If We Only Adopt to ‘Perfect’ Pet Parents, We’re Not Really Making a Difference…
As you may kn
ow, we have been investigating the philosophy of Satisfaction Guaranteed for shelter animal adoptions. The 2010 ASPCA $100K Challenge grand-prize winner, Humane Society of Boulder Valley, used this program to help adopters choose to adopt knowing that there would not be any consequences for returning the pet if the match did not work out. Not only were there no consequences, the focus really was to assure the adopter that their satisfaction was top priority for HSBV.
We decided to test the program at two fantastic real life “shelter laboratories” – Salt Lake County Animal Services and The Anti-Cruelty Society in Chicago – and have just completed collecting their data. A third laboratory is just finalizing their baseline data and getting ready to dive into their experiment.
Willamette Humane Society is our third shelter laboratory -- this poster nicely promotes the program.
We hypothesized that Satisfaction Guaranteed would increase the likelihood that a person would make the choice to adopt. We also hypothesized that returns might increase – not just because folks are making quicker decisions about adopting, but also because when the match does not work, they feel safe coming back to the shelter with the pet, as opposed to finding alternative placement themselves.
Measuring the increase in adoptions is a really good way to measure the effect of a process change that does not necessarily focus on increasing the number of people walking in your door. We use a simple formula we call transition rate. We survey the people walking in the doors to find out if they are there to look at or potentially adopt a dog or cat. And at the end of each day, we count the number of adoptions of dogs, cats, puppies and kittens that occurred. By dividing the number of adoptions by the number of people who walked in the door, we can calculate a transition rate. The higher the rate, the more people are choosing to adopt.
The Anti-Cruelty Society found a nice increase in transition rate for felines. Their baseline transition rate (prior to program implementation) was 11.6%, and during Satisfaction Guaranteed it was 16.5%. Return rates did not increase. It gives me chills to think about such a simple change having such a powerful effect on lives! Interestingly, the transition rate for canines actually decreased from 5.25% to 4.45%. Adult dogs remained fairly static, while puppy transition rate decreased almost 4 percentage points. The population of dogs they had available during the baseline phase vs. the experimental phase likely impacted this transition rate – there were several puppies available during the baseline phase, and very few available during the experimental phase. This means that those clients who’d reported they’d come to the shelter “to look at or adopt puppies” during the experimental phase were likely to not find a puppy to adopt.
We asked Tatiana Garrett, director of community outreach at The Anti-Cruelty Society, if the staff fully embraced the philosophy behind the program. You will see by her answer that they absolutely “get it!” “Yes, the philosophy didn’t diverge much from previous practices since we’ve always stated that we’d rather have an animal returned for replacement,” says Tatiana. “The major difference here is that we’re underscoring that we’re not vilifying people if they do need to return a pet. “Satisfaction Guaranteed” is a great step in the right direction of forming a better relationship with the public; reinforcing the fact that a part of our mission– “building a community of caring by helping pets and educating people – is about educating people. If we only adopt to ‘perfect pet parents,’ we’re not really making a difference.”
I could not have said it better myself!!
Salt Lake County Animal Services saw large increases in both canine and feline transition rate. Cat transition rate increased from 26% to 45%, while canine transition rates increased from 8% to 17%. Return rates increased for adult cats – from zero percent during baseline to 9% after the experimental phase. Even with the increase in returns, many more cats were saved.
You may have noted the difference in transition rates between the two facilities, with The Anti-Cruelty Society having lower transition rates overall compared to Salt Lake County Animal Services. This may have a lot to do with the type of foot traffic coming in the doors. The Anti-Cruelty Society had significantly more people coming to look at dogs or cats. This is exciting, as there is likely a lot of opportunity for program shift to increase choice making, and maybe increase donor base as well! While at SLCAS, more people came for animal control services than to look at dogs or cats. John Coulter, SLCAS adoption and outreach supervisor, told us “I mentioned this before, but I think this program would be more successful with a larger client base and more community exposure. We’re making huge strides, but it’s fair to say most in our community don’t realize they can adopt animals at our facility… they assume we’re a stray holding facility and look to the humane society to adopt their companion animals.” The data does appear to show that improving the likelihood of making a choice for adopters can make a huge impact for a municipal facility.
Salt Lake County Animal Services' nifty poster
Are you ready to try on Satisfaction Guaranteed? Thanks to the innovative work of the Humane Society of Boulder Valley, we have the tools, and thanks to our shelter laboratories we have the data – now how about trying it on for size at your agency? Don’t worry – if it does not fit, just return!
Related links:
“Satisfaction Guaranteed”
Shelter Management: Turning Visitors Into Adopters
Tags: $100K Challenge, adopter survey, adoption, adoption policy, Humane Society of Boulder Valley, open adoptions, R&D, returns, Salt Lake County Animal Services, shelter operations, The Anti-Cruelty Society, transition rate
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Lee Russ Says:
To properly evaluate this statement of results, you need to know at least the following:
1. If the puppy % available can affect the dog adoption rate, you need to know the info on the kitten availability % to see if having more kittens available influenced the cat adoption rate.
2. How long a time passed before the adoption was deemed to not have resulted in a return?
3. What marketing and publicity was done during the time when the old rate was calculated, and what was done during the period that the new rate was calculated? Specifically, was there a spike of publicity related to the adoption of the new policy itself, which seems very likely to me.
4. How many adopted animals were not kept AND NOT RETURNED TO THE ADOPTION FACILITY? Even with a guaranty, I know some people who no longer want the pet would simply turn it over to family, friends, neighbors, and, maybe, the street.