In this instructional video, Polly Barnfield, OBE, walks through a real‑world example of how the North Lanarkshire dog shelter Homes for Hounds uses authentic storytelling on Facebook to rehome dogs. She dissects a successful post about a greyhound named Mojo, highlighting how the shelter combined honest, detailed narrative (personality, needs, quirks) with strong photographs and a light‑hearted joke to capture attention. Barnfield stresses the importance of responding to every comment to foster conversation, improve algorithmic visibility, and build genuine connections. She then shows how smaller charities can benchmark their performance against larger organisations such as the RSPCA using a social‑media dashboard, examining best‑performing posts, hashtag usage, and content formats (e.g., video). The talk concludes with practical advice that any business or nonprofit can apply: know your audience, tell a complete story (the good, the bad, the ugly), use compelling visuals, engage actively, and continuously benchmark to refine strategy.
Chapters
Today we're in North Lanarkshire and we're looking at how using compassion and honesty can create engagement and connection on social media. Homes for Hounds is a dog shelter based in North Lanarkshire and looks after retired greyhounds and their aim is to help them find their forever homes. They use Facebook regularly to keep potential dog owners and dog lovers abreast of their new intakes, give them the story behind their dogs and hopefully attract someone to want to book and come in and meet one and ideally take one home. But this post here shows the strength of sharing the story, warts and all, whatever your business. Whilst the other posts get shares and they get comments, this one outdid them recently with Mojo's story explaining exactly who he is, what he needs, and even making a little joke at the end about his ears to try and lighten the mood. So let's have a little look at what they did. So here they've done a very special appeal for a very special boy. So they've talked about just how lovely he is. They're saying exactly that. He's their longest resident, so that's going to appeal to, you know, like tug on the heartstrings, if you like. And they want to find a special home. They explain that he's 8 years old, that he loves the outdoors, you know, so they talk about his personality, but then they've also said exactly what they need in terms of the type of household, and they've explained maybe the slightly more cheeky behavior. And they have said that, you know, if you're willing to work, then he's the perfect companion. So they are explaining the good, the bad and the ugly, if you like, about this. And then they've put the little joke at the end. Contrary to these photos, he does have fully functioning ears because his little ears are back, bless him. But so what is what, how do you take inspiration from this? So what they've done is they've taken some lovely photos of the dog to really try and show him at his best and also to appeal to their dog loving community on Facebook. Now, this is all about knowing who your potential customers are, who your customers are, and if they know, they know that they're, you know, they're trying to obviously, you know, promote how gorgeous their dogs are. They're trying to get their dogs a forever home, but the only way to get them the forever home is to tell a story. The best way of starting with that is having some really lovely images of their dogs and then it's telling the actual story. So they gave a real understanding of the dog. They went into lots of detail about what the dog needs, exactly why he, why he should be rehomed and gave him the personality. So this really appealed to their customers passion. And any business can do this. Whether, you know, no matter what your services, it's all about appealing to what your customer needs and wants and what drives them. And then if you look at the comments, they've responded back to comments as well. So they're making sure that that's fundamental when it comes to social media is actually any comments that someone makes on your post, you always respond back to them. It's critical when it comes to social media because it really drives conversation and creates connection with that person. And it also helps Facebook push you up the algorithm and make sure that you are seen by more people. So let's have a think about what they actually did. So they've kept everything honest, they've kept it simple. And just like the rest of their feed, they share really authentically. And any business can do this because this is about storytelling, this is about, it might be thinking about maybe why did you start your business? What did you want to achieve? Did you want to solve a problem for people? Does your product do a particular thing to a particular person? Or it could be sharing something about something that you love. It's all about telling a story, sharing the ins and outs, the ups, the downs and giving detail. And always finish with an absolutely phenomenal picture. Now, if I was homes for hounds, I'd be wanting to look for ideas on how to make my content even better, even stronger, because obviously their end goal is to re home their dogs. So what better content to look at might be the rspca. Now what they could do is they could go onto, this would obviously be their dashboard. They'd go into here and then they would type in the RSPCA to compare their stuff with them. They would click the RSPCA and then what they would start finding here is their best post versus the RSPCA's best post. They would see their content versus their content. They would start looking at what's working, what's working for the rspca, what hashtags do they use, what one should you be using? And it just gives you a real flavour, you know, if I was homes for hounds, it would give me a real flavor for, you know, should I be doing something else? Should I be doing more video content? Because the RSPCA is a big brand, it might be a good one to look at. So any business can do this. All you need to do, if you have any questions, is to hop onto your dashboard and click on the little blue maybe button and it connects you to all of the team 24 7. And we absolutely love to help.
