Facebook offers and incredible potential to spread ideas and engage people in worthwhile causes. Unfortunately most activists have not fully managed to harness its amazing potential.

At Let’s Adopt! we have been busy building a massive worldwide network but we need your help to continue growing. Here are 3 pointers that will help you understand the logic behind what we do.

1. Grow your personal network first.

In order to make a group grow you first need to build your own personal network, to fill them up not with useless connections but with great people who will contribute to your cause and contribute to make the group bigger and better, one member at a time. Your group or cause will not grow unless you make a real effort to grow your own personal network.

2. Open new routes.

You all have Facebook friends with whom you share hundreds of “connections”. That is ok, it provides solidity to the group, but does it really contribute to expanding its reach? At Let’s Adopt! most of our adoptions and offers to foster come from people with whom I share just a handful of common connections. Each time we create one of those new connections we enter unexplored territory and endless new opportunities. That is how I see it anyway…

Don’t forget to invite each and every new connection to your group.

3. Understand what we are here for.

Once in a while I am criticized for not reaching out to my Facebook friends, for never starting conversations, for not commenting on people’s status notices. Regardless of the fact that I strive to answer each and every email and that it is clear to all that I use Facebook with a clear and defined purpose, many feel that I am not making enough effort in reaching out, bonding, sharing, getting to know them.

As much as I love all of you and that many of our members have become my personal friends and will likely remain forever, the truth is that I am not here to make friends. I’m here to CONNECT and make CHANGE.

Through our work, Let’s Adopt! is making a great deal of change, we are saving the lives of hundreds of animals, we are enriching the lives of our adoptants and fosters, we are inspiring people in the community by encouraging to do their absolute best and to work as a team to achieve seemingly impossible goals.

We could not have achieved any of this if I had focused in developing deep bonds/relationships with our members. Sure, I would have been invited to weddings and birthday parties to last me for a lifetime but we would not have saved a single animal.

I’m here for a purpose, and if you are reading this message, so are you.  Our motto is:  Saving animals, inspiring humans… THAT is my purpose.

Now, start enlarging the Let’s Adopt! network of your choice… We need adoptants and foster homes worldwide, and we will only get those if each one of us does its best to reach out and enlarge our incredible community.

Viktor

What can I say…. Is the little things like these are what make this community so remarkable.

If you are a Firefox user please feel free to use this Persona.  Share it with your friends and explain them what Let’s Adopt! is all about.

If you are in the office why don’t you send it to your boss?

And don’t worry… it will be the first of many…

A big thanks for our volunteer/designer Deniz Erguner, the person responsible for most of the  little things you see going on in Let’s Adopt! and one of the best graphic designers in Istanbul.

Deniz, you rock!