There is a concept in animal sheltering that is slow in
moving through our community, and in my opinion it is the next turning point in
making a significant impact on placement statistics for shelters. Open Adoptions is the practice of
opening your adoption criteria to include a larger number of potential
adopters.
To begin, it might be a little easier to explain what Open
Adoptions is not. Open Adoptions
is not punishing a person because they had to give up a pet 10 years ago; Open
Adoptions is not turning away an adopter because they don’t have all the
answers about how to train a dog; Open Adoptions is not penalizing a person
because they chose to not vaccinate their indoor house cat last year; Open Adoptions is not sending home empty handed an adopter wanting to bring a new pet home for his/her significant other. And on the same token, Open Adoptions
is not giving a pet away to any person that walks into your shelter. Rather, Open Adoptions is shifting the
approach of adoption counseling to utilize the process as an educational tool
and in doing so, ensuring the best possible match of person and pet is
made.
Open Adoptions asks us to rethink our adoption criteria and
rather than create barriers for an adopter, aims to set up building blocks that
become the foundation of a long-lasting relationship between pet, adopter, and
your organization. The main focus in Open Adoptions is
meeting the needs of adopters and their new pets during the adoption process
and after adoption. This is
achieved when animal shelters commit to an inviting and non-judgmental adoption
process culture and think first about how they can facilitate a conversation
with adopters and educate them about pet care and animal needs. It is time to abandon the inflexible
adoption guidelines of the past and move forward toward a friendly and
conversational approach to adoptions.
In doing so, shelters and rescues stand to increase their adoption
numbers, increase their influence on adopters, and also gain community support.
On the opposite end of Open Adoptions is the process of
maintaining communications with new adopters, ensuring the bonding and
acclimation periods are going well.
Again, this is a necessary shift of resources for many organizations;
many groups adopt pets and then send them home with their new family usually
never to have contact again. With
an Open Adoptions culture, it is essential to maintain contact with new
adopters (and even ‘old’ adopters for that matter) to provide them with
support, advise, and resources should they need help.
There are a multitude of ways an Open Adoptions culture can
be achieved, and the roadmap to achieving this at your shelter will look a
little different for everyone.
Here are some ideas to get started:
1.
Institute a pet match program at your
shelter. Meet your Match from the ASPCA is probably the most well known, but a homegrown version will work just
as well.
2.
Consider prescreening applicants and approving
their application even if they have not yet found a suitable animal in your
shelter. Make the application
approval good for 60 days (or whatever time frame makes sense for your
organization) and they can come back to your shelter within that time and
select an animal.
3.
In the same spirit, maintain a request list for
adopters. If they are looking for
something very specific (eg: neutered, all-white, front declaw, 4 year old
cat), give them a call when you get an animal that fits their description.
4.
Send
all adopters home with a resource packet, both in print and electronic. This will give your adopters a point of
reference for any questions they may have post adoption. Even if your organization cannot
provide for all their post adoption needs, give them resources for other
organizations or businesses who do.
5.
Hire staff or volunteers to make follow-up
calls/checks on adopters at various points post adoption. This will remind the adopters you are
committed to the success of their placement and the resources available to
them. As an added bonus, it will
widen your circle of supporters, probably increasing donations and return
adoptions when adding to the family.
6.
Speaking of return adoptions, go ahead and give
return adopters a “Go Directly to the Front of the Line” pass. You already have their information and
know they have successfully adopted from you in the past, so make the process
even easier for them the second (and third, forth, fifth, etc!) time
around.
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| Open Adoptions can increase your live release rate
*Photo courtesy of Chris Tanaka
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I challenge all readers of this blog to do an internal
examination of their adoption process and start implementing some of the ideas
presented above. It will be worth
your time to take a look at your recent adoption applications and do a
mini-analysis of the percentage of applications you turn down and for what
reason. Based on this data, decide
how you can make the process easier for adopters and guide them through the
process rather than turn them away and risk losing their support now and in the
future. Of course, in the animal
sheltering business we want to do what is best for the animals in our care, and
it is very difficult to decide if someone would be a good fit for an animal in
just a few hours. Therefore,
utilize these Open Adoptions concepts and create a long-lasting relationship
with adopters in which your organization continues to be instrumental in the connection
between the adopters and their pets thus ensuring the animals are well cared
for long after they leave your doors.
