Shelter’s Edge

OK, so what’s going on here?“At the start of our first-ever 24-Hour Super Adoption Event last year, we had every cat condo in the shelter filled to the brim,” says Zachary Black, Operations Manager at Lewiston, ME’s Greater Androscoggin Humane Society. “In less than 24 hours we had all of the cats and kittens in the condos pictured adopted, all because of our amazing supporters who shared the news about our ASPCA $100K Challenge kickoff event.”

How would you like to take a similar before-and-after photo at YOUR shelter this year? This Wednesday, February 8, at 3PM ET, Zach and his colleagues at GAHS will reveal the secrets to their success during a free, 60-minute webinar, Life Saving Tips for Small Shelters. Find out which of their adoption promotions had people lining up at their door—and also hear about the promotions they won’t do again.

Register for Life Saving Tips for Small Shelters here. Small agencies who think big will especially benefit, but there are great ideas for promoting adoptions for organizations of all sizes.

P.S. And there’s more where that came from—check out these upcoming webinars presented by your colleagues in the animal sheltering field:

Community Engagement: Using Synergy to Save Lives, February 15
Presented by Humane Society for Greater Savannah

Strategizing and Energizing to Save Lives, February 22
Presented by The Humane Society of South Mississippi

Municipal Agencies Share Their Life Saving Tips, February 28
Presented by: City of Independence Animal Services
Cobb County Animal Control
Riverside County Animal Services

Planning for Success: Life Saving Tips from the 2011 $100K Challenge Winner, March 7
Presented by Austin Pets Alive!

Increasing Capacity for Spay/Neuter Before Big Events, March 8
Presented by: Kathleen Makolinski, DVM, ASPCA
Lesli Groshong, DVM, Humane Society of Boulder Valley (2010 $100K Challenge Winner)
Carolyn Brown, DVM, ASPCA

Related links:
Upcoming Webinars
ASPCA $100K Challenge
“Keeping Up with the Contestants: Party in the USA!”
Hosting Large-Scale Animal Adoption Events

Reflecting on what you’ve accomplished and where you’re headed is going to be a whole lot easier this year thanks to business expert Caryn Ginsberg’s new book: Animal Impact: Secrets Proven to Achieve Results and Move the World. Ginsberg cites dozens of examples of animal advocacy – both successful and not so successful – to illustrate how to be more strategic in achieving change for animals.

Three of my favorite lessons:

- How to say something to someone instead of nothing to everyone

- How to figure out what’s keeping people from changing their behavior…and then getting rid of those “barriers to change” in order to facilitate the desired behavior

- How to use a strategic message grid so you reach your target audience

And the best part is, in addition to a wonderfully clear step-by-step formula for achieving impact, the book is just loaded with personal experiences of animal advocates across the spectrum of animal issues…which makes me feel like I now have a whole new expanded network of friends and colleagues here in the trenches with me.

Full disclosure: I’ve worked with Caryn on numerous projects for different organizations and think of her as a friend. But I’m promoting her book because it gave me a swift kick in the pants (what are friends for, right?). Now I’m busy applying some business strategy to improve the impact of my current projects – and really getting excited about it. So I thought I’d pass the kick[start] along. And here’s a bonus: download the first chapter for free.

Enjoy!

Related links:
“The Perfect (Brain) Storm”
Shelter Management: Leadership and Planning

…and may even give you a grant to do it!

As you may already know, several months ago many of the national groups and shelter experts (American Humane Association, Asilomar, ASPCA, HSUS, Best Friends, Maddie’s Fund, National Federation of Humane Societies, National Animal Control Association, PetSmart Charities, SAWA and UC Davis agreed upon a minimum data set that all animal sheltering agencies (foster-based or physical facility) should collect. While many of the participating groups collect this minimum data set plus more, these “naked data” items were all things we all agreed were vital for collection.

You also may already know that this caused much glee and jubilation among the data geeks of the animal sheltering world. To be able to speak the same language, and compare apples to apples amongst each other when talking about these basic data sets, is really a great and historic step.

The National Federation of Humane Societies had volunteered to take on the bulk of the work in the development of a basic data matrix so that animal sheltering organizations could give the data set a try. And now, they have finished a version that does your addition for you! Download the form here.

I would love for you to try the matrix. Monitoring these simple but important pieces of shelter data can indicate for you what programs and processes (if implemented at different times) are effective for saving lives in your organization, and which are not. With limited resources, this due diligence is necessary to assure you continue to grow your organization’s life-saving ability.

For those of you who may have recently implemented an ASPCA Shelter R&D program (such as Less is More, Fosters as Adoption Agents, Meet Your Match or fee-waived cats or other you learned about through this blog or ASPCApro.org), I have an added incentive for you…

Send us your baseline (prior to program implementation) and implementation data and we can both help you to interpret the data and help you to apply for Shelter R&D grant funds to support your work.

Contact me and send me information on what program you’ve implemented and when, and we will determine how much baseline and implementation data we would need to measure impact.

Related links:
Basic Data Matrix (pdf.)
“Able, Willing and NAKED”
ASPCA Research: Shelter R&D

What’s on your shelter renovation wish list?

P.S. Keep the responses rollin’ on in the comment box. And we know you’ve been waiting to find out what’s up with last week’s feline stare-down.

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the fastest time for running a mile hovered just above 4 minutes. And then, in 1954, Roger Bannister famously shattered the 4-minute mile barrier. Within six weeks, John Landy ran it even faster, and today thousands of runners have beaten the 4-minute mile.

History – and The Guinness Book of World Records – are full of stories like this, where seemingly insurmountable limits stand – until they don’t – and then suddenly the very definition of “possible” changes. And so do our expectations. And that is a beautiful thing because expectations are powerful. In fact, the people who study and work with Appreciative Inquiry have accumulated substantial proof of the power of expectations in their own work with human systems as well as from other fields – such as the placebo effect in medicine and the Pygmalion effect in education.

Of my entire career, the most influential moment for me took place on a day back in 1995 at Monadnock Humane Society when we tallied up the day’s adoptions and realized we sent home 14 animals in just one day – nearly three times as many as usual. I know, these are laughable numbers now, but at the time they rocked our world. Our “possible” was redefined. Two years later, in our tired little 1960’s-era, open-admission shelter (which housed animal control and investigations for the entire region), we broke the 80% live release rate barrier (up from 54% in 1992) and by the end of the decade, we were closing in on 90%.

These days, my big influential moments are coming from what shelter staff and volunteers are doing with the ASPCA $100K Challenge. Not the least of which is that last year’s 49 contestants increased lives saved by 8,977 in just three months. But in my opinion, the most significant outcome is that 70% of competing shelters reported breaking at least one – and in many cases several – records! They broke their own records in numbers of lives saved in a single day, in a weekend, in a month or ever in their history. And not just by an animal or two – we’re talking about increases of more than 100% in many instances!

From the blog of Greater Androscoggin Humane Society in Lewiston, ME: "Wow, 254 adoptions/reclaims divided by 14 days = an average of 18 animals adopted or reclaimed every day; that is record-breaking for us here at GAHS!"

Staff and volunteers at these shelters have a whole new set of expectations now. They’ve broken their 4-minute mile, raised their own bar. No doubt they’ve already started mapping out a whole new aggressive plan – like we did way back when at Monadnock – to break into the 90% live release rate range as soon as possible.

What about you? Planning to break some life-saving records at your agency this year? Looking to reset your expectations? Sign up to get inspired by last year’s Challengers in a series of weekly webinars starting February 8. The webinars are free and there’s nothing to lose, except maybe your old definition of “possible.”

Click the title for more info or to register:

• Life Saving Tips for Small Shelters, February 8
  Presented by Greater Androscoggin Humane Society
• Community Engagement: Using Synergy to Save Lives, February 15
  Presented by Humane Society for Greater Savannah
• Strategizing and Energizing to Save Lives, February 22
  Presented by The Humane Society of South Mississippi
• What is High Quality-High Volume Spay/Neuter?, February 23
  Presented by Kathleen Makolinski, DVM, ASPCA

• Municipal Agencies Share Their Life Saving Tips, February 28
  Presented by: City of Independence Animal Services
  Cobb County Animal Control
  Riverside County Animal Services
• Planning for Success: Life Saving Tips from the 2011 $100K Challenge Winner, March 7
  Presented by Austin Pets Alive!
• Increasing Capacity for Spay/Neuter Before Big Events, March 8
  Presented by: Kathleen Makolinski, DVM, ASPCA
  Lesli Groshong, DVM, Humane Society of Boulder Valley (2010 $100K Challenge Winner)
  Carolyn Brown, DVM, ASPCA

All webinars will take place from 3-4pm ET; all sessions will be recorded and archived.