Animal Welfare Professionals

I am the foster coordinator at our shelter and we are struggling getting our fosters to help out when it is actually needed. We do have a large program, and animals needing foster homes constantly for a variety of things, but mostly URI's and Kennel Cough. We are using a program that allows us to see who and how many people read our emails and view the animals that need fostering, but unfortunately we hardly get any responses for adult dogs and cats. Everyone is just wanting kittens and puppies, but we have less of a need for this the majority of the time. Does anyone have any recommendations on maintaining active fosters, or recruiting them, for sick animals that are not young?

Hi Chelsea,

I have been in a similar boat as I am expanding the dog side of our foster program (we focused mainly on cats previously). I use SignUp to inform my foster community about new cases and I can also see who has viewed the emails I send out and when. I have found that with "scarier" medical or behavior cases I don't get a great response rate from the blast email or social media postings. But if I have a foster case listed for about 3-5 days with no response I start cold calling people who have viewed the post. I have found that people are much less resistant in a one on one interaction and they also feel that our organization needs their help on a more individual level. It can be very easy for the entire foster community to just assume that another foster parent will pick up the case. It is definitely a more time consuming approach, but if you can hook a handful of people to try out a harder foster case just once those people will probably have less reservations for future cases. Good luck! 

Hi Chelsea, 

We have fostered almost 100 kittens/cats and saw the same challenges you are mentioning so we developed a free mobile app that is of no cost to foster parents or to shelters which has a recruiting tool in it as well as provides great support to existing foster parents which helps keep them fostering longer.

It is called Opening Cages and can be found in the app stores.
Let me know if you have any questions about how this can help your shelter.

Here is a short clip that explains what the app does for foster programs

I like how Front Street Shelter in Sacramento, CA has a "See our available foster dogs on Trello" link on their Foster webpage that links to a public Trello board which shares their dogs available for foster and their reasons (critical, medical cases, senior dogs, etc.). Anyone can view it and it's updated regularly. They include all kinds of information about the dog.

Link to Foster page on their website: http://frontstreetfosters.weebly.com/fostering-dogs.html

When you click on "See our available foster dogs on Trello" on that webpage it leads to this: https://trello.com/b/ggaGrnAi/front-street-fosters