Animal Welfare Professionals

Hello,

I was wondering how often shelters send a foster request list to their volunteers?  We've been sending 1-2 per week, but I feel like the response rate has diminished and I'm concerned we are fatiguing our volunteers with requests.  Any other tips/tricks for an effective foster request is appreciated!

Thank you,

Erin

Hey Erin-- we use a closed FB group to post our cats and dogs and send an email bi-weekly. Like you, when we sent them more often, we found that people treated the emails like spam. So we've encouraged our fosters to join FB and have found a lot of success with this method!

Hi Erin, 

Can you share anymore information about your foster program? What types of animals are you trying to send to foster? Are you only emailing volunteers? How large is your foster base? 

I love trouble shooting foster challenges and have some templates and examples for emails we have used in the past to great success! Feel free to message me if I can send you anything that might help. 

To answer your direct question, when I was with Nevada Humane we emailed foster requests daily  

Hi Erin,

We send requests sometimes daily. It can be a lot of emails, but our foster parents look forward to the ones listing who is available and when. We tell foster parents to set up a separate email account if they are feeling like they are getting too many emails.

A good tip is to make the title of your email very catchy or just really easy to know what it is about. Instead of saying: more kittens need you today, you could say 2 orange 6 week olds want you!

Hope that helps!

Kristi

Hi Erin,

I was the foster program manager at Nevada Humane Society for 6 years. I worked with Scarlett (below) was one of my awesome fosters, and she's become an expert in her own right. I wanted to tell you what we did. During kitten season, we would anywhere from 1-15 litters of kitten/puppies a day. As a result, I sent out almost daily requests for "what's available today." The foster parents knew upfront this would happen. However, I also know that in order to keep people engaged and informed, sometimes you need to use different methods of communicating your needs. I figured out a way to text foster parents as well as created a closed Foster Facebook group. Many days I would contact people through these methods to break it up. This way foster parents weren't getting the same email every day. I also found that we'd get quicker responses to texts and FB. And, on days where there were only a few litters, often I'd only need to post to FB or text and not have to email at all.

Another thing we did was keep track of fosters who currently have animals in their home. We would exclude them from the regular need emails. If they already have animals, I don't want to stress them out thinking they need to take more or aren't doing enough. However, once their home is open, they start receiving them again.

This is what we did for our daily needs. However, we would send out specific and targeted emails to our fosters about special needs adult cat/dogs, etc in need of foster care. These emails look and feel very different and would go out once every other month or so depending on the need.

The questions Scarlett asked are important. The answers to them may help us shape your communication processes to better utilize your base. Let us know if you have any questions.

We have the opposite problem. In our shelter nobody is in charge of the so called "foster program", and volunteers are complaining not to get notified when there is the need for a foster home. I have been a foster volunteer for 6 years, and the only calls I ever got was for bottle babies. Otherwise I just go to the shelter, walk through the back rooms, and pick out the cats/kittens with the highest need for foster care, usually feral ones or sick ones. Had a talk with the new director about it, hope she will appoint someone to take care of the foster business.

Thank you all for your feedback.

We’ve been sending out a foster request weekly, with a picture and bio of dogs needing foster homes. One thing we’ve added that has helped spark enthusiasm is a “Pupdates” section at the bottom of the list.  Here, we thank foster parents that have taken in dogs, share adoption updates and any other good news we think our volunteers would be interested in.  We include photos when available.