ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MARCH 2004

The fundraising potential of welcoming visitors to animal shelters

The fundraising potential of welcoming visitors to animal shelters
"It has often been observed," New Hampshire activist Peter
Marsh told Spay/USA conference attendees a few years ago, "that
people tend to resemble the animals they choose as companions. I
submit," Marsh added, "that people who rescue feral or abandoned or
abused animals also tend to resemble the animals they choose, not in
physical appearance but in the psychological sense.

"Just as feral or abandoned animals or animals who have been
abused tend to be frightened and furtive," March continued, "so we
ourselves are often frightened and furtive, and fear the public will
think badly of us because we have too many animals, or must
euthanize some animals. We don't invite people into our shelters
because we think they won't understand what they see. Therefore they
don't understand why we can't give lifetime care to every animal
someone dumps on us, or why we are always stressed out and blaming
pet keepers for being irresponsible--and we don't get the help we
need to change things. I further submit," Marsh finished, "that it
is time we opened the doors."

That evening ANIMAL PEOPLE visited the Bosler Humane Society
in western Massachusetts.

The site is a wooded former hunting camp, on a private lake. The cat quarters are appropriately modified wooden playhouses, each with an exercise yard, grouped like a miniature New England village beneath a single high roof.

The dogs in longterm care are grouped more-or-less by size in
spacious yards with bunk-buildings, a variety of views, and access
at times to a pond. While most were outside when we visited, several
were inside watching a John Wayne movie on television. Founder
Elaine Bosler insisted that John Wayne movies are canine favorites.

As animal control contractor for the towns of Barre and
Baldwinville since 1974, the Bosler Humane Society may have been
doing no-kill animal control for longer than any other agency in the
U.S. Impounded dogs occupy ordinary cinder-block-and-chain-link
cells most of the time, but are rotated in and out of a large
exercise yard.

The Bosler Humane Society facilities are neat, clean,
attractive, and remarkably seldom visited. Donors, adopters, and
people looking for lost pets are welcome, but Bosler makes little
effort to pull in others.

Elaine Bosler seems still scarred by the hostility she met 28
years ago, when the only "shelter" she had was, as she recalls,
" Twenty-seven dogs tied to 27 trees and scarcely enough money to buy
food."

The Bosler Humane Society has survived and grown with
volunteer help, consignment sales, and bequests--but it hasn't
built the high adoption rate it could have, expanded the on-site
neutering clinic to handle the volume of animals Bosler dreams of
fixing, or completed the new shelter as rapidly as Bosler would
like, because the cash flow it needs has yet to be developed.

The Massachusetts animal protection donor base is perhaps the
most generous in the U.S. The Animal Rescue League of Boston and the
Massachusetts SPCA, for example, have reserves of $104 million and
$75 million, respectively, as the two richest animal protection
groups in the U.S. and, between them, they have increased those
reserves by $150 million during Bosler's years of operation.
Bosler, however, isn't even getting a penny for each dollar
that either the Animal Rescue League or the MSPCA raises. The Bosler
mailing list, compiled from direct contacts, is responsive,
according to board president Ann Bent, but only numbers in the
hundreds because the volume of direct contacts remains quite low.

Draw the crowd

Attracting visitors is the surest way for Bosler or almost
any other shelter to raise more money. The more visitors a shelter
has, the more volunteers and donors it will attract. Even one-time
visitors to shelters and sanctuaries on average donate at many times
the level of non-visitors, and can be encouraged to donate as often
as 12 times a year by effective direct mail follow-up.

Most visitors to well-reputed shelters, especially no-kill
shelters, arrive with a positive preconception of what they will
see. They may be shocked by bad conditions, but will usually
understand and appreciate honest effort--and what they see depends
largely upon how they see it. Successfully attracting visitors who
become regular donors begins with presentation. Every shelter
should welcome visitors with an attractive sign, stating the name of
the facility, the address, and a telephone number that will be
answered after hours as well as during business hours.

The sign should also state the adoption-and-reclaim hours,
when senior staff are on duty, and the visiting hours, which may
overlap the adoption and reclaim hours but can usually be handled by
volunteers.

Adoption-and-reclaim hours should include afternoons and
evenings, all seven days of the week if possible, from three p.m.
(when children get out of school) until 7 p.m. (to accommodate
working people).

Visiting hours can be briefer. Wildlife Waystation, of
Angeles National Forest, California, has been highly successful in
fundraising chiefly from visitors since 1973, offering visiting
hours only on Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Each visitor gets a
volunteer-guided tour.

Tour guiding, incidentally, is among the easiest jobs to
delegate to volunteers--especially young volunteers, such as high
school students. Volunteer guides should be given an inexpensive
identifying vest to wear while on duty, and a specific tour route,
ending at whatever attraction seems most successful at inspiring
donations, with certain specific things to show guests, and a list
of answers to frequently asked questions.

More complex questions can be referred to senior staff--but
most questions will be repetitively asked, and will concern either
features and policies of the facility, or the life histories of
resident animals.

Each question is a chance to solicit funds. For example, at
the Bosler Humane Society, "Why do you keep cats in modified
playhouses?" might be answered in a manner ending with the
explanation that, "If you wish to donate a cathouse, and be
recognized for it with a plaque on the door, please take one of our
handouts on 'Donating to the Bosler Humane Society.'"

Such a pre-prepared handout should be ready for volunteer
tour guides to distribute. More should be left in a clear plexiglas
box, like those real estate brokers use to help sell property, near
the welcoming sign. The handout should explain how and where to send
money, how to donate material goods, what goods are welcome, and
how to leave a bequest to the organization.

Questions about particular animals at Bosler should end with
a mention that care-for-life of unadoptable animals costs much more
than killing them, as conventional shelters would do, and should
mention that contributions may be placed in one of the donation boxes
on the grounds.

Any shelter without prominent donation boxes needs to add some.
The life history of any particular animal ends similarly: "It
costs us X-amount per year to keep (name of animal). Each
contribution helps. Please make yours in one of the pre-stamped
self-addressed envelopes we gave you with your tour packet," which
should also include a copy of the shelter's latest appeal.

The more items people take to read later, distributed with a
self-addressed envelope (postage-paid, if possible), the more money
a shelter will receive. The envelopes make donating easy, and
ensure that all donations are correctly addressed.

Thanking donors increases response--including when
prospective donors see others being thanked. On the shelter grounds,
an attractive sign or plaque should acknowledge every donated item,
from art to zoonotic disease reference books. Prominent thank-yous
not only encourage donors to give again, but also inspire others to
contribute, and will exempt a shelter which receives quality goods
from any criticism of "luxury" by visiting misers who might
nonetheless make a bequest.

Upkeep

Access roads, if any, should be kept in good repair. Rough
roads discourage visitors--and every dollar they spend on car repairs
is a dollar the shelter won't get.

A shelter capitalizing on visitor traffic must not stink. If
a shelter stinks, people will be reluctant to enter, stay long,
bring children, return, and adopt pets, because--as Helen V.
Woodward Animal Center director Mike Arms has long emphasized in
teaching adoption promotion--they will fear that the animal might
make their home stink too.

Shelter odors are 90% preventable, with retrofitting and
redesign, so as to have floor-level air ducts, to remove odors from
the point of generation instead of at nose level; to accomplish
continuous air exchange; and to keep all drains automatically
flushed.

In the U.S., eighty percent of animal protection donors are
female, most are between the ages of 20 and 50, and women in that
age range have up to seven times the olfactory acuity of most men and
women over the age of 65.

In short, the animal sheltering donor base tilts toward the
very people who are most likely to have a negative response to a bad
smell--even though the response may be entirely subliminal.
An occasional bad smell can be turned into an asset with a
prominent sign in the problem area that frankly states, "Smell
something bad? Please tip us off! We don't want our shelter to
stink."

Noise

A successful shelter should also never be noisy. Noise
drives dogs and cats crazy, and drives visitors out, away from the
very animals who most seek attention.

Dogs crave company. They want to be part of a pack, so it
is quite all right--indeed essential--to house small groups of dogs
together. It is also quite all right to let enough of them be
together at times, under supervision, to choose their own
companions. Once dogs are in compatible groups, however, noise can
be reduced by minimizing visual contact among dogs who are not housed
together. This can be as simple as alternating the directions in
which runs face, so that no dog looks directly at any in different
runs, thereby seeming to pose a threat or challenge.

This is not to be confused with reducing the dogs' mental
stimulation and social life. Among mentally healthy dogs, barking
is usually reserved to deter intruders--and even the appearance of
intrusion can be limited if fewer dogs at a time see any given
visitor.

Shelters of older design may have obsolete and ineffective
sound baffling. Hanging pressboard ceilings, commonly installed to
deaden sound during the 1970s and 1980s, tend to absorb and then
re-emit odors, and tend to have discolored, if they haven't
outright disintegrated. They may be ready to come down forever.
What an older shelter may really need to muffle sound may be
a high ceiling, with lots of insulation to keep the tin roof from
reverberating.

Make a jailbreak

Finally, and almost self-evidently, a shelter successfully
attracting visitors should avoid looking like a jail. Cats need
vertical space and a comfortable bed. Dogs do better in almost
anything but conventional cinder-block-and-chain-link runs, which
unconsciously reflect the medieval practice of keeping hunting packs
in otherwise empty stalls at the end of a horse stable. When humane
societies began sheltering dogs about 130 years ago, they blindly
copied the arrangements of hunting kennels, not pausing to consider
that hunter attitudes toward animals, including dogs, were and are
fundamentally opposite to the humane ideal.

Yet even a shelter which looks like a jail can be shown off
to advantage for a while--as part of a fundraising drive to build
something better.

Lest there be any doubt about the fundraising potential of
attracting shelter visitors, note the visitor-driven growth of Best
Friends, whose sanctuary near Kanab, Utah, is several hours away
from the nearest big city.

Raising under $3 million a year as recently as 1995, Best
Friends in 1999 took in more than $10 million. Direct mail is Best
Friends' basic collection method, but friendly attitudes, open
doors, and the positive experiences of thousands of visitors are
what open the checkbooks.
--Merritt Clifton
(From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2000)