Happy New Year! (Can we still say that, heading toward mid-month?) We’re taking this moment to re-introduce some of the multitude of tools and resources that we’ve got for you here at HASS.
Here are ten you can put into action right now!
Please browse and search the HASS website for even more, more, more. Because seriously, we’ve got a huge amount of pro resources, blogs, and webinars that can help you in your mission to keep families together and save animals’ lives.
Pet Eviction Calculator
Use our easy pet eviction calculator to determine how many families and pets are at risk of eviction in your community in the near term. This figure can help you with public awareness, and also with your decisions about where to allocate resources.
The Keeping Families Together toolkit is another great resource for helping you help families stay intact.
HASS Government Communications: Getting Started
Laws and policies can stand in the way of lifesaving, or they can aid in it. This Government Communications toolkit empowers shelters and rescues to effectively engage with government officials, and have a meaningful voice in the legislative process.
Community-Focused Communications Strategy
Consider this 12-month communications planner created by HASS and HeARTs Speak your roadmap to building connections and deepening understanding about your community-focused programs and efforts.
pets.findhelp.com
Make sure to get your organization’s pet support programs listed on pets.findhelp.com, a free, first-of-its-kind platform to make accessing pet support services easy. Once you’ve listed your programs on pets.findhelp.com and you’ve built out an ecosystem of pet support services, begin to market pets.findhelp.com to your community.
Getting Started With Ecosystem Mapping
Speaking of ecosystem mapping: Mapping your community’s pet support resources is a critical part of ensuring equitable access for all who need that support—and helps shelters identify service gaps, potential new community partners, and build new connections.
Use the Getting Started With Ecosystem Mapping toolkit to learn how organizations can start mapping their ecosystem, the tools necessary to this process, and what success looks like.
10 Ways Shelters and Rescues Can Use QR Codes Today
This blog is all about QR codes—and the creative ways shelters and rescues are using them to raise money, distribute adoption handbooks, market pets, and more. There’s a little primer on what QR codes are and how you make them in here, too.
Supported Self-Rehoming Without Surrendering: Setting Up Supportive Services with Safety and Success
Supported self-rehoming is a great way for organizations to give pet parents who can no longer keep their pets the tools they need to safely rehome their own pets with ongoing support from shelter staff and volunteers
In this info-packed webinar, speakers Kaycey Adair from Greenville County Animal Services, Ana De Luccia from Adopt-A-Pet, and Lucy Fernandez from Austin Pets Alive!, highlight how organizations can begin offering supported self-rehoming options. They also discuss ways to use social media and other tech solutions that fit your organization’s needs, and best practices for communicating these programs to stakeholders and your community.
Use this Supported Self-Rehoming communications kit, too, to help raise awareness with pet owners about what self-rehoming is, how it can benefit their pets, and how your organization can support them through the process.
Who Do You Want to Be? Use This ‘3 Words’ Exercise to Find Out
“I keep three words taped to my desk in hopes it reminds me to behave. How I want to be perceived. It doesn’t always work but I look at those words more often than not and I know many conversations could have gone very differently if I wasn’t reminded to be a good listener, to be quick to forgive, and to be creative.”
This blog will take you through a three-word exercise that’ll get you digging deep to describe, and realize, who you want to be and how you want to be known by your community.
What Home Means for Cats: Working Together to Keep More Cats Alive and Thriving
In this webinar, cat experts discuss how to save cats’ lives by keeping them in homes—whether those homes are inside or out—and how to raise awareness and garner support in your community.
Here’s a Cats and Kittens HASS x HeARTs Speak communications kit you can use, too.
This Shelter Started a Lost and Found Texting Program and Got Twice as Many Dogs Home
Before instituting a lost and found texting program, Greenville County Animal Care‘s return to owner rate was about 15% for dogs. Since putting the testing program in place, that rate has doubled.
“We’re now averaging about 28% to 30% for dogs,” says director Shelly Simmons.
Do you have an idea for a blog—one you think we should cover, or one you’d like to write yourself? Reach out at marketing@americanpetsalive.org and let us know!
