Hello HAD Members!

Hopefully everyone’s enjoying the first few days of spring.  Of course, we all know that things will be heating up soon, so my goal is to set up some fun events now while the weather is a little cooler and get some warm weather things on the calendar for when things start heating up!  Find updates on the following in this email:

-  Creating a picture banner for the Meetup Page

-  Event Suggestions – we have a couple, but we need more!

-  Cleaning Up the Member Roster

Looking for some pictures!

-  I would love to find some great action shots of member’s dogs and create a picture banner for the Meetup site.  We need  good action shots, so if you have any, please consider submitting them.  It could be photo you took of your dog in the yard or at the dog park, beach, etc.  Or it could be a competition photo – some of my dogs compete in agility, but I know we also have dogs in the group that participate in Dock Dogs, we have some Frisbee dogs, and I feel confident that if we don’t have any official FlyBall dogs, we have some tennis ball fanatics that are “wanna be” FlyBall dogs!

-  If you would like to submit a photo, email the digital file directly to me at [address removed].   For you amateur/professional photographers, I do not have the software to deal with vector files, so please send .jpeg files (.jpg).

-  If you have professional shots of your dog, please only send me those shots that you own the rights to.  For instance, if you purchased a sized digital  4x6 or 8x10 image from a professional photographer and you didn’t purchase the actual image file, you may not own the rights to that photo.  Even though our Meetup group isn’t a business, I don’t want to risk using a professional’s photo on the site without their permission.  Please DO NOT send any photo if you aren’t 100% confident that you own the rights to it.

Suggest some events - What do you want to do?

-  I asked for some suggestions in the last update email and I did receive one suggestion to go to the beach!  I added it to the Suggested events tab, but I think folks forget to look there.  It’s a beach trip with a proposed overnight stay at Galveston State Park.  Log on and leave some feedback in the comments!  I need to know how many people would be interested in a overnight camping trip.  I am thinking mid/late May or early June if we camp.  (At least that’s what would work for my schedule for an overnight.) If we don’t camp, we could go almost any time.

-  Diving dogs or Dock Dogs training – We have at least 2 facilities in the Houston area that have regulation pools and rent them out.  I have no experience in this except as a spectator, but I am wondering how many or our members might want to take a beginners class and try it out.  If we did set something like this up, there would be a cost associated with it  (we would need to rent the pool and arrange for an instructor).  The cost per person/per dog would depend on how much interest we got and how much we could share the cost.  Please let me know if you would be interested in participating in something like this – if we get enough interest, I will do some more research and get a firm cost lined out.  (I don’t think even with an instructor that it would be more than $20-$25/dog depending on how many people we get.)

-  I will be setting up some on leash hikes inside the loop and on the north side of town in the weeks to come.  If you have any specific suggestions of trails to hike, dog parks to visit or dog friendly restaurants to relax at after the hike, please let me know.  (I am especially in the dark about potentially dog friendly restaurants on the north side of Houston.)

Cleaning Up/Maintaining the Member Roster

-  We now have 830 members on our roster, but 136 of those haven’t visited the Houston Active Dogs Meetup page in over 3 years.  The good news is that almost 550 members have visited that page within the last year.  While there are lots of legitimate reasons to “lurk” as a member of a Meetup, it’s more helpful to us to know how many of our members are actively looking at our group page.  Folks might lurk on the site to find out about local dog friendly venues or dog friendly seasonal events.  Some might never actually intend to participate in an event, or if they did want to participate, the right event may not have come around that fits their schedule.  Whatever the reason, it’s more helpful to us to know how much real interest certain events get.  Having an inflated roster of folks who are not logging on skews any statistics that the Meetup site provides.

-  To help maintain a more current roster, beginning May 1, 2014, we will begin removing members from the roster that haven’t logged in to visit the HAD Meetup page since 5/1/2011.  (This is the only criteria that will be considered when removing members as part of this roster clean-up.)   In order to stay on the roster, you must have visited the HAD page while logged into Meetup after 5/1/2011.  Please note that this is the second reminder that has been sent out and at least one more will be sent prior to removing anyone from the roster.  (The first reminder was sent only to those that hadn’t logged in recently and we did have a fair amount of those members log in after the first reminder.)

Hopefully we’ll see you at a Meetup event soon, but if not, get outside with your dog and enjoy the weather now – we all know that springtime temperatures don’t stick around in Houston very long!

Tara | HAD Organizer

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