4 Tips for Prepping Animals Before a Big Adoption Event

You've selected your location and found funding for your mega adoption event—now it's time to start thinking about preparing your animals. To help make the task less daunting, here are four helpful tips.

Select Your Animals

• It's important to have enough animals available, preferably with a variety of sizes, personalities and care needs. Consider transferring in additional animals, if needed. For example, if the goal is to adopt 100 animals, shoot to have 150 available since animals you had earmarked for the event may get adopted, sent to foster homes or get sick.
• Open adoption inquiries to all the animals in your care—even those who are still on stray hold. For example, at KC Pet Project in Kansas City, KS, potential adopters can do an early bird hold for dogs who are on stray hold. Half of the $50 hold charge is applied to the animal's adoption fee and the other half is considered a donation. The deposit guarantees the potential adopter the first right to adopt the pet if no one claims the dog at the end of the hold period.
• Include foster animals and ask the foster families to attend the event to talk with potential adopters.
• Some agencies combine forces with other shelters or rescues on large adoptions events, which is a great way to address the homeless pet problem on a community-wide basis. If you choose to partner with other groups on a mega adoption event, keep these three things in mind:
  1. Go in with a collaborative mindset.
  2. Cross-promote among all the agencies to maximize the impact of your event.
  3. Consider having one adoption policy and price for all the groups at the event. This will help eliminate customer confusion during the adoption process.

Promote Early & Often

• Get the buzz about your animals going a few weeks before the big day. Recruit professional volunteer photographers to take photos of the animals a week or two before the event and put the photos, along with the animals' bios, on your organization's website and social media as a preview.
• If an event is held at more than one site, keep potential adopters informed of which animal will be at which location by posting updates and schedules on your website and social media.
• To maximize the number of people who see the photos, share the preview albums with your sponsors, partner agencies and the media before your event. Here’s a great piece on getting media coverage for your event.

Complete All Vetting & Grooming

• All animals should be "showroom ready" and prepared to leave the event as soon as they are adopted, which means they have been spayed and neutered, microchipped and vaccinated before the event.
• If possible, schedule additional veterinary support the week before the event to help with spay/neuter and general vetting.
• Consider the personality of the animal before deciding to take them to an offsite event. Animals who would be too overstimulated by the event should remain at the shelter.
• If your adoption event is offsite, make sure you bring complete medical records for each animal so you can send the records home with the adopters.
• Bathing and grooming the animals will make them more appealing to potential adopters. It's hard to resist a sweet-smelling, well-coiffed cat or dog! Many agencies partner with local groomers to get significant savings on services. You can even put event-themed bandanas on the animals to further increase their charm.

Identify Your Animals

• With so many animals at a mega event, it's important that each be clearly identified. Every animal should have a collar with some kind of unique identifier on it (shelter ID tag, number or nametag).
• Create event-themed cage cards where you can fill in key information before the event, including things like age, sex and any personality traits that may be helpful to adopters such as housetraining status, energy level, etc. 

No matter what your event plans entail, be sure you build in lots of extra time and recruit volunteers to help. 

More Lifesaving Resources

To learn more about planning a large-scale adoption event, read 5 Tips for Choosing a Big Adoption Event Location.