Open Adoptions - A Call to Action for All Animal Shelters

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.   

Open Adoptions can increase your live release rate

*Photo courtesy of Chris Tanaka

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.   

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Shelters (Statistical Version)

Ah yes, another take on the infamous “7 Habits…”!  Below are some thoughts on why statistics are just as important as good husbandry techniques for adequately managing a shelter population.  Statistics are more than just an afterthought, or “I’ll get to them as some point” kind of mentality, and need to be added to the forefront of shelter operations.  Capturing good data and then using that data to plan and adjust to changes in your population will help your shelter go the extra mile in every aspect of shelter management possible.  Admittedly, the following is geared towards brick and mortar animal sheltering facilities, but I think any type of rescue organization can relate to these ideas.  Read on to explore the 7 Habits of Highly Successful Shelters (the Statistics Version):

1.  Garbage In-Garbage Out.  The single most important factor in using statistics to your advantage is to gather good data in the first place.  Don’t wait until later to record an intake, medical exam, outcome, behavior test, etc.  Do it now, and do it correctly.  You have no hopes of your software producing good reports if the data going in are incorrect or missing.  Shelters are so dependent on measuring time and making sure that animals move through quickly and efficiently, therefore it is vital to record events and observations AS THEY HAPPEN.  You are dead in the water if you are not recording data as events occur.
2. You have to do a regular head count.  Depending on the capacity of your shelter, this might mean every day.  This can be accomplished when shelter managers/veterinarians are doing rounds, or when staff are going through the rooms each morning for first feedings, or this can be one person’s job to do each and every time.  I have even heard of shelters using bar codes and scanners to take inventory counts!  Whatever works best, just make sure it happens.  There is no way you can produce good statistics, if you are not 100% certain of the animals in your population and where they reside at every point in time within your facility.  As an added benefit, this will also help to reduce ‘lost” or “missing” animals. 
3.  Know your carrying capacity and its limits.  By this I don’t mean know how many cages you have; carrying capacity is more than just number of cages.  Carrying capacity means calculating your intake “comfort zone” based on your usual “outcome activity”, rather than the other way around.  It means adjusting to unusual intake patterns such as kitten season or puppy mill raids to account for the needier (ie, resource draining) events/populations.  It means having an action plan in place for when you are reaching that carrying capacity—watching statistics on a weekly or monthly basis will allow you to be proactive and notice even subtle trends/changes in your data.  Managed/limited admissions facilities will find this task slightly easier to accomplish than open admissions shelters, but that just means those shelters will have to be a little more creative and flex a little more mental muscle.
4. Set benchmarks. Once you are consistently gathering quality data, go ahead and set benchmarks (ie, goals) for the statistics that you most closely watch.  This will give you even further insight into the health and well-being of your shelter.  Are you consistently meeting your benchmarks?  If you are not, what action items will be put in place to adjust for the discrepancies?  Increasing the benchmarks themselves does not count!  Benchmarks will also provide direction for staff and hopefully increase productivity if they have in mind what goal they are working to achieve.
5. Share your stats with staff.  This is important for a couple reasons.  First, it’s always good practice to have many eyes looking at the data to notice any discrepancies, errors, and to make observations/interpretations.  But in addition, this is a great way to give all shelter staff an appreciation for their work beyond direct contact with the animals—in other words, this will give them a glimpse at more of the “big picture”.
6. Talk with your shelter management software company, and often—you do have a specific animal shelter management software company, right? (We need to talk, if you don’t, this is an integral part of keeping good data)! Tell them what you need and why.  Maintaining an open line of communication with this group will ensure that your data management becomes a fluid, efficiency creator for your daily operations.  Furthermore, it has been my experience that many of the developers of these types of software are computer people and not “animal people” or “helter people”.  So, from their perspective, the software is performing just perfectly, but from your perspective—someone in the trenches daily—you might think the software needs a little tweaking.  Go ahead and speak up!
7. Collect basics statistics and report on a regular schedule (weekly or monthly is preferred).  Every shelter regardless of size should at least be collecting the following, and be able to report it by variables including animal type, animal age category, etc: a. Intake numbers, b. Outcome numbers, and c. Length of Stay/Animal Care Days.  Basically, you need to know what is coming in, what is leaving, and how long they are staying.  I would guess that about 80% of all meaningful shelter statistical analysis would in some way include these three stats in the respective calculations, so make sure you start with these.