Best Friends Animal Society

Home is more than four walls and a roof 🏡 It is a place where we should feel safe and loved 🧡 Everyone deserves a home — and that includes pets in shelters 😸🐶    Shelter and rescue workers like you are working hard to find homes for every pet, but the reality is that today, not every dog and cat gets to experience the love and comfort of home. 💔     All we need is just 6% more people to choose to adopt versus purchase their pets to close the national lifesaving gap and #SaveThemAll! 🧡   Help us #BringLoveHome for pets across our nation - share and get your community involved in lifesaving! 🧡🐾 Visit bestfriends.org/home to learn more.

Best Friends' recent year-to-date national data report had some good news for us all: an encouraging lifesaving indicator of a 4% increase in adoptions for cats and dogs in our sample of shelters. We spoke to a few organizations making particularly strong progress to find out how they're doing it. Burke County Animal Services in North Carolina saw a 45% adoption increase, far exceeding the national average. Director Kaitlin Settlemyre credits this to strategies like engaging the community through social media, events, partnerships, and enhanced behavior and medical support for pets. They also reduced euthanasia by 285 pets in 2024, aided by programs like pet parent resources and 'Free Ride Home' for lost pets to keep animals with their families. 📊 Read the full Shelter Pet Lifesaving Year-to-Date Data Report: https://bit.ly/3Zb8sBc

How do you use data when making programming decisions? You can easily spot trends in your intakes, outcomes, and how you compare to other organizations in Shelter Pet Data Alliance (SPDA) that you can use for strategic planning. Here's an SPDA data visualization from our One Alliance data comparison feature, which enables you to compare your organization to other organizations. You can filter it down to ensure you're comparing to shelters or rescues very similar to yours for an apples-to-apples comparison. In this case, we compared Example Shelter C's cat data with that of other government animal shelters in counties with a high Social Vulnerability Index. We found that, compared to their peers, Example Shelter C: 🔍 Takes in significantly more stray cats 🔍 Has more cats that Died in Care. This can often be attributed, especially in cats, to a longer length-of-stay. 🔍 Doesn't appear to have any rescue support in transferring out cats, which is an unusual challenge among their organization type. 🔍 Does many more adoptions than average 🔍 Despite that excellent work getting all those cats adopted, though, they're still only able to save around 63% of their cats. SPDA's data comparison feature has revealed a major opportunity for lifesaving for Example Shelter C: a Community Cat program to return eligible cats back to their outdoor home. Learn more about community cat programming: https://lnkd.in/eaQ4qTDd

2025 is just around the corner, and for animal shelter and rescue folks, it’s time to think about some goals to make the biggest impact for the pets in your care. Here are five lifesaving goals that can help transform your shelter or rescue in the coming year: 1️⃣ Commit to a more inclusive adoption process to create fewer barriers for pets finding homes. 2️⃣ Understand your organization's data to make informed, strategic planning decisions. 3️⃣ Prepare for the unexpected by developing or reviewing your organization's emergency disaster plan. 4️⃣ Find one area where your organization can contribute to the success of community cat lifesaving. 5️⃣ Invest in education for your team to keep everyone up to date on the latest lifesaving techniques. Ready to kick off your lifesaving goals for 2025? The Cat Lifesaving Fundamentals course is the perfect starting point. Starting January 8, you can learn all these skills and more! Register now before the year ends—the deadline to enroll is almost here! bfas.org/CatLifesaving

Do you look at your data when planning for the future? The data visualizations in Shelter Pet Data Alliance (SPDA) can easily point out trends in your intakes, outcomes, and how you compare to other organizations, which you can use to strategically plan your year. Using our One Alliance data comparison feature, we compared an example shelter’s dog data with other organizations' around the country, filtering down to only look at: ↪️ Other government animal services and shelters with government contracts ↪️ Only shelters taking in 500+ animals annually ↪️ Only organizations in counties with a high Social Vulnerability Index We found that, compared to their peers, the example shelter has: 🕵️ Higher stray dog intake and lower Return-to-Home rate 🕵️ Slightly higher adoptions and considerably higher transfers out 🕵️ Slightly higher euthanasia and slightly lower save rate One key insight is that Return-to-Home is a growth opportunity for the example shelter. If your organization is planning for 2025 and also finds that your data shows RTH to be a growth area, consider investing more energy and resources into getting more pets back home with their families. Check out our Return to Home Playbook to level up your Return-to-Home efforts: https://lnkd.in/eJppv8WK

Best Friends recently released our Shelter Pet Lifesaving Year-to-Date Data Report. Breaking dog adoptions down by organization type reveals dog adoptions are up in some organization types, but not others. In our sample of consistently reporting shelters, dog adoptions are up 10.9% in municipal agencies and up 2.4% in private organizations with contracts, but down 5.7% in private organizations without contract. Based on data from past surveys of Best Friends Network Partners, private shelters without government contracts and rescues without government contracts are the least likely to practice open adoptions or facilitate same day adoptions. These practices are likely increasing length of stay unnecessarily, delaying transfers from capacity-crunched municipal shelters, and negatively impacting the community's collective lifesaving efforts. 📊 Read the full Shelter Pet Lifesaving Year-to-Date Data Report: https://brnw.ch/21wPtJM

The day has come for shelters and rescues using ShelterBuddy: our SPDA + ShelterBuddy integration is here, so you can now set up automatic data-sharing through your shelter software API!   Got 1 minute? Watch this video to see the step-by-step for how it's done, and be sure to save this post for later or send it to the person at your organization who handles data. For more details, bookmark the step-by-step instructions on page 8 of the SPDA User Guide: https://lnkd.in/gf9aHGne   Although manually uploading your data to SPDA each month is quick and easy, we know it's just one more thing on your mile-long list. Now you can permanently check it off, and always have fresh data insights and visualizations at your fingertips in SPDA!   Shelter Pet Data Alliance helps any shelter or rescue organization visualize their data, whether you use a highly sophisticated shelter management software, spreadsheets, or pen and paper! Get started with SPDA: https://bit.ly/4eyxrmq

Animal welfare folks: do you have a plan for your 2025 communications? For Part 2 of our post from earlier this week, we've put together this simple annual calendar to get you thinking about what messages are most important to get out to your community when. These suggestions are based on common intake and outcome spikes and dips, but be sure to compare them to your own data in Shelter Pet Data Alliance (SPDA) to see if they match up to what your organization experiences. Then make adjustments as needed by downloading a copy of this calendar spreadsheet for a slightly more in-depth version you can edit yourself: https://bit.ly/4gbH8Jb Be sure to save this post for later so you can refer back to it, and bookmark ShelterPetData.org for referring to your data visualizations quickly and easily.

⏰ TODAY is the last chance for early registration for Best Friends National Conference! Register today and save $130: https://bit.ly/3CyY3Xa Best Friends National Conference is happening February 20-22, 2025, in Palm Springs, California. Join us and let’s make history! #bring2025home

What do you most wish your community knew? Now...how often do you talk about that with your community? For example, the importance of keeping ID on your pet.   It's easy in animal welfare to get caught in the trap of both wishing that our community members understood something and assuming that everyone knows that same thing. We certainly wish all pet parents kept ID on their pet, but the reality is that if everyone knew how important it was, our shelters would be nearly empty. So we as shelters and rescues still need to educate about it and plenty of other topics!   Stay tuned in the next couple of days for part 2 when we'll talk about a simple way to start planning for how to do that.