News May 2010

Are You Fully Connecting with Your Community? 

Our conversational webinar series provides tips on engaging every member of your community - from your local reporter to an online friend to a resident who lost their dog.  Learn tips and discuss strategy with experts. Register today and boost your presence tomorrow!

This series is especially designed for ASPCA $100K Challenge Contestants but all leaders are welcome to participate! Space is limited, so register now! Upcoming sessions:

• How to Use Social Networks to Reach Your Community - nonprofit communications expert Jeff Patrick discusses the ways you can use social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to promote your events, raise funds, recruit volunteers, and boost adoptions.
• Fee Waived Cat Adoptions - our Dr. Emily Weiss describes the why and how behind shelters who've have had great success implementing fee waived cat adoption programs, drawing crowds and saving many feline lives.
• Lost and Found Matching Programs - 3 Success Stories - meet three agencies who have cracked the code in lost and found matching. Discover their secrets and learn how your organization can boost the return to owner rate and connect with new audiences.
• Taking Adoptions to the People! - Best Friends' Julie Castle explains how to adopt 400, 500, 600 at a time with large scale Super Adoption events. Meet your community, build brand awareness, and increase your adoptions exponentially!
• Fosters as Adoption Agents - 3 Success Stories - meet three agencies who have added a new twist to foster care with dazzling results. Learn how they've invited foster families to conduct adoptions right from their home.
• A Leader's Role in Insuring a Customer Friendly Shelter - join Jan Elster in a conversation about taking a close look at one's organization to make changes that will complement staff in insuring effective public interactions. A happy, well-served public can be your best asset and you can be theirs.

User-friendly Adoptions Practices

Is your adoption process based on trust or steeped in suspicion?  Does your community view you as a family-building partner or a rigid investigator whose standards are impossibly high (and less pleasant than say the local breeder or pet store)? Consider reviewing your practices from the public's point of view. Perhaps refreshing your policies and making your adoptions more "user-friendly" could make you a better resource for your community - and the place they turn to first for a pet.

Dakin Pioneer Valley Humane Society in Springfield, MA, previously had policies such as insisting on proof of home ownership and making adopters wait two days before allowing them to take a dog home. Says Leslie Harris, executive director, "In reality, such measures mean you insult far more terrific people while trying to 'catch' the rare person doing the wrong thing."

By taking a closer look at how they viewed their clients and existing adoptions processes, they planned some important changes, and adoption numbers have soared to record heights in recent years. Read the whole Dakin profile.

For Oregon Humane Society in Portland, OR, the process of change began with a change in outlook - starting with viewing the public as a solution rather than a problem. They modified their interaction with adopters from interrogation to conversation. Hiring practices changed too - the organization actively looks for enthusiastic, upbeat candidates who communicate well. Their efforts paid off with increased adoptions, decreased staff stress, and improved word-of-mouth in their community. Read the whole OHS profile.

Tools to Measure Donor Value

Ever contemplate the value of your online supporters? FrogLoop.com(Care2's nonprofit online marketing blog) has a basic calculator that tallies the value of an email address based on average donations over time.

We like this tool because its mortgage-calculator style is simple to use, plus it shows the value of an email address over four years. FrogLoop wisely points out that many, if not most, of your donors will donate multiple times. So the amount of money you are willing to spend to acquire one email address should be determined by the value that your organization will receive from contacting that address over multiple campaigns. Use this handy calculator in combination with Pro's direct mail tips to plan your email acquisition strategy and budget.

FrogLoop also shows benchmark values from a 2007 Convio study so you can compare the performance of your names with other nonprofits, including animal welfare orgs in general. The benchmark average lifetime value of an email address in the animal welfare field is $23. How do your addresses compare?

FOUND: 333 HOMES FOR ANIMALS (& Amazing PR for the Rest of Year)

A whopping 333 animals – 269 dogs, 43 cats, 12 parrots, 2 guinea pigs and 7 rabbits – found homes at the 4th Spring Tampa Pet Adoption Expo on April 24. Funded by the ASPCA and coordinated by ASPCA community partners TampaPets.org, The Humane Society of Tampa Bay, and Hillsborough County Animal Services, the largest pet expo in the Southeast drew more than 50 rescue groups and 2,000 attendees. Check out our Flickr album for photos from the day.

New this year were the Adoption Ambassadors dispatched to help new adopters. "We made sure someone was available to escort them to the vet booth, to the Hillsborough County Animal Services booth to get their free pet license, and to the Subaru booth for their free ID tags," says Cory Cooper, President, TampaPets.org.

Best of all, the benefits to the organizations involved go beyond the amazing adoption numbers, which will help to achieve our Tampa partners' 2010 goal to adopt 700 more dogs than in 2009. "I look on this more as great PR we get for the rest of the year," says Cooper. "People are so unaware of the scope of the problem of pet overpopulation.  But when they see all our breed-specific groups and other animals for adoption, they see that a shelter animal is not a bedraggled animal with 'issues' - they learn they can be beautiful animals who just took some rough turns."

Interested in learning exactly how TampaPets.org does it-and how to put on a similar event of your own? Read the whole story. And don’t miss Julie Castle’s May 26th webinar on super adoption events.