Fewer Makes For More
In Bert’s blog post last week, she shared the learning of a colleague. It was powerful to see these ideas move forward and save lives. One of the pieces of information Todd learned was to offer a variety of animals, but limit selection. This can be quite controversial in our field – as most of us think that offering more selection will result in more adoptions. Hearing that it actually results in less can be tough to grasp!
Choosing – makin
g decisions – is a fascinating and complex set of behaviors. Our short-term memory can really only hold 7 bits of information (plus or minus 2) – making the function of deciding among more than that number of items a Herculean feat in the field of cognition. The field of research around decision making is huge – take a peek at the lab at Harvard and read about a variety of research and books focused on the area in a recent Sunday Morning Show on CBS (my favorite TV show, hands-down…).
When there are fewer animals on your adoption floor, your adoptions can increase and your length of stay can decrease. Why? Because when there is too much to choose from, consumers, people, adopters, simply do not choose. I remember telling the board of a shelter this once and getting the response, “That is ridiculous. 
Look at Wal-Mart, they are huge and they are the top retailer in the country.” My answer – Wal-Mart has tons of inventory, but few choices of each type of product. Want paper towels? You have way fewer choices of different types of paper towels at Wal-Mart than you do at your local supermarket – which makes you more likely to make a decision and actually buy. Imagine the emotional decision making that can happen around bringing a new family member into your home? Now add 100 cats to choose from… yikes.
How do you figure out how many animals to have on your adoption floor? Start by analyzing the number of adoptions you do per day. Next, take a look at your transition rate (a term I learned from the Richmond SPCA). Your transition rate is the rate of people who walk in your doors to look at or potentially adopt a pet who actually end up leaving with a pet. A simple greeter survey matched back to total adoptions per day can provide your transition rate. Now assume you can increase your daily adoptions by 15% (I am being conservative). That is how many animals you should have on the adoption floor. Any time an animal is adopted, his cage should be immediately cleaned and a new animal placed in that spot, so that at all times, there are the same number of animals in view for your adopters.
Washington Animal Rescue League
San Francisco SPCA and Washington Animal Rescue League are just a couple of examples of facilities that gave this a try with good success. How about this – collect your baseline transition rate, length of stay, and adoption numbers, then try decreasing the numbers of animals on your adoption floor and measure the change.
If you have already made a transition, share your thoughts here!
Photo 1: Courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/austinevan/ / CC BY 2.0
Photo 2: Renee Tellez photography
Tags: adoption, decision making, length of stay, transition rate
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Mary Jarvis Says:
We found such great success with lowering our cats on the floor that we found it works with dogs too!! We now have an area blocked off of unavailable dogs. Thanks, Dr. Weiss, as usual for such great advice!
Leese Says:
Have there been any studies on if/how many of the animals from this practice are returned or “unsuccessful”? My mathematician friend asked me this when we discussed this topic. She wondered if there were only 5 or 6 to choose from (smaller shelter) would someone take an animal who isn’t necessarily a good match just because it was the “only” choice? Thoughts?
Emily Weiss Says:
Leese – interesting question. The shelters I have worked with on this have not reported an increase in returns when they move to this method – but I have not specifically researched it. Any shelters out there interested in decreasing the number of cats on your adoption floor? Reach out to me so we may knock heads about the data to collect pre and post implementation!
Leese Says:
Dr. Weiss,
Do you have more information on the research for this topic? I’m very curious as to why having a limited number of animals on display makes a difference. I also have questions as to why the number of animals would change depending on the size of the shelter, or am I figuring this incorrectly? I understand you to say to figure the number of animals on display you would take your adoption rate and increase it by 15% and that’s your number. So a place that did on average 3 cat adoptions would only have 4 cats on display at any one time? Help me understand this more.
I’m so glad you are researching this.
Leese
Emily Weiss Says:
Regarding research around choice – there has been some fantastic research around the topic – click on the 2 links in the blog to learn about some of them. When translating this into the number of animals we should have available on on floor, we are still doing research on finding the magic numbers/formalas. At this point we know that when we reduce the numbers of cats available for adoption from 70+ to 35-50, adoptions increase, and we suspect some of it will depend upon the set up of your facility etc. Feel free to contact me directly (emilyw@aspca.org) with questions.
Kate Hurley Says:
One of the things we’ve noticed with shelters that try reducing the number waiting for adoption is that their length of stay decreases, and their Upper Respiratory Infection rate can decrease dramatically. This is probably a result in part simply of the decreased time in the shelter, and in part probably because when fewer cats are up for adoption at any one time, each one generally gets a little more space and care.
A comment on Leese’s comment about whether this leads to less successful adoptions/more returns…I would expect the opposite (though I suspect there is some minimum number of animals to have available, perhaps more than 4-5 as in her example). There’s a good handful of studies in which people reported more satisfaction with a choice, whether a poster or a piece of chocolate, when they had fewer to choose from. And in an interesting study on speed dating, people with more choices were more likely to base their choices on superficial factors such as height and weight versus people with fewer choices who put more stock in factors such as education and profession. If this applied to the animal world we might expect that people less overwhelmed by choices might look more at an animal’s personality, versus just age or coat color, and migth actually make a better match.
Barbara Says:
Dr. Weiss,
I understand your theory but my concern is that when we have over 150 available cats in the shelter and you pick and choose the lucky ones who will be “on display for adoption,” what are you suggesting happens to the others? Are you suggesting we euthanize adoptable cats simply to keep the supply down?
We also have the same number of dogs (not all available though) on any given day. The most common thing we hear from visitors to the shelter is that “we don’t have any dogs-they’re all pit bulls.” Yet we have a variety of dogs to choose from, just not what they are looking for (and yes, we have a lot of pits).
Emily Weiss Says:
Barbara –
When we limit the number available on the adoption floor, that does not mean euthanizing others. In fact, it will very likely mean decreasing euthanasia significantly, and increasing your live releases significantly! The length of stay decreases which means each cat stays in your shelter for fewer days… freeing up some cage space. Moving cats from “on deck” into a visible adoption space quickly is an important piece as well. Feel free to email or call me with questions!
For those canines, you may want to look at the Meet Your Match program to help distinguish those dogs for your adopters!
Jaime Robbins Says:
I personally noticed this phenomena last year at our shelter and commented on it to staff. 2009 had been a particularly hard year on our shelter, and there were cats in every room and every space we could fit them. We did have people coming in to adopt, people who seemed so interested we were sure they would take someone home, but they walked away with nothing, unable to chose.
Barb Jones Says:
I am a bit confused by the actual math required here. Can you give an example with actual numbers? You said start with the average number of adoptions done per day. Let’s say that number is 20. Then, you said, determine the transition rate. Let’s say that’s 85%. Then you said, assume you can increase your daily adoptions by 15%. Where did you get this number? Is that an estimate based on a transition rate of 85% (e.g. an assumption that you can increase the transition rate from 85% to 100%?) Then, you said, that is how many animals you should have on the adoption floor. What is “that” number? What math do you do? In my example, do I take 20 + 15% of 85??