Sometimes, We Just Don't Understand...

I know I have not been writing the Smiling Dog Daily News as often as I want to. There just never seems to be enough time.

But I wanted to tell this story because we are at a loss to understand this person's actions! Maybe one of you can see something we are missing!

Today, we received a "dispute" notice from Paypal. Someone from Atlanta donated $10 to Smiling Dog Farms, on May 25, using Paypal. The implication of filing a dispute is that she asked for her money back, and we refused to give it to her.

But that is not what happened. Not even close!

If I had been writing these posts daily, you would all know by now that our former website manager had to quit managing our website for us. She made a huge positive impact on our ability to communicate information, and one of her major accomplishments (among many!) was that she was updating our donor lists daily! When someone donated, their name would go on the donations page right away!

We do have another wonderfully experienced website manager on board. In fact, she is just starting to get in and update data this weekend. Hopefully, she will soon have us back up to speed.

But there has been a period of about six weeks when we have not been able to update our donor lists and our website has just been "frozen" where it was.

I don't know if our failure to recognize her is what motivated this person or not. It was about all I could think of that would make someone want to donate to us, and then two and a half weeks later change their mind.

If anyone else has donated to us for the first time, or signed on as a monthly sponsor in the past six weeks, but has not been recognized on the website yet, we will soon be getting you listed among our donors, who are the lifeblood of Smiling Dog Farms!

So -- back to my story about the lady from Atlanta.

Today we received a "dispute" from Paypal. But here is the part we don't understand.

She had never contacted us directly and asked for her $10 back!

We would have happily given it back to her.

Please don't misunderstand -- we are always working hard to raise funding to support our work with the dogs. But we don't want someone's money if they don't want us to have it! We want our financial supporters to be cheerful givers who donate from their hearts and who want to help our dogs!

Because she did not contact us directly and let us send her a refund of her $10 ...

But instead created a "dispute"...

We not only gave this woman her $10 back, but we were charged $20 by Paypal because it was set up as a dispute!

We wish she had just told us she wanted her $10 back.

As much as we need donations (we have not had a fundraiser since Dec-Jan), it would have been better if this person had never donated in the first place!