Spokane Has Spoken - It's Time to Meet Your Match

The animals of Spokane are caught up in a love triangle. However, you won't read about this one in the tabloids or watch salacious details unfold on the evening news.

The triangle in question features the three leading humane organizations in town:

• Spokane Humane Society
• SpokAnimal C.A.R.E
• Spokane County Regional Animal Protection Service (SCRAPS)

In the first community-wide effort of its kind, these three agencies are banding together to help potential adopters find their best match—and to increase Spokane's adoption rate in the process.

Collaboration is the name of the game in ASPCA Partnership communities. The three Spokane agencies took that cooperative spirit to new heights when they launched the ASPCA's Meet Your Match® Adoption Program on February 14, 2008.

Peace, Love and Adoption

The Valentine's Day inauguration was a well-attended, successful event. The three agencies jointly chose a '60s theme ("Peace, Love and Adoption"). Staff and volunteers sported purple, orange, and green Meet Your Match t-shirts and the dogs were resplendent in matching bandanas. 

The shelters did advance publicity to drive the public through the doors. From 5:00 to 6:30 pm the night before launching, representatives from the three shelters appeared on KHQ, Spokane's NBC affiliate, to take calls at the station's Help Center. They were featured on-air, answering calls about both the Meet Your Match program and adoption questions in general.

An Orange Adopter is an Orange Adopter . . .

Post-launch, the extraordinary cooperation has continued. The shelters, which attended the Meet Your Match trainings together, have implemented a new procedure. Adopters discover their color at one shelter, and if they don't find a great match there, they can take their color-coded guest pass to the other two shelters and pick up where they left off.

The shelters are considering sending a copy of the adopter survey with the departing adopter. The adopter doesn't need to complete the survey twice, and the second shelter can use the information on the survey to assist the adopter.

. . . And a Purple Dog is a Purple Dog

Meet Your Match has also improved relationships among the three shelters. Gail Mackie, Executive Director of SpokAnimal C.A.R.E., said, "The fact that we're all are on the same page has truly made a difference in our community.  Transfers of pets are made with the Meet Your Match work already done. We're all using uniform assessment methods and are confident that a purple dog at one shelter is a purple dog at another shelter. We feel quite comfortable transferring a dog that has already been evaluated. We love this program!"

The three shelters are discussing the idea of transferring based on color. If one shelter is light on green dogs and another can't see past the sea of green, they can do a transfer to round out the color spectrum for both agencies.

Demonstrating a whole new level of cohesiveness, the Spokane trio of shelters is showing how this kind of close collaboration is a win-win for the adopters, for the shelters, and most importantly, for the animals.