How Can a Wet, Lost Dog Become a Champion For Your Story?

What You’ll Learn

After a lost dog wandered up to the utility during a storm, Suwannee Valley Electric Cooperative posted a series of videos and pictures that quickly spread across the community. Learn how the hashtag #PowerPup kept the community PUPdated as the utility searched for pup’s PAWrents in this PAWsitive storytelling opportunity!

Guest Speaker

Christy Tuckey

Show Notes

Transcripts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability.

Intro: A production of Pioneer Utility Resources. StoryConnect, helping communicators discover ideas to shape their stories and connect with their customers.

Megan McKoy-Noe: How can a wet lost dog become a champion for your story? That’s what we’ll be talking about on this episode of The StoryConnect Podcast. Hi, I’m Megan McKoy-Noe, one of the storytellers at Pioneer and your host today. I am joined by Christy Tuckey, communications and public relations specialist at Suwannee Valley Electric Cooperative in Florida. Christy, thanks for joining us.

Christy Tuckey: Thank you for having me.

Megan McKoy-Noe: This is so exciting. Now your unusual story starts on a dark and stormy day. Can you take us back to the moment when you met this story in waiting?

Christy Tuckey: Oh, yeah. So it was a rainy afternoon. It was about 1:00 or 2:00 pm. And one of our member service reps comes out and tells me because, apparently, I am the animal go-to person at the co-op. Says, “There is a little dog in the driveway.” I’m instantly having flashbacks because I already rescued like a little baby kitten from our co-op driveway. And I’m thinking, oh no, this is happening again. So, you know, they let me know that there is a dog out there. So I obviously walk out along with the team lead, Denny, to try to see if the dog is going to come over. And the dog did not want anything to do with us. Dog was like, “You’re strange people, and I am not coming to you.” So we’re thinking, well, maybe she lives kind of down the road. Not really sure. We’ve never seen her before, but this is a rural area and that happens. So let’s just give it some time and see if she kind of walks off back to toward another house because there are a couple on our road. So a couple hours passed by and my boss, John calls me, and he’s like, “Can you come outside like right now?” I’m like, “Wir, yes, sir. Coming out immediately.” No idea that it was still the dog. And sure enough, she’s in our driveway now, in the back. So kind of officially on our like main campus area in our employee parking lot. And so she had been out there. Now it’s probably 4:00. She never left. So we’re like, “Well, okay, that’s kind of weird.” We try at this point to coax her again and thought, oh, I have leftover lunch. And literally this is so cringe, but I had already kind of tossed it into my office trash can and was like, “Retrieve, retrieve,” because I’m like, “We need to get this dog. We need to get her here because it’s not safe. It’s been raining all day. We’re about to head into the weekend. The co-op is going to be closed. Everything’s going to be closed, and President’s Day is Monday.” So we were going to be closed again for like a full employee training day. So I was like, “We’ve got to handle this now.”

Megan McKoy-Noe: So this was a Friday, right before the weekend.

Christy Tuckey: Yes, Friday afternoon, right before the weekend. And we literally, it was like Hansel and Gretel, just little chunks of chicken getting thrown in a trail as she slowly came closer to the co-op. And finally I was able to hold her, brought her in. She looked at me like, “You are strange, but I’ll allow it.” And we were like, “Okay, now what? We have this dog. What do we do?” Um, so we called animal control, and we left a voicemail with them. They are, bless them, so overwhelmed. And so we thought, let’s go ahead and try to get ahead of things and try to post. At first I was going to post from my personal profile on Facebook, and I thought, “Well, how can we reach more people more quickly?” And technically, this dog is already at the co-op. So I was like, John, “Is it okay? Can I post to our social media and see if we can maybe locate the dog’s owners that way?” He’s like, “Yeah, that’s fine with me.” So there we went. I quickly grabbed a hard hat, placed it next to the dog, and I was like, “Okay, we’re getting this going.”

Christy Tuckey: We’re going to get some attention to just try to get people to look and say, “That’s different.” You know, not just a normal dog scrolling through the page or your timeline, just, “Oh, there’s a dog, but it’s at a power company. That’s unusual. Let me read.” And so I decided to write it out, and it was not much thought was put into it. I was just kind of working off of my own emotion, I guess. And so I wrote out, “Can you find my family?” And I decided to be a little funny about it and use it from her perspective. And so I was like, I don’t remember what I wrote exactly, but “I got lost in the rain and founded my way to the co-op in the rain. Can you help me find my parents?” and submit.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Yep.

Christy Tuckey: Let it be, and then we waited just to see what would happen. And pretty soon it took off and people were sharing it all over.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Yes, I saw it all over as well.

Christy Tuckey: And she had garnered quite a following. So we were like, “Okay, maybe this dog is going to be found before 5 p.m., and everything is going to be fine. Like the owners are going to come up, and it’ll be a happy story, a happy ending within a two hour period,” or whatever it was. So that was not the case. Unfortunately, we didn’t hear from an owner. So then came the decision of what are we going to do over the weekend? So John ended up offering to take the dog into his house. But in the meantime, while we waited, I was like, “She’s wet. She’s probably feeling a little gross and dirty,” because you could tell she had probably been in the woods and stuff. And so I was like, “Let’s try to get her a bath.” So we decided to take her out back to our operations area and give her give her a nice bath, get her warm. I grabbed a random basket that I have literally just on a shelf because we had no cage, no leash. So I grabbed the basket and stuck her in it to see if that would work. She thought it was fantastic.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Well, we should say she is a small dog. She’s only about, what, a foot long?

Christy Tuckey: Oh, yes.

Megan McKoy-Noe: It wasn’t like a mastiff.

Christy Tuckey: Right. I’m sticking this mastiff inside a basket. No, she was probably like 10 pounds, like a terrier type mix. And so she fit in the basket. And I was like, “Okay, this is great.” She fell asleep in the basket. I was like, “This is even better.” Her precious snores. I was absolutely obsessed. So I decided to record it and just share it with my husband in real time. And I’m like, “This is just so funny. Like this little dog showing up in the rain, and then now she’s in a basket. Is this real life? And she’s snoring on my desk. This is fabulous. I’m loving it.” I decide she’s got to go potty. What am I going to use for leash? I use my laptop bag strap.

Megan McKoy-Noe: That’s what that was? Because I’ve seen this video. You shared a video. And the first time I saw this story was you shared the video of this dog getting a bath like you videotaped the whole thing. Walking on a makeshift leash, which now I know was your laptop bag strap, which is hilarious, going through hallways and by the docks and then finally curled up asleep in the basket snoring.

Christy Tuckey: Yeah.

Megan McKoy-Noe: What prompted you to start taking these videos and putting them together to share with your members?

Christy Tuckey: Yeah, So at first, like I said, it was just kind of for my personal enjoyment. I was kind of updating my husband, and I know that in the back of my mind too, I remembered we had just gotten back from the statewide youth tour. And in that youth tour, we ask our students that apply to write an essay. And the essay is “How can our co-op better engage with your generation?” And a recurring theme was TikToks and short videos and connecting in that manner. So kind of in the back of my mind I was like, “Well, everything is content. Everything is content.” So like, “Let me just take a video because this is fun.” And so that’s really what it was. I didn’t know whether or not I was actually going to use it, but just in the back of my mind, let me have it stored away, and I may give this video thing a shot. So yeah, that’s how we got video of her in the basket, video of her walking through the halls. She walked past our CEO’s office. I thought it was so funny because she tried to go in there too, and I was like, “Girl, you gotta keep walking.” And yeah, we gave her a bath, and I decided at the end of that night or that next morning, I think it was to go ahead and create the video. So I was just – she was getting shared a lot, and people were wanting to know, obviously, let us know what came of this little dog at a power company. Um, so I compiled it together within just a few minutes really. And again, this was all very light hearted in the moment.

Megan McKoy-Noe: The post that you, or the subtext on the video post cracked me up because again, you used first person. And you said, “When you’re lost in the rain and end up at an electric co-op with five-paw amenities,” which which made me really happy too. And you kept up the pup dates and all of the hashtags. You were using #powerpup in all these posts. Talk to me about how your members responded to these posts.

Christy Tuckey: Oh, they absolutely loved it. They were completely enamored with this little dog and her story and how she wound up at a power company of all places on a rainy Friday. People were already like ready to make her the mascot of our co-op. They were like, “If no owner comes up, like she’s got to be your co-op dog and got to name her Sparky.” And just it was very wholesome, very positive responses. And everyone really just wanted to see this dog have a good outcome. So whatever that may be, you know, a lot of people were hoping for obviously the dog to be reunited with their owner. But they’re like, if that is not the case, and there were other people who were offering to adopt the dog. There were several people who said, “You know, if you can’t find an owner for this dog, please contact us. And we’d be happy to help and take her in.” So we really had a lot of support from the community with this dog and her situation.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Now I was noticing when I was looking at these posts that you were sharing, you were telling two stories at the same time. Whether intentionally or not, maybe it’s just you live and breathe co-op, which just knowing you, that is what you and John do. But you were telling the story of a lost pet, of course, but something more was being told to the community. What story did your members hear during all of this?

Christy Tuckey: To me, I think everything that I do when it comes to posting on social media, I always put myself in the perspective of our consumers or our members. And so what is our single greatest advantage as a co-op? And our co-op story is we’re here, we’re local, and we’re human. Like, we’re right here. We’re right down the road from where you live, and we go to the same grocery stores, our kids go to the same schools. And everything that is the co-op is because of the people we serve. So, I think that’s become so standard in the way that I view my position and everything that I do with the co-op that I think it was just an unintentional second connection of community and caring, you know, caring for community. One of our core principles is outreach to community. And so I find it important to kind of go the distance or take the extra step to kind of pop the bubble between what could seem like a normal business power company that sometimes people may not care too much for. You know, it’s like I get a bill from you every month, but it’s more than that. You know, there’s so many people that come into the co-op every single day to serve, and there’s a very unique connection that we have to our area. And so when I posted, I wanted to still, of course, bring that co-op nature into it all, you know. So they kind of got a little bit of a tour of our cooperative walking our halls, and seeing our bucket trucks parked outside, and where we store our spools with wire because our little pup got a photo shoot out there.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Oh, the pictures. Beautiful, beautiful profile shots of this pup with the bucket trucks. And then you had them on the spool and with the hard hats. It was giving me all the feels as someone that works in the industry, but it was beautiful.

Christy Tuckey: Yeah. So I think that was. That’s just kind of how I feel like it’s important to approach everything that we do, is with a sense of connection, finding ways to connect with our members in ways that matter to them and goes beyond the foundational expectations of what a power company is. Because for me, what does a co-op look like? What makes us different? Why should we support, you know, the cooperative business model and the cooperative story? All of that in a way indirectly is considered in every post that I do. So with this little dog, it’s like, “Hey, um, you know, we’re here. We’re local, and we hear about everybody, including the little furry ones.”

Megan McKoy-Noe: Oh, well, the community really responded well. I was looking back at the posts, the initial pictures that you took with the photo shoot, as you said, with the dog, those were shared 296 times. And then that video post that was shared 56 times just on Facebook, did you post it on other channels as well?

Christy Tuckey: Nope, I just did Facebook. That was partially because it was so chaotic in the moment that I just went straight to whoever had our greatest following. So our Facebook is our biggest social media page, and so I just posted on there, and it just kind of continued that way.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Yeah, I noticed that combined, I think you said the power pup posts reached more than 17,000 people over the holiday weekend. I’ve got to ask, and I know folks listening in that may not have seen this unfold online, they’re all wondering, how does the story end?

Christy Tuckey: I believe Monday, we started calling. At this point, animal control was kind of connected with us and involved, and we were kind of doing our part to just see if the owner was out there. So I actually was reaching out to veterinary offices, and this is a bit of a tangent, but I have to say, it was so cute to call a vet’s office and say, “Hey, this is kind of strange, but we found a dog. And we just wanted to check to see if any of your clients had reported one missing. My name is Christy, and I work with Suwannee Valley Electric.” “(Gasp) Is this the dog with the power company? We’ve been following your story all weekend.” And I was like, “Yay! Yes, it is. Yes, it is, in fact, that dog.” And so that was very heartwarming for me and encouraging. So unfortunately, we didn’t have any luck there. But later that night, we did get a message on our social media, on our Facebook, from a young woman who said, I think that is my dog. So, we immediately the next morning, we’re like, this is great. Let’s connect you with animal control. And animal control really kind of took over with the reunion at that point. And Wednesday they were reunited. So happy ending. We couldn’t be happier, honestly, to know that she’s back home with her family and just to feel good little community moment there.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Well, we will add links to the video and the pictures from your Facebook post onto our website, pioneer.coop, so that folks can meet Daisy, which you now learned was her name. Daisy, the power pup, although she’ll still be Sparky in all of our hearts. Now that the power pup has been reunited, what else are y’all going to do to keep this story going in your community?

Christy Tuckey: Yeah. So we have actually started a monthly power pup feature, so we are going to be working with our local county shelter to feature adoptable dogs and call them power pups. Power pups and pals because there is a potential that there will be other animals too.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Okay. Okay. So we’re going to get some. If you have another kitten show up at the co-op, then you’ll be ready to go.

Christy Tuckey: I’ll have that power pal ready.

Megan McKoy-Noe: I love that. You said this is going to be now a community partnership with animal control.

Christy Tuckey: Correct.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Oh, I love it so much. Before I let you go, is there anything else that you would like folks to think about when faced with an unusual situation like this?

Christy Tuckey: Um, I would say put yourself in the perspective of the member always and find or consider the opportunities that may lie with that situation.

Megan McKoy-Noe: I love it. Well, thank you for sharing such a paw-sitive story with utility pioneers. I’m trying to channel you, Christy, for all of this now. She is Christy Tuckey, the communications and public relations specialist at Suwannee Valley Electric Cooperative. And I’m your host, Megan McKoy-Noe, at Pioneer Utility Resources. And until we talk again, keep telling your story.

Outro: StoryConnect is produced by Pioneer Utility Resources, a communications cooperative that is built to share your story. StoryConnect is engineered by Lucas Smith of Lucky Sound Studio.