This is a follow up to the blog post shared a few weeks ago, How your animal organization can better connect with the community it supports.

In a recent post, Elijah Brice-Middleton, Executive Director of Plainfield Area Humane Society (PAHS) in New Jersey, shared how grassroots marketing can help your animal organization better connect with your community. Brice-Middleton follows up with additional data showing just how much it helped his organization.

“When I first got to the shelter, we had very little foot traffic. We needed a way to try and attract people to our shelter. I dropped off several adoption event flyers that had ‘Post and Tag’ call to actions for social media,” shared Brice-Middleton. They were brought to places where individuals who are under age 25 tend to be found (think schools, gyms, activity centers etc.).

This was very successful in spreading the message. It also resulted in their shelter having significantly higher adoption rates, which was needed due to fear of overpopulation at the time. “The percentage increase of adoptions from the starting year of this initiative to the next was 56.3%,” he said.

Another example involved fundraising to help repair damage to the shelter. “Our shelter suffered extensive property damage at least twice in the past 3 years due to natural disasters. The board and I printed out nice photos of some of the destruction and made posters boards and went out to events and talked to folks about how we needed help,” said Brice-Middleton. “This was crucial to gaining support outside of our normal jurisdictions. We gained all our lost supplies back through in-kind donations and raised funds to cover the destruction in totality.”

And of course, as shared in the original post, while going out to provide educational talks to other community organizations, Brice-Middleton was able to create many new relationships between many local agencies and organizations. This also led to a local prosecutor hearing of their work and joining their board to further their initiative.

“Whether programmatic, monetary, operational or other, there are many ways our animal organizations can integrate into our communities,” said Brice-Middleton.