Camp Directors Report 10 Feb. 2011
Submitted by Patricia Barlow-Irick

Accident
I was trying to feed a foal and mare, when the mare bit me. She took off the tip of my finger and my fingernail. It looks bad, but it doesn’t hurt. It was a good safety lesson.

Hiring Help
I ran ad in Yard&Groom for an assistant trainer. I felt that I needed an assistant to handle all the horses that I would be trying to get adopted with the adoption contract that the USFS was offering. I will be paying my assistant with money that I earn on the adoption contract and not through Mustang Camp until Mustang Camp has money. I got about a dozen applicants, and it was very difficult to make a decision, but I selected a woman by the name of Krill. She was to start on February 15, but has been delayed till the end of the month. I became apprehensive about the situation and started thinking about hiring another person, but we will see if Krill actually makes it here. A second person named Terry impressed me with her application. Terry lives near Santa Fe, so I e-mailed her to come interview. Kerry will be here on Thursday of this week.

Adoption Contract
I was awarded a contract to get the horses adopted that were in the USFS holding pens. There were 21 horses, and I started advertising on Craig’s list, improving the website, advertising in the local weekly shopper, and notifying the
people on the New Mexico Horse Friends FaceBook page. I had a very good response, and I’ve got 12 horses adopted including two half blind horses. We’ve been providing free delivery, which seems to have helped the adopters. Most of

the horses trained at Mustang Camp have been adopted. We hope to have all of the 2010 USFS horses adopted by the end of February. A 100% adoption rate is something to brag about. We will be emptying out their holding facility on Saturday when we take the last three horses to train.

BLM Invitation
I was worried about running out of horses, so I sent a letter to Dean Bostadt of the BLM inquiring about getting them directly from them, rather than going to TIPs. I received a call from Sally Spence with the Wild Horse and Burro office
in Washington. She and I had a nice conversation, and I directed her to the Mustang camp website. She was very interested in what we were doing. I talked to her about the three missions for Mustang camp and said that we needed horses and funding for education and research. She invited me to send her a proposal.

Google Advertising
Google has been offering free coupons for its AdWords, so I decided to try it to advertise the Mustang camp internships. I set up the variety of key words focused on Mustangs, wild horses, New Mexico, in horse training. I restricted my ads to Europe and Australia. As of Saturday the fifth, we had attracted 13 viewers through this program, but the analytic tools show that they are spending very little time on our website. We since changed that by making an adventure vacation webpage for them to land on. This seems to attact them into looking at the rest of the site, but I have had no conversions (inquiries about booking). Our viewers coming to us from other ways are spending an average of 12 minutes on our website. They’re probably looking through the slide show of horse pictures for horses to adopt.

Soso created a new video for us and I placed it on the front page. I have to create another page with all of our mustang videos linked on it.