5 Key Takeaways from Maddie’s Online Apprenticeship
In light of the ongoing pandemic, the always innovative Maddie’s Fund hosted an online apprenticeship course about growing adult dog foster programs. This educational opportunity was unique in that it was the first online apprenticeship, and it had a regional focus. The Missouri Coalition of Animal Care Organizations was enthusiastic to help coordinate the course by recruiting participants from Missouri to take advantage of the opportunity. After our participation, the Coalition found five key takeaways that are instrumental for all organizations trying to grow their foster programs!
Ask your community for help! You may be surprised how excited your community is to support your efforts if you broadly advertise your request for help! Get creative and ask on social media, your website, and even in press releases. Use a sense of urgency in your messaging to help people understand that time is of the essence to get pets out to foster. Organizations with large foster programs are posting on social media about foster many times per week and sometimes even multiple times per day. New data from Greater Good also found smashing success at recruiting fosters with paid ads on Facebook.
Make fostering easy-peasy and low-barrier. Remove unnecessary steps and wait-time from your foster sign-up and on-boarding process to maximize participation. The more steps it takes to become a new foster, the less people that will make it all the way through to actually getting a foster pet. Test the efficiency of your process by seeing if a brand new foster could sign-up and pick-up a new foster pet in the same day.
Keep your marketing and adoption counseling separate when advertising foster pets for adoption. Think of your marketing as a pet’s dating profile and adoption counseling as the date. Save things that might make an animal hard to place (e.g. no children or needs to be an only pet) for the adoption counseling when you have an adopter interested in the pet; no need to put that on their dating profile (aka your marketing). Would you want to go on a date with someone who’s dating profile started with “I’ve been divorced 3 times through no fault of my own?”
Use innovative foster programs like short-term fostering, team fostering, and behavior foster programs to maximize your impact. Engage a more diverse pool of community members in your mission by offering a variety of ways people can get involved in your foster program. Short-term fostering is a great example of a way to engage people that may not be able to keep a dog in their home, but it still gives the dog a break from the shelter and helps them get exposure to potential adopters!
Automate your internal processes to manage a large foster program with less work! There are many great technologies to help automate your foster program. Try using Google Forms to sign-up new fosters on your website and a Trello board to organize and advertise all the animals in your organization that need foster! Also explore the use of apps like Maddie’s Pet Assistant and Best Friends Vet Access to support your foster families.
A big #ThanksToMaddie and Maddie’s Fund for hosting this valuable program. Learn more about Maddie’s Apprenticeship Program here.
