin, our commercial
activities, our marketing, online, so it was really important that we had a presence across
a number of digital platforms and had the infrastructure in place to support them.
So, at our charity shop in Pontypridd we have electronic point of sales (epos) system which
is really important not only for taking the money across the counter but it’s about
analysing the data and having that information. And we have a card reader there as well with
that. We also have quite a bit of technology in
the shop now, which again plays to the fact that people want to get their information
online, so they can come in, they can look at the screens and then they can go and interrogate
our website, find out about volunteering, find out about how they can help and support
us, or find out about the dogs that are looking for homes.
Here at Llanharan, we run commercial boarding kennels as well and so therefore we have the
electronic point of sales system. We also use cloud based accounting system. We also
use our social media sites. We communicate across the sites and with our volunteers through
workplace – and that’s proving to be hugely effective.
We’ve just had a Voice over Internet Provider (VoIP) system installed and that allows us
then to operate a mini exchange here but also, out-of-hours when we take in stray dogs, that
allows people to call us and tell us about a dog that they’ve seen or they have found.
A good example of collaborating on social media campaigns is with our partners at the
good wash company. Their luxury products are on sale in our charity shop, all profits go
to help our rescue dogs. Skype is one of those systems that is actually
proving to be more and more useful for us. It’s a great way of communicating between
our different sites, with our volunteers, to remote locations. For example, I live in
the South West, I’m not always in South Wales so that allows me to interact with people,
have meetings, conduct interviews and it really is a great facility to have.
We’ve got some exciting plans for the use of technology including a new website and
that will really help us to raise our profile, get more people engaged and involved, either
volunteering, donating, supporting, make sure that all the information on our dogs is current
and up to date but it really will improve the way that we interact with the public and
that is absolutely essential to the work that we do.