Animal Welfare Professionals

Maddie's Shelter Compass (www.maddiessheltercompass.org) has a lot of cool features. One of them enables you to connect directly with shelter experts and shelter coaches to help you implement programs from your shelter's lifesaving roadmap. 

A lot of the questions we get are similar from one shelter to another, so we like to share them here. Here's one we recently received about getting started with scheduling shelter intake for owner relinquishments.

Question: How do we even get started with scheduling intake?

Answer: Great question! While there are lots of details to consider, here's the basic outline...

1. Shutdown overnight "dropboxes" if you have them
2. Decide on a specific set of days when you will accept owner relinquishments. Ideally, this should NOT include any weekend days. Ideally, choose no more than two or three week days per week.
3. Decide on a specific series of hours when you will accept relinquishments during those days. Remember, you are providing an incredibly valuable service, and people should not expect to be able to just do this any time on any day.  It is good to aim for no more than 3 to 4 hours per day of owner relinquishment intake.
4. Have at least some resources in place to offer owners instead of relinquishment. Do this on your own or -- better yet -- in partnership with another organization or rescue group in your community. Some basic resources include: temporary housing for pets (this is actually a very common need), pet food and supplies, any vet care (even very simple things), options to offer them to re-home their pets without bringing them to the shelter. These are just a few examples
5. For anyone who is wanting to just walk in and surrender their pet and won't take no for answer, offer a "pre-admission vaccine." Here, you give your usual intake vaccines and then ask the owner to hold on to the pet for a week to let the vaccine take effect and explain that this gives the pet the best chance for success when the pet does come back to the shelter.  

To build your shelter's lifesaving plan and/or connect directly with a shelter coach, head to www.maddiessheltercompass.org.    

We follow these guidelines (except #5) for owner surrenders and managed intakes, and they have DRASTICALLY helped our intake and euthanasia percentages. We offer the rehome.adoptapet.com website for rehoming and medical care if that’s what makes or breaks someone from keeping their pet. As far as appointments,  our intake is Tuesday and Thursday 10am-2pm for owner surrenders. We also offer a diversion program, we take pups and spay mom and dad for free. We have a food bank for those in need, and offer free S/N along with it as well. We try everything possible to keep the animal in their home over the shelter. 

Randi, thank you for the additional info! Yes, definitely a shout-out to rehome.adoptapet.com. So glad that these practices and concepts are working for you!