Fence Line Rescue · Season One · Episode 6 · Parsnip’s turn
How to promote a charity auction? Tell your best true story, then get people registered.
[Editor note: IMAGE PLACEHOLDER: HEADER (16:9)] Caption: “I was supposed to stand nicely.”
When everybody in the barn turned around and looked at me, I looked behind myself.
There was nobody back there but Clementine, and she was eating a feed sack.
So it was me.
“Tell the whole city,” the Fundraiser had said, and then they’d all looked at the horse. I have been looked at by a lot of people in my life. Grandstands full of them. But they were always looking past me, at whoever was winning. I’d never had a whole room look at me before, like I was the answer to something.
I didn’t know what to do with that, so I did what I always do. I stood still and waited to understand it.
It took about a month.
The Calendar on the Wall
The Fundraiser taped a big paper calendar to the barn wall beside my stall, so I could see it every morning.
Each day had a square. Each square had a job. Some said “POST: item of the day.” Some said “CALL.” One, a few weeks out, said “RADIO,” with three exclamation points. The last square, at the very end, was colored in red and said “OPENING DAY, 8:00 A.M.”
Next to the calendar she put up a poster board with a big thermometer drawn on it in marker. At the bottom it said zero. At the top it said a number of registrations the Consultant had helped her pick. In between was a lot of white space.
“When this is full,” she told me, “we’re ready.”
She had a list of a hundred ways to get people registered. Number three said every board member tells ten people. The Board Chair read it twice and went to find his reading glasses.
The Board’s Ten
The Board Chair made his calls from a folding chair in the barn aisle, right outside my window. I don’t think he meant for me to listen. I don’t think he minded, either.
He didn’t send emails. He called. He had a little index card with ten people on it, and he dialed each one slowly, like a man who’d been raised to believe a phone call was a visit.
The first one, he was stiff. He said “fundraising opportunity” twice. I could hear the person on the other end getting polite.
The second one, he was a little better.
By the fourth, he’d stopped reading off the card. He just talked. He told them about the dog on the roof, and the cat in the bookstore window, and the horse who’d lost every race he ever ran. He told them about the hole in the roof over my stall.
Then he said, “I’d love for you to be part of this.”
Not “Can you give?” Not “We need.” Just I’d love for you to be part of this.
I learned something from that. A good ask isn’t a hand held out. It’s a door held open.
All ten said yes. Two of them asked if they could bring friends.
The Leaderboard
The Volunteer Coordinator set up a contest. He gave every volunteer a row on the tack-room door, and every time somebody got a friend to register, they got a tally mark.
Banjo watched the tally marks go up with great interest. He has his own tally marks, on the fence post by the barn door, one for every day. He seemed glad somebody else had caught on to the system.
For two weeks, the Volunteer Coordinator was winning. He has a lot of friends and talks fast.
Then the Junior Volunteer came in on a Sunday afternoon in her yellow rain boots, with her notebook, and quietly signed up her entire Sunday school class’s grandparents.
All of them.
“Grandparents love to register for things,” she explained, the way you’d explain that water is wet.
The Volunteer Coordinator looked at the tack-room door for a long time. Then he took the whistle he never uses off his lanyard and hung it around her neck.
The Radio Host
The Radio Host came out to the barn on a Thursday morning to record a public-service spot. She had a big gray microphone with a soft foam cover on the end.
She interviewed the Director, who was nervous and said “um” eleven times. I counted, the way Footnote taught me. Then she interviewed the Fundraiser, who wasn’t nervous at all anymore, which was something to see.
Then she held the microphone up to me.
I thought about what to say. I’m a horse, so mostly I breathe. I breathed into it, slow and warm.
“That,” the Radio Host said, “is the best sound I’ve recorded all year.”
She set the microphone down on a hay bale to shake my halter. When she picked it back up, the foam cover was gone.
Clementine was standing very still, looking innocent, with a small gray piece of foam on her beard.
They ran the spot anyway. It went out on the morning show, the one the farmers listen to. I’m told my breathing is in it.
The Live Video
The Fundraiser’s big idea was a live video from the barn, on the rescue’s page, so people could see us in real time.
The plan was this. Banjo would sit on a hay bale and look handsome. Footnote would sit on a fence post and look intelligent. I would stand in the background, in the nice light, and look noble.
She held the phone up. The red light came on.
Banjo looked at the camera. Footnote looked at Banjo. I looked at the phone.
I don’t know what came over me. Maybe it was the red light. Maybe it was all those years of being in the back of the picture. I walked right up and put my whole face into the camera. Nose first. Then the rest.
On the screen, there was nothing but chestnut nose and one big brown eye and a little white blaze filling the whole picture.
“Parsnip!” the Fundraiser laughed. “You’re supposed to stand nicely!”
The comments started coming in. Hearts. Laughing faces. “THE NOSE.” “Is that a horse or a sofa.” “Who is this beautiful boy.”
The Fundraiser stopped trying to fix it. She just let me be in the camera. It’s a strange thing to be wanted right up close.
[Editor note: IMAGE PLACEHOLDER: KEY MOMENT 1 → placed in “The Live Video” in the paste; kept here as the master list.]
The Poster
That week the Director brought out a photo I hadn’t seen before.
It was from Banjo’s first week at the rescue, back in the spring. A picture she took on her phone one night in her truck: Banjo with his head on her knee, his one ear straight up like a flag on a mailbox, looking right at the camera like he was sure everything was going to be fine.
She’d been carrying it on her phone all this time.
The Fundraiser turned it into the auction poster. At the top, in big barn-red letters: BID FOR THE BARN. Underneath, the date, and a little square code you hold your phone up to.
The poster went up at the feed store, the bakery, and the barber’s. Then the item posts started, one a day, like the calendar said. Monday was the Pie-a-Month Club. Tuesday was the quilt, with its blank square. Wednesday was the hoof-care morning, and the photo was of me with one foot politely lifted, looking like I’d done it on purpose.
Banjo stood in front of the poster at the feed store for a long time.
“That’s me,” he said.
“Yes,” said Footnote.
“I was on her knee.”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t know she kept it.”
Footnote didn’t say anything to that. Neither did I. Some things you just let a dog find out on his own.
[Editor note: IMAGE PLACEHOLDER: KEY MOMENT 2 → placed in “The Poster” in the paste; kept here as the master list.]
That’s My Parsnip
On the third live video, the comments were going fast. The Fundraiser was reading them out loud, laughing. Then she stopped.
She read one comment to herself. Then she read it out loud, slower.
“I was a groom at the track, years and years ago,” it said. “I’m the one who started calling him Parsnip. I’d know that face anywhere. That’s my Parsnip. He always let the others go first.”
The barn got quiet.
I hadn’t been recognized in a long time. Not since the track. And here he was: the stable hand who gave me my name, who used to hum while he brushed me and slip me peppermints when nobody was looking.
I put my nose against the phone screen, gently this time. I don’t know if he could see it. I hope he could.
The Fundraiser wrote back to him. He registered for the auction that night. He was the first person on the list from out of state.
The First Face
I lost fourteen races. Every one of them, I was the last thing people saw go by, if they were still watching.
But that month, on the posters and the videos and the radio, I was the first thing people saw. The first face. Not because I’d won anything. Because I was the reason.
The Farmer used to say that the last shall be first. He said it about a lot of things. Usually it was about who got the last biscuit at supper, and usually the dog got it. I didn’t know it could mean a horse.
Full
The night before opening day, the Junior Volunteer climbed up on a hay bale with a red marker and colored in the very top of the thermometer.
Full.
Everybody clapped. Banjo barked. Clementine ate the cap of the marker.
Then everybody went home, and the barn got dark, and the calendar on the wall said tomorrow, 8:00 a.m.
Banjo couldn’t sleep. I heard him walking up and down the aisle all night, his toenails clicking, stopping now and then to check that the poster was still on the wall.
Footnote couldn’t sleep either. She sat on the windowsill of the office, perfectly still, eyes open.
“I’m not anxious,” she said, when she caught me looking. “I’m monitoring.”
I stood in my stall under the hole in the roof and looked up at the stars through it, maybe for the last time.
Slow down, I told myself. Somebody’s still on the way.
Tomorrow, it turned out, a whole city was.
Next time: auction week. Banjo learns that “bid” is not a treat word. He remains unconvinced.
How Real Rescues Do This
How to promote a charity auction: registrations first
The Consultant was right: the list didn’t count until it registered. Here’s how Fence Line filled the thermometer, and how real rescues do it.
Lesson: promotion means registrations. Every promotion idea should point toward one thing: getting people signed up before opening day.
- Ask board members to invite ten-plus people each, and make personal phone calls (not emails) to your biggest supporters. “I’d love for you to be part of this” works.
- Run a volunteer referral contest with a visible leaderboard.
- Post one item highlight a day with a photo and a short story.
- Put up QR-code flyers where your people already go: the feed store, the bakery, the barber.
- Ask local media for free spots, like a radio public-service announcement.
- Use a goal thermometer so everyone can watch progress.
- Tell your best true story. A slow old horse with his nose in the camera beat every flyer.
Platforms like Your Charity Auction build in registering bidders before opening day as its own step, because that’s where results come from.
Fence Line Rescue and everyone in it are fictional. The fundraising ideas are real.
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