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Our great techie, Declan, took off on well deserved holidays yesterday.

Just before he left he set up a new page where you can see all rescue dogs that were re-homed during the last five days.

Nice one Declan, enjoy the holidays.

Please remember, if you are looking for a dog, have a look in the rescue section first.

DoneDeal are going out and about to meet you DoneDealers this summer!  Our first outing will be this years Discover Ireland Dublin Horse Show.

We will have games and facepainting for the kids and loads of DoneDeal goodies for the grown ups!  This years Horse Show is in the RDS Dublin, from the Wednesday 3rd to Sunday 7th of August.

So if you love your horses, or just fancy a day out, get yourself to the Dublin Horse Show and come say Hi! at the Stand D6 in the Main Hall!

We have made a number of updates to the rescue sections on DoneDeal over the last few weeks. Here is a summary of the most important changes.

Ad Pages

We have updated the text on all ad pages for rescue ads. The ads now say “For Adoption” instead of “For Sale”. And instead of “Price” we say “Donation”, if the rescue centre wants to highlight any adoption costs.

Adopted Dogs

When rescue animals have been re-homed we flag the ad as “Adopted” instead of “Sold”. See Butch’s ad for an example.

More Animals

A whole lot more of rescue centres have joined our free Rescue Centre Programme. A few weeks ago we only had 17 rescue dogs on the site, now we have more than 100 dogs for adoption.

More People

We have promoted the rescue section with banners across DoneDeal. The promotion has really helped increase awareness. In the last two weeks the rescue section has been read 42,306 times, up from 16,150 times the two weeks before.

Great to see that people are starting to look in the rescue section first, before they look at the rest of the site. Our goal is that everyone looking for an animal on DoneDeal will check out the rescue section first.

What’s Next?

A big thank you to all the rescue centres who are helping us improve the rescue section, and have signed up for our Rescue Centre Programme. Many of the changes above came from meetings and discussions with various Irish rescue centres, so your feedback is very important and helpful.

We still have some things we want to improve on the site. We hope to have them sorted over the next few weeks, but please keep the feedback and ideas coming.

Last week we met with Tara Nic Dhiarmada from Madra.

Printed Educational Material

Tara mentioned that Madra, and other rescue centres, often visit schools to educate kids about responsible pet ownership. These school visits are appreciated both by teachers and by students.

It would be great if the rescue centres had some printed material to leave in the schools, for kids to take home and for teachers to use during the rest of the year.

We decided that PetAware will pay for the design and production of educational material that rescue centres can use for school visits.

We have allocated €10k for the initial design and producing material for the first year. The material will be available to a number of different rescue centres all over Ireland.

Finding Good New Homes

We also set up Madra so they can find new good homes for their dogs through the DoneDeal site. You can see Madra’s dogs in the rescue section.