Best Friends Animal Society’s Post

Home is more than four walls and a roof 🏡 It is a place where we should feel safe and loved 🧡 Everyone deserves a home — and that includes pets in shelters 😸🐶    Shelter and rescue workers like you are working hard to find homes for every pet, but the reality is that today, not every dog and cat gets to experience the love and comfort of home. 💔     All we need is just 6% more people to choose to adopt versus purchase their pets to close the national lifesaving gap and #SaveThemAll! 🧡   Help us #BringLoveHome for pets across our nation - share and get your community involved in lifesaving! 🧡🐾 Visit bestfriends.org/home to learn more.

🗓️ 1 YEAR LATER 🗓️ When Shelter Pet Data Alliance was introduced in May 2023, Best Friends offered one $100,000 grant to celebrate the launch. South Suburban Humane Society in Illinois was selected as the recipient, and with the funding, they were able to add Dog and Cat Outcome Coordinators to their team. CEO Emily Klehm says she used the data visualizations in SPDA to drive her decision about how to invest the grant funding. "Seeing the data in such an easy-to-read way with the comparisons to organizations like ours and nationally, we knew we had to actually focus more on adoptions,” said Emily. Since their outcome coordinators have been in place, Emily says their 2024 adoptions are up 45% over 2023, and their cat length of stay has decreased by 7 days. Use your own data to make informed operational decisions like this by getting started on shelterpetdata.org.

Did you catch our webinar last week, Accessibility in Animal Welfare: Increase Lifesaving with Access for All? Watch the replay: https://brnw.ch/21wM7KU No matter your function at your shelter or rescue, you can have an impact on improving accessibility! Our expert panelists and moderator provided practical, actionable solutions for creating more accessible environments and communicating about them with pet adopters, fosters, volunteers, and employees. Huge thanks to our experts! ✅ Alison Fechino: Chief Executive Officer, Norfolk Animal Care Center ✅ Heather Miller: Development and Communications Director, Cat Adoption Team ✅ Reagan Daughtry: Specialist, National Operations Support, Best Friends Animal Society ✅ Kristan McCormick: Senior Manager, Regional – East Coast, Best Friends Animal Society ✅ Joyce Quinzel: Senior Analyst, DXC Operations, Best Friends Animal Society ✅ (Moderator) Samuel White: Manager, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, & Belonging, Best Friends Animal Society

200+ shelters and rescues across the U.S. piloted open adoption and foster practices in June as part of our very first Bring Love Home Challenge. The results? 34,557 pets were adopted or fostered in June. For these shelters and rescues, that's 3,500 MORE pets getting into homes than last June! 👏👏👏 Thank you to every shelter and rescue employee, volunteer, and foster who participated, pushed themselves, and did the hard thing. Organizations that completed the challenge received grant funding ranging from $1,000 to $10,000. Enjoy this video of the $10k recipients getting the news 🥹

When animal control officers are empowered to return pets home, and when they're trusted to use discretion on enforcement vs. engagement, they can be your shelter’s most powerful Return to Home champions.   Hear from Alexander Caldwell, Senior Specialist, National Shelter Support, Best Friends Animal Society, on why Return to Home is such an important opportunity for community- and trust-building for officers.   Then check out his presentation from the 2024 Best Friends National Conference, Noncompliant Doesn't Mean Defiant, to learn more about how animal control can continue to shift our "bad guy" image by focusing on community engagement, situational de-escalation, and transparency.   https://lnkd.in/e8UzdbQU

⏰ TODAY ⏰ Join us at 5pm ET for our webinar, Accessibility in Animal Welfare: Increase Lifesaving with Access for All: https://bit.ly/4fztcc6 No matter your function at your shelter or rescue, you can have an impact on improving accessibility! 42.5 million Americans live with disabilities such as hearing, vision, cognitive, learning, walking, self-care, or independent living difficulties (U.S. Census Bureau). The U.S. lifesaving gap in 2023 was 415,000 pets. What lifesaving progress could we accomplish by improving accessibility for people with disabilities and ensuring they know they are welcome and safe with shelters and rescues? We'll show you where to start in this live webinar featuring: Meet Our Guests: ✅ Alison Fechino: Chief Executive Officer, Norfolk Animal Care Center ✅ Heather Miller: Development and Communications Director, Cat Adoption Team ✅ Reagan Daughtry: Specialist, National Operations Support, Best Friends Animal Society ✅ Kristan McCormick: Senior Manager, Regional – East Coast, Best Friends Animal Society ✅ Joyce Quinzel: Senior Analyst, DXC Operations, Best Friends Animal Society ✅ (Moderator) Samuel White: Manager, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, & Belonging, Best Friends Animal Society These experts will draw on their personal experiences to provide practical, actionable solutions for creating more accessible environments and communicating about them with pet adopters, fosters, volunteers, and employees. Register now and join live TODAY at 5pm ET: https://bit.ly/4fztcc6

"Shelter Pet Data Alliance for us is not just a tool that takes our numbers and keeps them in one space," says Kelsey Knight, manager of Washington Parish Animal Shelter in Louisiana. "SPDA is the opportunity to show my government what i've accomplished in comparison to other shelters that are just like me. SPDA is a tool that I can use to get in contact with shelters, rescues, and resources that are doing better than me."   WPAS has five employees. Kelsey knows the importance of maximizing resources.   "This is free," she emphasizes. "You can even use this data to look at gaps in your lifesaving, to help you see ways to push forward and make bigger changes in comparison to the other people just in your neighborhood. It's not going to hurt you. No one can go in and dig through and see every little detail, but you can make connections that make you better."   Have you discovered all data can do for you? Visit shelterpetdata.org to try this free data analysis tool.

💡 Great idea for Girl Scouts or Boy Scouts hoping to support animal shelter or rescue organizations! 💡 Check out how Girl Scout Troop 1255 from Brentwood, Tennessee, installed two public microchip scanner stations in their community! Troop 1255 used their Girl Scout Cookie money to put together and install one scanner station at the The John P. Holt Brentwood Library and another outside of the Williamson County Animal Center. Inside the box, they placed instructions for how to use the scanner and the information, and a sign-in sheet so they could track community use of the scanner station. They even made a website for their program: https://lnkd.in/gBFh6N8a Shelters and rescues: want to get more pets back home? Check out our Return to Home Playbook in the comments. 📸: John P. Holt Brentwood Library

"People and pets go together like PB & J! So in my mind, if you want to help animals, you’ve simply got to be people-friendly too," says Heather Miller, Development & Communications Director, Cat Adoption Team. "When more people can access animal welfare services in a way that both supports them and shows them they matter, our interactions become a more positive experience for everyone involved, including the animals!" Heather will bring her expertise to a live discussion, Accessibility in Animal Welfare: Increase Lifesaving with Access for All, on Thursday, August 22, at 5pm ET. Meet our other panelists and register at the link in the comments.

Are you making Lost & Found easy for your community? Pet finders and lost pet parents are often panicked and too overwhelmed to check off a list of 15 To-Dos. Anything we can do to simplify the process could help pets get back home faster. One tool that many shelters are using to do that is Petco Love Lost. Petco Love Lost uses facial recognition technology to get more pets back home by: 🔍 Matching lost pet photos with found pets that look similar in the area, whether people report them through a shelter, Nextdoor, Neighbors by Ring, or Petco Love Lost 🔍 Notifying the shelter if any lost pet reports match facial descriptions for pets in your care Lost and found has come a long way since the days of printed flyers in binders. This technology is here, and it's available to any shelter, for free! If you haven't already implemented Petco Love Lost at your organization, email lost@petcolove.org to get set up.