2019 RECAP & FUTURE CHANGES

2019 was a huge year for Real Dog Moms. With your help, we raised over $81,500 for animal rescues in the Chicagoland area (over $30,000 more than we raised in 2018). We hosted 83 events and donated the proceeds to 32 organizations - our busiest year yet! 

We’re ready to do more. In 2020, we've got our sights set on $100,000.

The goal of Real Dog Moms has always been doing good while having fun. We are here to help you have fun with your dog and meet fellow dog-loving people while giving back to those who need it most in our rescue community. There are already amazing people and rescues doing incredible things in the Chicagoland area and we want to support them however we can. In order to set ourselves up to help them even more, we will be handling our events and donations a bit differently moving forward.

We learned some valuable lessons in 2019 that are leading to this change.

1. First, emergencies happen. You’ve seen the posts and gotten the emails about a dog in need of major surgery to survive or a last minute transport to help out an area affected by a natural disaster. The truth is we cannot plan for everything and neither can rescue staff.
2. Second, rescues need more help at different times throughout the year. There are peaks and valleys to everything, including donation cycles. Rescues are more likely to receive an influx of support at the end of the year when holiday giving is in full swing. But what about the months where events may be slower because of the weather or vacation schedules?
3. Most importantly, we learned that our current event and donation model does not allow us to help in these situations. Since we've started our organization in 2017, we have assigned one rescue as the beneficiary for each of our events. In the past, this has allowed us to spread out our donations in a fair way to different rescues throughout the year. However, when a rescue needs emergency contributions for one reason or another, we can only share in their efforts to call for action because our donations are tied to a specific organization with each event.

Here's how we are going to change that. Moving forward, all of our Signature Events will have one rotating rescue beneficiary - the same as it's always been. 

Signature events include: Small Dog Tea Parties (2x/year), Mini Photoshoots (3x/year), our annual Anniversary Party and Dog Mom's Day Brunch and other larger events we may decide to host.

The difference will be that the proceeds generated from our other events will go directly into a new Real Dog Moms Care fund. This fund will allow us to help the most vulnerable rescue causes and provide emergency support based on need.

Other events we host may include: Romps, Pool Parties, tasting events, craft/DIY events, fitness events, cruises and more.

As always, 100% of the proceeds from all of our events will continue to go straight to animal rescue partners. We will always post here on our website blog and on our social media pages when a discretionary donation is made to a rescue because transparency is incredibly important to us. We want you to know exactly where your money is going. Want to see who we donated to in 2019? Check out our list of rescues here.

We can’t wait to see all of you this year for some new Real Dog Mom get togethers and all of your favorite annual events! Be sure to sign up for email newsletters so you don’t miss any updates.

UPCOMING EVENTS