Animal Shelter Fundraising: A Deep Dive

When you imagine an animal shelter, what do you think of? Probably, you picture compassionate people working hard to help animals in need. But, you might also think of overcrowded spaces, stressed animals, and overworked staff. You’d be right on both fronts.

Animal shelters face plenty of challenges. Research into the subject has consistently found that most of the issues facing animal shelters, namely overcrowding and lack of hygiene, can be boiled down to one main cause: insufficient funding. Like most helping professions, animal sheltering faces pervasive underfunding, which trickles down and affects nearly every facet of shelter operations.

The blame for underfunding does not rest squarely on the shoulders of shelter managers, but they often bear the responsibility of finding the solution. Finding diverse sources of funding is one such solution, but fundraising efforts are quickly evolving in our increasingly technology-forward world. Let’s talk about how to consider your community, leverage technology, and build deep donor connections for better fundraising today.

Fundraising Best Practices

You’ve probably dropped some cash in a donation box, given away old clothes at Goodwill, or opted to round up your purchase at a local business to give money to a charitable cause. These traditional fundraising efforts are effective, but they’re also limited to the economic well-being of your community. Shelters in low-income areas, who often need funding the most, get left in the dust.

More sophisticated public relation strategies are often underdeveloped in the face of more immediate needs. Food shortages, overcrowding, and behavioral crises take the front seat, leaving website maintenance, social media efforts, and grant writing in the rear view mirror. But similar to budgeting and financial forecasting, fundraising takes a strategic approach that starts long before you ask for a single dollar. Following these best practices on the front end can help to head off crises long before they reach their boiling point.

A big part of fundraising involves engaging in your community through adoption events, tabling, and benefit runs.

Tailor to Your Shelter

Before engaging in any fundraising efforts, pump the breaks, put the car in park, and take a look around. There are tons of ways to fundraise, but you’ll spread yourself too thin trying to do it all. Instead, choose a few strategies that are tailored to your particular community.

Think of it this way: businesses tailor their operations to the infrastructure of their community. For more suburban locations, where customers often visit by car, they’d invest in larger storefronts with parking access. For more metropolitan areas, where customers are more likely to drop by on foot, they’d likely prioritize smaller storefronts in walkable areas. When it comes to fundraising, the same principles apply.

• Are you located in a tight-knit community with well-off residents? You might prioritize fundraising efforts that build local relationships, like special events, tabling, and community partnerships.

• Are you in a more de-centralized community with lower-income residents? You might want to focus on engaging supporters outside of your immediate area using social media, website optimization, crowdfunding, and grant writing.

Ideally, any fundraising efforts should incorporate a good mixture of in-person and online strategies, but learning about your community can help you decide where to focus the majority of your attention.

Leverage Technology

Regardless of your community, it’s important to utilize technology to diversify your funding. As young people who grew up with social media are entering the charitable age, the giving landscape is shifting. Today, technological literacy is more important than ever if you want to get the most out of your fundraising efforts.

Technology is a powerful fundraising tool, and it’s an essential way to diversify your funding sources.

Digital marketing tools are essential for building relationships through continuous engagement, and it’s easier than ever to get your message out to a broad audience quickly and consistently. Here are a few ways that you can use technology to your advantage:

• Develop your brand: Developing a clear, consistent brand will help to differentiate you from other shelters, enhance your credibility, and encourage consistency in your messaging. Donors will feel like they can trust you and feel confident that their money is going to a worthwhile cause. If you haven’t already, create a mission statement, branding and style guides, and start clarifying your central messaging.

• Maintain your website: Your website is a huge part of your brand, and it’s also an invaluable tool for collecting donations. Tailor your website to your brand identity, making sure that your messaging is consistent across all of your pages. Include donation buttons with clear appeals that are simple and tailored to each specific website page.

• Cultivate a social media presence: Social media is a huge resource for building relationships with donors. It gets your message out fast and to a broad audience. Choose one to three social media platforms to focus on, and establish yourself with helpful and informative content to build credibility and a following. Once you’ve established your shelter’s brand and voice, social media can be an invaluable tool for targeted fundraising efforts.

• Focus on campaigns: Instead of one-time appeals, Nonprofit communications expert Farra Trompeter recommends focusing on targeted fundraising campaigns that utilize multiple channels in unison. Campaigns should be developed by a dedicated team, and they should have clear messaging, scheduled appeals, and achievable goals. This strategy focuses on building relationships with repeat donors over obtaining one-time donations made from feelings of guilt.

• Track your metrics: In past blogs, we’ve talked about the power of data collection for tracking animal welfare, managing pathway planning, and forecasting financial trends. Here’s yet another example of how data collection can serve you. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools are essential for keeping track of your donor relationships. By collecting this valuable data, you can track patterns in giving, manage donor relationships as they progress, and adjust your strategies as you go.

Keep fundraising initiatives specific by tying them to distinct causes. For instance, create funds for specific residents.

Keep Things Specific and Positive

Fundraising efforts that target specific initiatives, like medical expenses for a resident in need or funding for a sorely needed piece of equipment, are attractive to repeat donors. Instead of blanket appeals for funding, it’s important to attach all of your fundraising efforts to specific initiatives that will help donors to understand where their money is going. This will have the added benefit of keeping fundraising appeals focused on the positives, like exciting new changes to your facilities, instead of relying on guilt-based appeals. While these appeals can be effective for gaining one-time donations, they’re unlikely to draw in repeat donors.

Prioritize Relationships

A qualitative case study of nonprofit funding strategies found that there were three major themes in successful fundraising efforts: time management, funding diversification, and relationship cultivation. Researchers recommended, above all, for shelter managers to focus on transparent communication with donors, thereby building long-term giving relationships.

When it comes to fundraising, relationships are key. One-time donations are helpful, and they contribute significantly to the funding of most nonprofit organizations, but they’re no match for continuous giving built on the foundation of genuine relationships with donors. Having a foundation of repeat donors offers a reliable and consistent income source for your shelter to depend on. Here are a few ways to start prioritizing relationships at your shelter:

• Resident sponsorships: Giving donors the opportunity to sponsor a specific resident is a great way to help them to feel emotionally connected to where they’re giving their money. Offer sponsors special perks, like resident updates, videos, and visits.

• Membership programs: Membership programs are another way to build a base of loyal donors. Offer tiered membership options, and reward continuous givers with exclusive offers, like special updates, discounted events, preferential access to content, and discounts to businesses that are partnered with your shelter.

• Consistent communication: You can offer all of the tiered memberships that you want, but they’ll mean nothing without follow through on your end. Be sure to bake communication into all of your fundraising efforts, whether that means social media updates on specific initiatives, newsletters featuring the progress of individual residents, or scheduled “thank-a-thons,” where employees take time to call and thank every recent donor.

Laurie Lawless is an animal sheltering expert on a mission to transform the sheltering industry, one animal at a time.

Building Your Fundraising Strategy

Hopefully, this blog has left you feeling excited to incorporate new strategies in your own fundraising efforts. You might feel ready to start building your brand, cultivating relationships with donors, and broadening your sources of funding.

Possibly, you also feel overwhelmed and intimidated. That’s okay. Between building behavior programs, hiring staff, performing daily rounds, and managing finances, shelter managers often wear multiple hats. Sometimes, it helps to place one of those hats on someone else’s head. Laurie Lawless founded Shelter Behavior Integrations because she knows how it feels to be overwhelmed by the chaos of shelter work. She’s taken years of experience and used it to develop services that address common problems at their root. Check out the SBI website to learn how Laurie can support your shelter from the ground up.