Camille Labchuk, Animal Justice
April 7, 2020
Danielle Bays, Humane Society of the United States
April 14, 2020
It seems like folks enjoyed my listing of resources last week, so I am going to continue to share more resources for you to enjoy and share with others. Since in-person conference season is pretty much wiped out, one good way to share virtual education is to have a group of people watch presentations on their own time and then come together virtually once a week to share what they have learned with others in the organization. Another option is to assign out different webinars and topics and then come together in a virtual staff meeting and go around the table, having folks report in on what they have learned. This is a wonderful time to express creativity around rethinking how we will handle sheltering, TNR, RTF, and owned cat spay/neuter in the future.
Volunteers
April 19–26 is Volunteer Appreciation Week. Take this time to connect with and thank your volunteers with a virtual volunteer appreciation party.
Community Cats, RTF, and TNR
Get your database in good shape with Cat Stats, Airtable, or other database management software.
Reach out to your local animal control department, your local food pantry, all of your volunteers and community cat caretakers, and your local veterinarians to see how you can partner to help in emergency situations and evaluate needs to report back to our weekly pop-up panels.
Professional Management
This very interesting article in the Atlantic about our timeline on returning “back to normal” is worth a read.
This is a great time to review bylaws, policies, and guidelines for your organization. This will need the participation of your board and will keep us all focused on projects that most certainly need to be done.
Paperwork clean-up and data hygiene are other good projects to consider.
Animal Care Training (COVID- and Non-COVID-Related)
Sign up for Animal Welfare Digest, a daily digest focused on a range of timely Covid-19 related animal welfare issues.
Home to Home is an innovative program where you can do adoptions without the cat coming into the adoption center.
Review your adoption protocols and research the Adopters Welcome program.
We will be faced with kitten season, so mark your calendar now for all of the great free webinars offered by the National Kitten Coalition.
How to create an Animal Safety Net (ASN)TM at your organization (see the downloadable guide).
Behavior
These are Tabitha Kucera’s recommendations:
TEAM Education in Animal Behavior free webinar archives
Spay/neuter and Veterinary
Online and virtual training for veterinarians and technicians from atdove.org, including some with CE credits
Project idea: Inventory your instruments and supplies
Special offer from Betsy Banks Saul, creator of Petfinder.com, 911Fosterpets, and Heal House Call Veterinarian:
At Heal, we provide private practice house call vets with the office support (scheduling, reception, marketing, software, coordination, communication, billing, etc) to operate a house call service. We also have telehealth/telemedicine. The vets practice medicine their way, and we handle the “office work.”
The way we are designed offers a unique opportunity to help shelter medicine during this crisis. Since we can’t encourage the public to come in to a clinic, I’d like to offer our service and technology at no cost to any shelter vet who would like to deliver shelter veterinary services as “porch calls” to their fosters, the public, etc.
The shelter or rescue organization could provide house calls free to fosters or the service can be used as a benefit to adopters/donors, since many folks are having trouble receiving veterinary services. Our new telehealth (video) platform is rudimentary but effective (and free) and especially good for helping to reduce costs by triaging foster pets in the hopes of avoiding expensive ER visits.
Our currently practicing vets have developed creative COVID-19 best practices we can share with shelter vets who want to take their services on the road to.
We can help a clinic service deliver house (porch/garage/etc.) calls or telehealth/telemedicine within about 24 hours. If you are a shelter veterinarian who would like to schedule a conversation with Betsy to learn more, sign up for a time here.
Fundraising
Check out this Best Friends report on the various resources from the government to help nonprofits survive.
Learn to capture stories and use them for your fundraising efforts now. Our Pop-Up Panel on Saturday April 11 will have Susan Richmond of Neighborhood Cats walking through how they do appeals, etc.
Giving Tuesday is May 5. Here is an article on how to make the most of it.
I hope these resources keep you going for another week. Feel free to share any other resources you’ve come across.
