Hi Christy
I would suggest first obtaining all the data on the community that WAAL serves. For example, the US Census has a Quick Facts page and you can download the page on Sedgwick County, Kansas - 530,000 people, two-thirds white, one-sixth Latino, 10% African-American. Sedgwick County is approximately 2,500 square Kilometers so the human density would be around 200 people per sq kilometer (pet ownership varies inversely with human density). The equation for the US is y(% households with pets) = -16.625 X(log human density in sqkm) + 96.91. The human density in Sedgwick County is approximately 200 people per sqkm and log human density would be 2.3. Therefore the percentage of pet owning households in Sedgwick County would be around -38.24 + 96.91. In other words, around 58.5% of households in Sedgwick County own pets. One would have to divide these pet owners into dog and cat owners. The US Census has looked at dog and cat ownership across the USA in 2021 but did not report data for Wichita. However, the data for Oklahoma City indicates that 60% of households have pets and that 49% had dogs and 23% had cats. Typically, a dog-owning household has around 1.6 dogs and a cat owning household has around 2.1 cats. Therefore, you can work out how many pet dogs and pet cats there are in Sedgwick County. That gives you a sense of the pet population that WAAL and the other animal shelters in Sedgwick County are serving. That number is a good place to start as you consider how best to focus your efforts.
There are several other (large?) shelters in your catchment area so you will need to include their stats in any comprehensive analysis of WAAL's impact. However, the effort required to do this will help your Board understand the impact of WAAL's activities in the community. I suspect your impact will be relatively modest overall unless you choose to focus on specific communities. For example, several studies have reported that low-income areas produce more shelter dogs and cats than high-income areas. Therefore, focusing efforts in certain areas of Sedgwick County will have a larger impact than just sterilizing any animal that someone brings to you. To provide some historical perspective, in 1973, an HSUS survey estimated that 13 million dogs and cats were being euthanized by US shelters every year. The US pet dog and cat population at the time was 65 million. Today, there are an estimated 140 (maybe as many as 160) million pet dogs and cats while US shelters are euthanizing around 1.2 to 1.5 million dogs and cats. Nobody tracked what was happening to national shelter dynamics from 1973 to the present but there are snatches of data from different times that indicate that sterilization (conducted mainly by private vet practices although shelter sterilization efforts was probably a major reason why private veterinary clinics began sterilizing pet dogs and cats in large numbers in the 1970s and 1980s) is behind this dramatic change in animal intake and euthanasia by US shelters. Such changes take time to be seen in the collected stats and identifying such changes requires careful and systematic data collection over a long period of time. I have data for Peninsula Humane Society (the major shelter operation in San Mateo County in California) stretching back to the 1970s. Their data documents a huge decline (around 50%) in their animal intake in the 1970s. Intake levelled off in the 1980s and was followed by slower declines in both dog and cat intake starting in the mid-1990s. WAAL was founded ten years ago so most of the large declines in animal intake had already happened by the time you were founded so you should look for metrics other than declines in shelter intake to assess impact. Overall sterilization rates for pet dogs and cats are now generally over 80% so it will be difficult to increase sterilization rates markedly. In addition, dog ownership hardly varies across the USA (in 1950 there were 215 dogs per 1,000 people in the USA and that number has ticked up slightly to 235 dogs per 1,000 people in 2022. In other words, pet dog numbers increase as the number of US households grows but the RATE of dog ownership has hardly changed at all in 72 years.
It is generally thought that somewhere around 15% of new pet acquisitions fail. A population of 500,000 people will have an estimated 100,000 pet dogs and 15% of those acquisitions will fail annually leading to the straying/relinquishment of 15,000 dogs. Therefore, in Whichita, you and the other animal shelters in Sedgwick County will take in around 15,000 dogs and probably an equal number of cats. WAAL takes in less than 1,000 dogs and 1,000 cats so the organization is responsible for around 5% of the relinquished dogs and cats in your community. It will take years (probably decades) for you to see much reduction in the numbers of animals you take in.
I do not wish to discourage WAAL's data collection and interest in statistics. If you would like to discuss possible options for WAAL, my email is arowan@wellbeingintl.org.
Andrew Rowan, President, WellBeing International
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Andrew Rowan
President
WellBeing International
MD
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Original Message:
Sent: 02-27-2025 05:21 PM
From: Christy Fischer
Subject: How to demonstrate impact through statistics
This is probably an ignorant question, but my BOD is wanting me to find a better to demonstrate impact through statistics. We are currently operating one of two low-cost spay/neuter programs in our county. Last year, we completed 2897 surgeries (up from 1600 in 2023). I'm aware of the standard 7-year stats for how many cats/dogs and their offspring can produce but the issue is that when you are trying to use that "formula" to determine impact the numbers become so large that it becomes difficult for donors to conceptualize. Does anyone have any suggestions for alternative ways of showing what good is being done?
#DataandTechnology
#FundraisingandDevelopment
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Christy Fischer
Shelter or rescue director
Wichita Animal Action League
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