Animal Welfare Professionals

When hosting a no charge adoption event, how far in advance do you promote it? What are the pros and cons of promoting it too soon or too late. Our goal is to empty the shelter and may need to combine it with a plea for fosters too. 

Based on what I've seen other organizations do successfully, promoting it about 2–3 weeks in advance seems to strike the best balance. It gives people enough time to plan without letting the excitement die out.

If you promote too early, the risk is that people see it, think "I'll go when it gets closer," and then forget. The benefit, though, is more time to highlight your pets and-since our goal is to empty the shelter-more time to make a strong foster plea.

Promoting too late can create urgency and energy, but it also limits your reach and makes it harder to line up fosters or volunteers.

Since your goal is to clear the shelter, one idea could be:

• Start with a foster push first ("Help us prepare for a major adoption event").

• Then follow with the no-fee event announcement about 10–14 days out.

When hosting a no charge adoption event, how far in advance do you promote it? What are the pros and cons of promoting it too soon or too late. Our goal is to empty the shelter and may need to combine it with a plea for fosters too. 

When hosting a no charge adoption event, how far in advance do you promote it? What are the pros and cons of promoting it too soon or too late. Our goal is to empty the shelter and may need to combine it with a plea for fosters too. 

We just did three no-fee events. They were our first and we had to experiment with the promotional timing. The first one we promoted it only a few days in advance, worrying that we would see a decrease in adoptions beforehand if we promoted to early. Unfortunately, it seemed we promoted too late and didn't really reach as many people as we would have hoped, ending up with a normal number of weekend adoptions for us. The second one we promoted sooner, two weeks ahead of time, however as that one was on a Monday & Tuesday instead of a weekend, we didn't really see a big turnout. The third one was another weekend event and we promoted that two weeks ahead of time as well. That one saw increased adoption numbers and we didn't really see a decrease in adoptions beforehand, either.

If we were to do it again, I'd likely go for promoting 2-3 weeks ahead of time as Julie said. That seems like the "sweet spot" in our albeit limited experience.

When hosting a no charge adoption event, how far in advance do you promote it? What are the pros and cons of promoting it too soon or too late. Our goal is to empty the shelter and may need to combine it with a plea for fosters too. 

When hosting a no charge adoption event, how far in advance do you promote it? What are the pros and cons of promoting it too soon or too late. Our goal is to empty the shelter and may need to combine it with a plea for fosters too. 

I think it's possible it is region or area dependent. For us we really cannot post but for maybe the week before. If we mention it on social media, and we are in Northeast Tennessee, I kid you not people will start going to the shelter now thinking the option ( for whatever it is we're posting about) is NOW.

What we started doing is if we have a post like that will simply say something vague like look for it later this month, for example. Without any dates and then we'll put in the actual dates. 

I don't know if this helped at all though I just wanted to share.

When hosting a no charge adoption event, how far in advance do you promote it? What are the pros and cons of promoting it too soon or too late. Our goal is to empty the shelter and may need to combine it with a plea for fosters too. 

When hosting a no charge adoption event, how far in advance do you promote it? What are the pros and cons of promoting it too soon or too late. Our goal is to empty the shelter and may need to combine it with a plea for fosters too.