Animal Welfare Professionals

So, for some of you a kitty adoption is nothing special.  You do them 10 or 20 or 30 or more times a day.

We're a small rescue, and Kassidy had been in foster care in my house for over a year.  She came to our program as a 6 week old kitten in a litter of I think five or six...the others all died of panleukopenia.  Kassidy survived but developed a nasty URI and a very shy personality, I think from all the medicating and the loss of her sibling cohort.  At 4-5 months she was finally healthy enough to be spayed but still quite shy, hard to catch, and definitely a slow track placement.

We didn't give up on Kassidy, not even when her URI proved to be fairly chronic.  And slowly, she learned to trust us.

Last week, I brought an adolescent kitten for a bit on one of our local news channels' morning show.  He didn't get adopted, but someone saw me on the morning news and reached out to our organization to adopt a special needs older kitten....who had gone home 3 weeks ago.  Slow updating to website, what can I say.  But I thought about this person's application and decided to reach out to see if they might be interested in Miss Kassidy, who had, about 3 months prior, decided that being a shy cat was boring and that she was going to be a social butterfly!  Her chronic URI kept her out of Petsmart's in-store adoption center, and she had a habit of snoozing though Saturday Special Adoption Events....but I was pretty sure the right home was out there for this cat.

After almost a year and half of foster care, Kassidy got adopted.  I want to share this with our volunteer base and our supporters, but not sure what the best medium would be.  It's cause for celebration, because it's high kitten season here.  We've adopted out two adult cats with...unique...challenges during the past few weeks and it's PARTY TIME!

I'm thinking of maybe a blog entry or something on our Facebook, but it'll need to be graphics-heavy (pretty pictures are more fun than words) and not too preachy or long.  I get long-winded easily.

We don't have a publicity department (ha!) so if it's going to get done, I'll be doing it.  Advice?  To do?  Not to do?

What we would do is share this wonderful story on our volunteer website AND on our social media platforms. May seem like no big deal but I know volunteers love to hear "the story" even if all you know is a few things. You could even use this win to say that now you can really focus on the next long term kitty which is .. [insert adorable name here]. I'd love to hear what others would try..

Lauren

We publish a post on Facebook, ideally with a photo of the adopters with the animal (but for some animals it's not feasible, so we just use the photo we have for the adoption websites). We include a short backstory, how long the animal was in our care, thank the adopter, celebrate the adoption, and thank our supporters for giving us the resources to be able to give these long-term animals a chance. We also publish many of them in our (snail mail) newsletter.

Congratulations!!! Absolutely celebrate Kassidy's success on your Facebook and rescue website if you have one. People love a story and you can always use the success story to garner more support in the form of product donations, monetary donations and possibly even more foster homes. Share a "before" and "after" picture. I think the general community doesn't realize how much effort and care are put into sick kittens and that not everything is straight forward. People in the animal welfare community know the amount of work that is put in but often times we consider it the norm.