Must Have on the Holiday Wish List for all Shelter Staff and Supporters!

Can’t decide what to get your staff or favorite volunteers this holiday season?  Look no further than the Feral Cat Hat!!!  To the average consumer, this is just another winter hat, but to those of us in the know, this is the most awesome fedora ever!  A perfect and subtle way to promote TNR, animal welfare, feline pride, and a bonus that some of the proceeds from the sales are donated to a local TNR organization.

**If you happen to pick a few up for your friends, please be so kind as to mention that you saw it on the Shelter Report, thanks!

Maintaining a Sustainable Volunteer Program

I have spent most of my animal welfare career managing a volunteer department, and I still remember the comment that was said to me by a board member on the first day I took over the program at the shelter I was working.  When my boss introduced me as the new volunteer coordinator, the board member said, “Oh, you have a tough job, we can’t live with volunteers and we can’t live without them.”  At the time, I had no clue what she was referring to, but in reflection the statement makes sense to me now—a healthy, functioning volunteer program can be a shelter’s greatest asset whereas an ailing, nonfunctioning program can be its worst enemy. 

Regardless of the size and “shape” of an animal shelter, everyone needs a volunteer program.  In some shelters, volunteers add the finishing touches to daily routines, in others they participate in vital operations including cleaning and feeding animals, while in other shelters completely volunteers run the show.   Whatever the case may be at your shelter, the mark of a great volunteer program is the quality of its infrastructure.  In other words, to end up on the “our-volunteer-program-is-one-of-our-greatest-assets” side of the coin, a shelter must provide a solid infrastructure to support a productive volunteer program.    

Ensuring a solid infrastructure is in place

Consider a volunteer’s tenure from beginning to end.  Ideally, you want to have a well oriented and prepared volunteer reporting for duty on day one, so you need to invest in the volunteer as a resource before they ever begin paying out.  I have found the following orientation training model to work well:

Step 1: Attend General New Volunteer Orientation

·      Background/history of organization

·      Current organizational structure including services offered to the public/animals in need

·      Statistics (unfortunately, I have seen a few eyes glaze over while I talk about shelter stats, but in staying true to industry standards of transparency, I still think presenting basic stats is a good idea!)

·      Specific volunteer programs/jobs—present in detail the various volunteer opportunities

·      Tour of facility (if you have one)

·      Animal handling and animal body language presentation—general concepts.  There are many free online sources for this, but if you are lucky enough to have a behavior department or CPDT (or the like), get them involved in the presentation

Step 2: In-Shelter Small Group Training

·      Once a volunteer is assigned (or chooses) a program he or she would like to work in, connect them with a trained and experienced volunteer to show them the details of the program

·      Detailed training in animal handling and body language

Step 3: Volunteering with a Mentor

·      Volunteer is on his or her own, but scheduled at the same time as an experienced volunteer.  This allows for an easy question/answer flow when things come up and also a confidence booster for the new volunteer.

Once a volunteer is working within your organization, the next challenge is to keep them working within your organization.  There is a certain percentage of volunteers that will be a revolving door no matter how fantastic your program is: people will always move, get a job, have a baby, etc (In fact, the average national volunteer retention rate is 64.5%).  The contest now becomes engaging your volunteers to keep coming back.  Here are some key ideas to achieve this:

1.     Define a commitment for the volunteers: ten hours of volunteering each month, five community events each year, foster 8 animals in a year, etc.

2.     Provide periodic continuing education and training refresher courses—especially helpful for volunteers that lapse in their commitment and then return to duty.

3.     Offer multiple volunteer programs or opportunities to appeal to a wider range of people and levels of commitment.

4.     Define a volunteer coordinator and make this one person the volunteer’s point of contact for everything. 

5.     Host regular volunteer meetings to allow for volunteer ideas and concerns to be addressed.  Volunteers are important stakeholders, so make them feel as such.   

6.     Recognize volunteering milestones—these can be defined to suit your organization, but it is important to acknowledge a volunteer’s anniversary, consistency, job well done, continued commitment, etc. 

Let’s Roll With It: Calculating Live Release Rates

The live release rate is a very telling metric in measuring a shelter’s progress towards improving dispositions for the animals in its care.  Literally translated, a live release is any animal that leaves your shelter alive.  Options for live release include:

(1)  adoptions

(2)  return to owner (RTO)

(3)  transfers

(4)  TNR—or feral colony placement

Simply calculated, the Live Release Rate (LRR) is the sum of all the live outcomes for a period of time divided by the total intake numbers for that same period of time. 

Let us consider some faux data from Shelter XYZ:

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sept	Oct	Nov	Dec
Total Adoptions	97	88	99	100	78	84	94	99	102	87	85	105
Total  Transfers	12	13	8	5	11	10	12	9	4	11	5	6
Total RTO	5	19	3	10	2	4	2	15	18	1	11	2
Total Intake	250	249	234	112	276	270	265	245	235	241	223	256

Calculating the LRR for January: (97+12+5)/(250) = 45.6%

LRR for February: (88+13+19)/(249) = 48.1%

LRR for March: (99+8+3)/234 = 47%

The astute reader will wonder what is going to happen with April’s calculation?  Well, let’s see:

LRR for April: (100+5+10)/(112)= 100.2%

What?!?!  How is it possible to have more animals leave the building alive than what we took in that month?  The math does not make sense.  Enter the Rolling Live Release Rate (RLRR).  The RLRR allows the user to adjust for a holding or starting population of animals that carry over from month to month. 

Let’s consider our data from above with additional rows of information:

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sept	Oct	Nov	Dec
Total Adoptions	97	88	99	100	78	84	94	99	102	87	85	105
Total  Transfers	12	13	8	5	11	10	12	9	4	11	5	6
Total RTO	5	19	3	10	2	4	2	15	18	1	11	2
Total Holding	45	30	42	32	29	28	29	25	46	44	41	39
Total Intake	250	249	234	112	276	270	265	245	235	241	223	256

Now, calculating a RLRR for January: (97+12+5)/(45+250) = 38.6%

RLRR for February: (88+13+19)/(30+249) = 43%

RLRR for March: (99+8+3)/(42+234) = 39.8%

Now, let’s examine the calculation for the odd month of April:

RLRR for April: (110+5+10)/(32+112) = 79.8%

Here is how the numbers compare:

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr
Live Release Rate	45.6%	48.1%	47.0%	100.2%
Rolling Live Release Rate	38.6%	43.0%	39.8%	79.8%

Why would I want to produce RLRR when they make my data look worse?  Because you must account for the carry over population for each time point (monthly, annual data, etc).  I have yet to encounter a shelter or rescue that can disposition all of its animals immediately; inevitably there is some carry over population of animals no matter how talented and speedy the shelter is in live release placements.  In a rolling live release the denominator is the sum of all animals that have the potential to be outcomed, so one must incorporate the holding population in the computation.  And, as is the general rule for most statistical markers, it’s the trend that matters, not the absolute numbers themselves.

RLRR can also be calculated for subpopulations within your shelter: cats and dogs, puppies/kittens and adults, male and female, and so on.  In these calculations, you would only sum the total live outcomes for the subgroup under investigation (puppies, kittens, etc) divided by the total potential for outcome in that subgroup.  In order to not underestimate the RLRR, always remember to divide by the subgroup, not total intake—in this example, all dogs and cats, etc).