Filed under: animal rescue | Tags: fireworks, homeless animals, pet adoption, pet grief, pet loss, shady, shadytales, TGTB, this good that bad, thunder shirt, thundershirt
As we approach the long holiday weekend, Mom is making the realization that she is grounded for the next four days. The 4th of July is all fun and games for you people, but I am scared of fireworks. Despite my vet prescribed natural calming pills and my newly purchased Thundershirt device, I will need constant supervision and that’s that. Suck it up, Ma.
It’s all for the best really, Mom has a ton of stuff to catch up on at home anyway.
Happy Fourth of July!
Not the least of which is getting back to the straight up adoption stories! As you may have noticed, our writing has been derailed a few times since our return in May.
First, our friends needed help with some tough pet decisions so we used our experiences and your input to oblige in a few posts like “How Do You Know?” Then when the worst outcome actually happened, we offered condolences the only way we know how in “I Will Love Him Forever.”
Then Mom got sidetracked by some upsetting pet adoption statistics in “The 8 Second Rule” and spent the next few follow ups trying to break that rule (again, with your help).
All that “out of the box” talk sparked an idea that now has Mom pretty darn busy. She has found a way to do what she challenges everyone else to do on those posts; think outside the box to promote pet adoption. She will be tying in our core message with one of her other marketing projects very closely and long term. We can’t go too much into detail, but it all starts with her new friend, Tuesday Larken. Stop by her blog site and read along to find out as we go how it will all tie in.
Mom and I would like to thank you for all your support and feedback on all our posts and projects. We really appreciate and know from our inbox that collectively, we do indeed make a difference for pets and their owners. We wish you a safe, happy and QUIET holiday weekend.
Filed under: animal rescue | Tags: animal rescue, companion animals, groupon, homeless animals, shady, shadytales, TGTB, this good that bad
As part of our Break the 8 Second Rule effort, We have been exploring ways to increase animal adoptions and reduce pet surrenders outside of traditional volunteering, fostering or adopting. It has been pointed out to us that Groupon recently had one of those ideas—and they blew it.
The discount coupon giant prides itself on its unique writing style and sense of humor. If they had taken the time to learn anything about the intended audience they would have seen the trouble coming a mile away…then they could have either dropped the idea of an animal rescue themed campaign or curbed their usual sharp edges a bit.
Instead they figured they knew best, even in this arena so far outside what they usually do, and ran with an insensitive campaign that accomplished 2 things; it stirred a lot of anger among animal rights people because it made light of a very real problem and it made a lot of people laugh. I have nothing against laughter of course, but the whole thing lacked any call to action to adopt or otherwise do something about the aforementioned very real problem. So why did they bother?
Groupon Takes Dig at Animal Adoptions and Fails
Well, we have no idea why they bothered. That doesn’t mean it was a bad idea. It was just poorly executed Groupon had the right idea and a huge audience to play to and please. Learn from their mistakes and find another way to get adoptable animals in from of larger captive audiences outside of your group’s usual reach. Maybe something like these:
1. Approach your local “Val Pak” coupon vendor about a reduced rate or donated spot to feature homeless animals.
2. Make your own place mat advertising: ask local restaurants to use your and get current adoptable animals in front of diners. Be sure to keep them current and not too “sad.” Maybe partner with a groomer or other pet related business to sponsor or share cost?
3. Ask any vendor with an email newsletter or list to feature one of your adoptable pets in each issue. Good candidates for this are civic groups, school organizations and restaurants.
The list goes on and on, depending on your community and the wherewithal of you volunteers. Don’t give up on “out of the box” just because Groupon or any other large entity failed. What they have in resource they can lack in flexibility, and if you can flip that balance you can make things happen.
Filed under: animal rescue, pets | Tags: animal rescue, HSUS, landlords, moving with your pet, pet adoption, pet friendly aprtments, shadytales, TGTB, this good that bad
It was brought to our attention that Mom and I were not doing so well on the “brevity” thing, as advised in our last post. We’re still working on that but what can we say? Some of the ideas we got were too good not to expand on!
Today we have another thought starter for those of you who are looking to break the 8 second rule that started this series. Here is another approach for those who want to get out there and start doing something new to reduce animal surrenders.
Landlord Intervention. When people relocate, their pets often suffer. Changing landlords or giving up your home can mean that you have no choice but to move to a place that does not welcome pets. This is a top reason in most shelters for animal surrenders.
What if you tried to improve the percentage of pet friendly rentals in your area? Start with landlords in your area that have had long term vacancies and see of they are open to cracking open the door even a little for pets. They will likely have a long list of reasons and concerns. Start by simply researching the policies and listen carefully. Resist the urge to argue every one right away.
Set out to overcome as many of their concerns in an organized fashion that continually highlights the benefit to them. Start small and see how far you can get. They may insist on breed or size restrictions at first but if you allow the deal to collapse over that then all dogs pay the price. Any progress is good progress and it can ease the landlord into bigger changes later.
Here are some things you can put into your arsenal to start changing their minds and building your reputation as a reliable source they can trust as they begin reexamining their policies:
- Pet owners on the whole are pretty responsible. Dig up what you can on stats for pet owners personalities to get the ball rolling—make a profile that explains why a pet owner is an ideal tenant. Things like; more likely to renew if pet is welcome, more likely to keep regular hours or be kind neighbors and so on.
- Recruit landlords that do allow pets to help (preferable those in another area, so there is no direct competition for tenants). Interview them, host a meeting or compile a top ten list of the benefits they found from allowing pets. Ideally these benefits include less vacant rentals and solid referrals (and free listings in pet friendly directories) from the very loyal pet community.
- If they are already somewhat sympathetic to the cause, highlight the benefits to the community as well. Allowing pets could ultimately relieve some burden on the local animal shelter.
- Draft a sample agreement that would be an addendum to a pet owner’s lease. Customize it to their specific concerns which may include:
- Increased security deposit for cleaning costs.
- Ability to meet and assess animal’s personality prior to move in date. For breeds they are wary of, maybe a professional assessment is in order, at tenants’ cost (you can probably recruit these gratis if you begin to make real progress).
- Tenant agrees to pay for professional floor cleaning X times a year.
- Tenant agrees to allow a quarterly inspection (with owner present) for pet damage and compliance with population limits and pay/neuter clauses etc.
- Tenant reveals/commits to number of hours pet will be alone on average, plans for pet sitting for vacations and so on.
- Tenant agrees to leash rules and/or walk dogs off private premises (no doggy mess or ruined lawns).
- No new pets once lease is signed, exiting pets only.
- Establish quiet hours—limit barking, loud play and no noisy ins and outs for walks in that time frame or lease is void.
- Landlord reserves the right to assess pet, leash or muzzle policy on a case by case basis.
- If you are able, offer yourself or other volunteers (perhaps from the shelter) to assist them with an additional screening process for potential tenants who have pets.
Some of this may sound excessive to pet owners and lovers but think of it from a business owner’s prospective; he has property to protect and the well being of other tenants to consider. This is not a personal decision for them, it is business and as we stated a few posts ago, it is time to start thinking like a business owner.
You may not convert landlords to the level of openness you’d like at first. Instead focus on building credibility with the landlords. Once you have some success under your belt you will be able to persuade them to do more.
If you have been looking for a way to help homeless animals outside of traditional volunteering, fostering or adopting, this may be the approach custom-made for you! Please share this post so others who may be looking for ideas can find it. What are landlords like in your area? Is this a major concern?
When every pet has a home, maybe then we can relax 
Filed under: animal rescue, Guest Posts | Tags: animal rescue, cats, companion animals, dogs, homeless animals, HSUS, shady, shadytales, TGTB, this good that bad
Our last post was a cry for help. A plea to end the 8 second cycle. It started like this:
“HSUS estimates that a cat or dog is put down in a shelter in the U.S. every 8 seconds. Do you think it is mere coincidence that marketing experts like SilverPop and Wikipedia alike report that the average continuous attention span for literate humans is also 8 seconds? (read entire post here)”
In the middle was a bunch of stuff about how we don’t want over 10,000 animals a day to die. And it ended sorta like this:
“…forget the animals for a moment and think like a business owner whose business is failing. You have a surplus and you need to move inventory or else your business is going to die.
What is the best (tried or untried) idea or advice you have to find more buyers?”
450 an hour. 10,000 a day.
Want to know what we came up with? We’ll tell you but not all at once, because that was idea #1.
Keep is Short, Socially. Social media is a boon to animal rescue. It makes sharing and spreading news fast and updates easy. Be sure to speak to your crowd there even when you do not have news though. They come to their PC for entertainment too, and it doesn’t take much. That is an ideal way to attract more people to your network.
Give them something to remind them about you and your cause very often and in small, entertaining doses. Questions of the day, cute status updates, caption this photo exercises, or trivia can work if not overdone. Talk more often, but not always at full length. Talk to them like it is person to person, not always just organization to large group.
End with a question whenever you can to give them a reason to interact and check back. “Has your dog ever done anything like this.” or “Who is braving the weather for a dog walk today?” Every post does not need a photo or a link. Let them know you enjoy their company and conversation, and schedule it regularly. Stockpile the cool, pithy filler stuff so you don’t lapse.
When it comes to blogging, shorter is always better. Break things into a series of several posts, always ending with a teaser of what is to come. Tighten sentences and paragraphs and drop unnecessary adjectives to make text look less time-consuming to a reader. We have been trying this here, even if it does not look it to you sometimes this is one where we really are trying…
Idea #2 gets down to the business of the MORE buyers thing, but still focuses on social media.
Make finding more followers/fans/friends to read your cool new pithy marketing stuff more of a priority. In the online world, followers in the 4 and 5 digit range is a lot smaller than it sounds. People come and go and their attention wanders.
Remember to ASK people often to share your page, retweet your tweet, share your post etc. Even your staunchest advocates may not think of this or remember it often enough. Somewhere in THEIR friend list is your next buyer…umm I mean adopter. Ask and you shall receive.
Ask them collectively every day, several times a day even, to do at least one thing. It may feel like overkill but most of us only check in once in a while so we only see it now and then. Flatter them, thank them and then ask them very specifically to help you recruit and tell them how (Please hit the “suggest to friends” button, please retweet, please forward this email to at least 5 people and so on)
If you are lucky enough to a person dedicated to your online presence, get a second person JUST to build the audience. These are 2 separate missions. Have them find similar Facebook Twitter accounts pages (or whatever you are doing online). Compose and send personal messages inviting people following them to follow you too. Learn the ins and outs of Facebook online events, Follow Fridays, PawPawties and hashtags and all the silliness that is out there to participate in.
This can be tough; you have to do this slowly so FB and Twitter won’t think you are a spam bot! Make the message personal enough so the reader knows you are not spamming either…”Hey I love the photo you posted on XYZ. Maybe you’d like to post to over with us too?”
Contests (with even the smallest prizes or other incentives like “we will name your pet dog of the day”), trivia questions, teasers and so on go a long way with a lot of people and will increase your visibility. Direct a few around building numbers: person who refers the most people to our site wins, person with the most followers to retweet our tweet gets naming rights on the newest batch of shelter kitties. People will do more than you think for very little incentive.
To sum up these two ideas I think it goes like this: for actual content, less will get you more. In terms of frequency more is what you need to get! That’s all for the social media ideas. So as not to violate these principles, we will save the rest of the ideas for another post next week. The rest of them are a little more “step away from the computer and get out there” types.
So please check back with us then. And if you know anyone shaking things up in the animal rescue world, ask them their secret and share it with us. If you don’t, help us find someone like that by hitting one of the share keys to share this post.
WOW- this less and more thing is delicate balance isn’t it? How do you think we did?
Note from Shady: This is a guest post by my people Mom. Mom already has a few ideas to share on this topic. Marketing is her “day job.” She would never pose questions like these without being willing to answer them herself and she will do just that as well as sharing the ideas you have sent. No suggestion is too run of the mill or too outlandish for this excercise…please send us your opinions.
Filed under: animal rescue, dogs | Tags: 8 seconds, animal rescue, attention span, homeless animals, shady, shadytales, silver pop, TGTB, this good that bad, wikipedia
HSUS estimates that a cat or dog is put down in a shelter in the U.S. every 8 seconds. Do you think it is mere coincidence that marketing experts like SilverPop and Wikipedia alike report that the average continuous attention span for literate humans is also 8 seconds?
That’s over 10,000 animals a day. Looking at these facts alone it would seem that as soon as one lost animal is forgotten, we immediately repeat the process and another animal pays the price for our attention deficit. Of course, we insiders know that is not the case.
Those who are in the position of euthanizing animals are most often the very people trying to save them. Although tremendous progress has been made –from around 25 percent of American dogs and cats euthanized every year in the 1970s to about 3 percent now–the current estimated rate of 4 million dogs and cats put down per year has been flat for far too long. They need help to increase their success rate.
Every 8 seconds, we lose a sale. Would this be acceptable to the average business owner?
If you are selling a product, marketers are full of tips and tricks that tell you how to best use your 8 seconds. Sales trainers and consultants are making real money dispensing this advice. There are scores of books and articles about how we can entice our audience into giving us more time and how to find new prospects.
They have formulas and suggestions like visual effects and punchy headlines or subject lines to do the trick. How can we translate that information to give these animals more time with their audience? If we are maxed out now, with too many pets and no realistic way to attract a larger pool of people willing to adopt a pet, how will we entice a new audience?
We’d love to end here with a list of out-of-the-box marketing strategies for animal shelters to improve adoption rates and reduce surrender rates. Except that we just don’t know yet.
Instead we appeal to those of you out in the field, the fields of animal rescue and marketing to be exact, to make the list for us. How do we reach outside the inner circle of animal lovers and make more people care enough to do something?
Just to be clear, “something” is not always donating, volunteering, adopting or fostering an animal. There are plenty of other ways to make a real difference; spay/neuter pets and/or educate others on how and why to do so, report known dog fighting rings, hold your municipality and its residents accountable for its euth rate, don’t support pet shops or simply don’t give up so easily on your pets or try to trade them in for newer models just to name a few.
Have you taken the time to read this post for more than 8 seconds? If so, forget the animals for a moment and think like a business owner whose business is failing. You have a surplus and you need to move inventory or else your business is going to die.
Forget the success stories, the sob stories and the typical events, none of that is going to be enough. It is time to add to that script and read the latest business books, check the blogs and attend the free sales seminars. Put on your marketing hat, ask your friends and colleagues…or imagine you’ve hired the best consultant or strategist you can find.
We are all responsible for this overstock and in 8 seconds, another one of societies’ “unsold goods” is going to be put down. They will be destroyed for no good reason or end purpose and not before taxing the system of overall resource meant for many causes. This should not be acceptable to anyone, animal lover or not.
What is the best (tried or untried) idea or advice you have to find more buyers? Leave your comments here or tell us all about it here.
Note from Shady: This is a guest post by my people Mom. Mom already has a few ideas to share on this topic. Marketing is her “day job.” She would never pose questions like these without being willing to answer them herself and she will do just that in her follow up post. Her suggested tactics include methods employed on this very post, designed to make you keep reading. No suggestion is too run of the mill or too outlandish for this excercise…please send us your opinions so we can share and learn together.
