Adopting Out Your Rescued Animals

These sections, 4 and 5 of 13 (all are linked here), deal with preparing for adoptions and marketing your pets.

Preparing for adoptions

So you took in your first rescue animal, and now you want to find it a good home, not like the home it had before that gave up on it and gave it away. For your first adoptions, the best way to find a home is word-of-mouth through social media. Once you take in your next volley, though, these are some of the channels that you will want to use to find homes for pets:

1. PetFinder, Adopt-a-Pet, PetHarbor, and other shelter tools for managing pet profiles. Choose and use two. Make sure that one of them contains your complete “inventory.”
2. Classified ads: Craigslist, Kijiji, and any that are popular in your locale. Breeders are using them: why not you? (Be diligent in your posts and communications from this source.)
3. Adoption fairs. You may have to create your own by asking petshops and shopping plazas if you can host an adoption event in their public space. You’ll have to poster, create a Facebook event, and do all your own promotion, but 80–90% of the traffic you may have will be opportunistic — they just happened to be there shopping for something else that day. Street fairs are great places to have an adoption event. You can do less before-event promotion for these, but redirect that energy into promotional T-shirts for yourself/your team, and have some giveaways — stickers, business cards, candy, pet treats, pet education, and any other giveaways you can dream up.

The next thing you need for adoptions is develop an adoption application and a contract. There are a few things that you’re looking for in an application:

1. Honesty over experience. You will meet lots of people who you will not otherwise meet, in this job. The fact that people are honest with you in their way says a lot about what they have to give a pet. There is a pet out there for everyone (who isn’t a psychopath), and we are working towards having a home for every pet.
2. That they’ve done their homework about what needs the pet will have, and who they’re going to call when they need help.

Your contract should basically state NO BREEDING, and that you retain ownership over the pet so that should the guardian no longer be able to look after the pet for any reason whatsoever, the pet returns to you, and if they happen to have a relative, friend, or acquaintance who desires to adopt the pet instead, that they clear it with you beforehand. Many, many times, people have handed over their pets to people who don’t know or value the amount of work that goes into ensuring that pet’s safety, and the new people are not so careful or responsible. Get some help drafting a contract. Keep it simple, but thorough regarding harm. As rescues gain experience, they learn what to add to a contract through trial by fire. Work with another rescue to develop your contract, but be careful to not absorb some of their particular biases or irrelevant concerns. This will be covered in a later section.

Marketing your pets

Marketing is everything to your success. It’s the bulk of your work, so be prepared to spend a lot of time online, being effective. If you don’t know anything at all about marketing, read a primer on it — particularly those written for non-profits. These are the basic things you need:

• A supportive online community of species/breed enthusiasts to whom you not only post about your intakes and availables and success stories, but with whom you can converse and assist — being sociable and engaged in your community is the best calling card you can have. Remember: you’re human, telling stories is human, tell your stories. (Just don’t burn bridges or slag someone off until you have no other choice. Even then it’s not wise.)
• A decent camera and a lesson in pet portrait photography (this as a routine task is demanding to ask of a volunteer, but take advantage of every offer you get, if you have the time!). Cute pictures make and break the Internet!
• Develop a habit of writing copy for each and every pet in the languages of your publics, as soon as you take in the pet. If 50% or more of your potential adopters are French, or Spanish, always always have French or Spanish copy. If 25% of your potential adopters are French or Spanish, have a translated headline and translate the most specific information about the pet, such as “Not good with children” or “Needs a home with other cats.” If you are fluent in both languages, by all means write all copy. As time management is your biggest concern at all times, remember that you simply must make sure that it’s good enough, and leave perfection to the experts who get paid. (Hint: there are no experts who get paid in pet rescue.)
• Two adoption websites to use. These are your “A/B testing” to see what works and what does not. They, in addition to the classified ads you post, will meet different audiences. Try not to copy-paste one profile on one website to the other website; write each one a little differently. You never know which “voice” you write with is more appealing. (A gentle suggestion in writing a profile: don’t plead or beg for attention to that particular animal. Write and state any case simply. People are resistant to any form of pressure but they are rational and can see when something is urgent or important.) Keep in mind that you could get volunteer help with this.

Go on to read more on Finding the Money and Getting Help