Animal Welfare Professionals

What are some of the MUST HAVES for your shelter or rescue in order to help animals? This could be anything from your favorite disinfectant to your favorite graphics app!

1) COFFEE.
2) My phone. It has a good camera and I don't know what I'd do without it.
3) Good shoes that don't hurt my feet.

I second the phone!!! What did we do before our cell phones!!!!

Those new paddle things you can use to separate dogs if they get into it during playgroup. If you rattle them they sound like a louder shake can.  I feel so much more confident just knowing I have them.

The prepared campaign graphics provided by many national organizations are very helpful! They are professional, visually appealing and easy to use. Social media is so important to successful outreach and many smaller organizations don't have the time, money or skill sets to create their own materials. 

Hi can you share some links to those prepared posts? Thank you!

Most of the prepared materials are intended for events or promotions that have defined start & end dates. For example, Petco Foundation includes electronic "toolkits" for their in-store promotions for things like "Be a Foster", "Cat Week", "Helping Heroes" and similar events throughout the year. it makes flyers and social media posts basically cut & paste easy with really professional-looking results. 

Specific to Maddie's Fund, there are some very nice graphics for the 25th Anniversary here: https://www.maddiesfund.org/25th-anniversary.htm  This can be added to your website. Great looking on t-shirts and such, too, which are available for purchase (see link on above page).

A couple of current events that you might want to review that also have graphics available:

Remember Me Thursday          Sept 26th      https://remembermethursday.org/

 Best Friends "Strut Your Mutt"   various dates around the country depending on your city      

https://support.bestfriends.org/site/SPageNavigator/landing_page_home.html

sample graphics:

Trello! It's been an organizational lifesaver and I don't know how I stayed organized before I discovered Trello. At this point, we have a Trello board for our Adoption application process, barn cat placements, social media posts, volunteer application processing, foster homes, and TNR projects/requests. 

Also, those double-sided cat show popup kennels for adoption events are awesome. They look 'sleek' and nicer than cages (though you can't stack them, so might limit the number of cat attendees - but I rarely have the 'problem' of too many fosters wanting to attend events, so they work well for me). 

Here's what the popups look like: https://www.amazon.com/One-Pets-Portable-Shelter-24%E2%80%B3x24%E2%80%B3x42%E2%80%B3/dp/B00HVI10EO

Feral cat den (for easier holding of ferals with medical issues), Tomahawk drop trap, and podcasts of all kinds (including the Community Cats podcast) to keep me entertained while I'm waiting for cats to go into traps.

Our volunteers for sure!! We couldn't do what we do without them! 

I have been using Black Wing Farms flower essences (different than essential oils) on our animals for about 10 years now and they are truly amazing. Things like Brave Balm, Calm Balm and Drama Trauma spray (among many others I have on my desk) have had a huge and often instant affect on our animals here. I can't say enough good things about the formulas and how they have helped our animals adjust. blackwingfarms.com is definitely worth a try.