Want to better understand how TechSoup can help your nonprofit organization?
Join us for our webinar on how your organization can access TechSoup’s wide variety of product discount and donation programs. From hardware to software, we’ll give you a tour of the tools available to help your nonprofit with productivity, collaboration, financial management, donor tracking, security, and more.
We’ll also show you how to access our many learning resources, tech services, courses, and community offerings designed to help you optimize technology for your organization.
There will be plenty of time for Q&A, so be sure to bring your questions!
Donating, volunteering, and being involved in your community is for everyone … including those with disabilities.
Inaccessible websites keep 15 percent of the population from finding you and your work online. That’s millions of potential patrons, volunteers, ambassadors, and even future donors who might not be able to use your website due to small but significant errors.
In this presentation, Knowbility’s Jessica Looney and Jillian Fortin will cover
What accessibility is and why it should be a priority for nonprofits
The business case for accessibility
How to get buy-in from stakeholders of your organization
A few quick website techniques to make your site more accessible today
Speakers
Jessica Looney
Jessica Looney, Director of Education, has worked for clients including Knowbility, Camp Fire USA, Austin Opera, The Thinkery and many others for nearly 20 years. Jessica has experience leading the organization, fundraising and marketing efforts for global outreach. Her work on tech-related programs includes rallying top talent to implement, teach, and advocate for accessible web design (AIR); organizing communities both locally and abroad to learn and practice accessibility (AccessU); and working to provide classroom support nationwide for students who use assistive technology (K-12 Access Toolkit). Jessica speaks at conferences and leads training workshops. Jessica has a degree in Nonprofit Administration from St. Edward’s University in Austin, TX.
Jillian Fortin
For more than a decade, Jillian Fortin has specialized in working with small to medium sized businesses as well as nonprofit organizations by helping them increase awareness of their brands online via search engines and social networks. She has traveled all over the country as a speaker on topics such as marketing through social networks, online brand management, universal design and accessibility. Previously, Jillian Fortin has managed web departments of up to 20 team members for online interactive marketing agencies and has held board positions for non-profit organizations in the Houston area.
Jillian’s colorful background includes experience in a number of industries: she has worked in upper management as well as the arts, nonprofits as well as youth leadership councils. Her clients have ranged from the ages of four years old to eighty-four years old. She firmly believes in self-education and as a student of life, she plans on educating herself for as long as she can.
In our next TechSoup Talks live-stream, we discuss five ways that nonprofit fundraisers can survive these tough times and emerge with positive approaches to donor engagement and fundraising.
We’ll be speaking with nonprofit tech pro Michael Stein about how to engage your donor community as active partners through this time of uncertainty.
According to the 2,760 organizations that report to Shelter Animals Count, national shelter intake is down over 25% for the first half of 2020; in some states, such as New York, animal intake is down as much as 55%.
The stories behind these stats are good ones: Animals are being directly rehomed by their guardians; fosters are “failing” in love and keeping animals that would have entered the sheltering system; food, medical, and behavioral resources are being offered to keep animals in homes before resorting to surrender; flush with time, guardians are able to work through behavioral and environmental challenges.
With so many of our markers trending in a positive direction, why aren’t we finally seeing an uptick in the ever-stubborn Return to Owner (RTO)? One might predict that the reduction in intake might have allowed staff to reallocate time to redemption efforts that move animals through the shelter faster, but a quick glance at the data suggests that’s not the case. In fact, RTO is down 1% from 13.8% to 12.7% (cats and dogs combined). What the heck?
Perhaps you intuitively know that doesn’t sound right. If you are one of the many shelters that have reduced your services to emergency-only during the pandemic, you’re likely attuned to the emerging data that has demonstrated a reduction in intake has not resulted in an increase in animals found dead on the street. So where are these animals going? We decided to call one of our own local shelters to dive deeper into what’s really going on with redemption rates.
In Sacramento City, out of the 67 animals that were found from April 1-June 30 and whose finder used Front Street Animal Shelter’s text to report/find app, 22 animals returned to their owners without ever entering the shelter. That’s 20% higher than the national average we are seeing reported by shelters.
“And that’s just the ones we know about. Many people don’t follow up with the survey and report their success to our shelter, but we can see from the ones that have responded that animals are being returned to their owners at much higher rates than our national average,” reports Front Street director Phillip Zimmerman. “They’re using the recommendations we’re providing and they are locating guardians on their own before coming to the shelter, which means they aren’t showing up in our head count.”
Does your shelter have a way of tracking the animals that don’t enter your shelter but are served by members of your community? We’d love to hear the results! Email us at mnewkirk@ucdavis.edu if you have RTO rates- in and outside the shelter walls- to share.
Interested in learning more about improving your redemption rates? A webinar featuring Return to Owner expert and innovator, Gina Knepp of Michelson Found Animals Foundation took place on June 29th. Gina reviewed the most recent best practices and recommendations from the national organization dedicated to getting more pets reunited with their owners. This special webinar was moderated by Michelson’s Matt Ulrich. Watch on-demand at: https://bit.ly/2BeiwBc
Remote work is exciting, fun, and different from office work. Getting into communication rhythms and making sure your team is performing well is not always easy. In this webinar, Adam Walker from the digital agency Sideways8 shares what he learned from running a company for 10years that never had an office. He’ll talk about how to think about remote work, the levels of communication to consider, and how to create a communications rhythm that will work for your team.
Speaker
Adam Walker, CMO at TechBridge & Co-Founder of 48in48 Husband. Father of six. Wearer of fedoras. Startup co-founder (with exit). Nonprofit co-founder & CMO. Podcast host at Tech Talk Y’all and Real Pink.
WebInterest can connect you with potential adopters from PetHarbor.com, all with a click of a button. Well, that and a form they fill out. We send their information to you automatically, you save staff time and reach a wider audience.It’s also part of our support along with Pethealth of the Clear the Shelters Event, where we’re providing a dedicated pet adoption website for the event, and reporting for participating shelters on Chameleon and PetPoint.
About Clear the Shelters
NBC and Telemundo owned stations are teaming up with hundreds of shelters across the country to host Clear the Shelters, a nationwide pet adoption drive in August 2020 that helps find loving homes for animals in need. More than 411,000 pets have found their forever homes since 2015
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, animal shelter workers, volunteers and animal welfare leaders from across the country have been meeting every Monday morning at 7am PT/10am ET to discuss protocols, ideas, obstacles they’re facing and more.
Led by Kristen Hassen-Auerbach, Director of Pima Animal Care in Tucson, AZ, these calls have provided an opportunity for people to connect that otherwise may not have even met.
“The purpose of these calls is simple – maintain connection among shelter professionals, provide support and comradery, and share science-based news and information along with emerging best practices in animal welfare,” Hassen-Auerbach says. “These calls are always lively and interesting and we’re not afraid to debate and share different perspectives from the attendees. You can take center stage and share your thoughts and ideas in front of several hundred of your colleagues or quietly drink your morning coffee and listen in.”
For many, these calls have been an invaluable resource. “When the subject of DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) came to the front of all of our minds, the calls adapted and we had a space to again learn from one another,” said Emily Klehmfrom South Suburban Humane Society in Chicago Heights, IL. “The calls have been my go-to source for grant information, statistics and trends. I’ve also been able to identify and connect to colleagues working on the same issues in similar communities.”
Dr. Ellen Jefferson, Executive Director at Austin Pets Alive! adds, “We hear from people in the industry who have important information related to COVID, new programming and research. This is information you can’t possibly get in your day to day work at your local shelter.”
If you’re a shelter professional, dedicated volunteer or run a rescue organization, we want you to join us! Bookmark this link and we will see you on Monday!
Note: The calls are recorded so if you can’t make it, you can listen in later. If you haven’t already, join the Facebook group to access the link to recorded calls and to connect with others on there.
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, animal shelter workers, volunteers and animal welfare leaders from across the country have been meeting every Monday morning at 7am PT/10am ET to discuss protocols, ideas, obstacles they’re facing and more.
NEW TIME as of 9/23/20 – 8 AM PT, 11 AM ET.
Led by Kristen Hassen-Auerbach, Director of Pima Animal Care in Tucson, AZ, these calls have provided an opportunity for people to connect that otherwise may not have even met.
“The purpose of these calls is simple – maintain connection among shelter professionals, provide support and comradery, and share science-based news and information along with emerging best practices in animal welfare,” Hassen-Auerbach says. “These calls are always lively and interesting and we’re not afraid to debate and share different perspectives from the attendees. You can take center stage and share your thoughts and ideas in front of several hundred of your colleagues or quietly drink your morning coffee and listen in.”
For many, these calls have been an invaluable resource. “When the subject of DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) came to the front of all of our minds, the calls adapted and we had a space to again learn from one another,” said Emily Klehmfrom South Suburban Humane Society in Chicago Heights, IL. “The calls have been my go-to source for grant information, statistics and trends. I’ve also been able to identify and connect to colleagues working on the same issues in similar communities.”
Dr. Ellen Jefferson, Executive Director at Austin Pets Alive! adds, “We hear from people in the industry who have important information related to COVID, new programming and research. This is information you can’t possibly get in your day to day work at your local shelter.”
If you’re a shelter professional, dedicated volunteer or run a rescue organization, we want you to join us! Bookmark the link below and we will see you on Monday!
Note: The calls are recorded so if you can’t make it, you can listen in later. If you haven’t already, join the Facebook group to access the link to recorded calls and to connect with others on there.
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, animal shelter workers, volunteers and animal welfare leaders from across the country have been meeting every Monday morning to discuss protocols, ideas, obstacles they’re facing and more.
Led by Kristen Hassen-Auerbach, Director of Pima Animal Care in Tucson, AZ, these calls have provided an opportunity for people to connect that otherwise may not have even met.
“The purpose of these calls is simple – maintain connection among shelter professionals, provide support and comradery, and share science-based news and information along with emerging best practices in animal welfare,” Hassen-Auerbach says. “These calls are always lively and interesting and we’re not afraid to debate and share different perspectives from the attendees. You can take center stage and share your thoughts and ideas in front of several hundred of your colleagues or quietly drink your morning coffee and listen in.”
For many, these calls have been an invaluable resource. “When the subject of DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) came to the front of all of our minds, the calls adapted and we had a space to again learn from one another,” said Emily Klehmfrom South Suburban Humane Society in Chicago Heights, IL. “The calls have been my go-to source for grant information, statistics and trends. I’ve also been able to identify and connect to colleagues working on the same issues in similar communities.”
Dr. Ellen Jefferson, Executive Director at Austin Pets Alive! adds, “We hear from people in the industry who have important information related to COVID, new programming and research. This is information you can’t possibly get in your day to day work at your local shelter.”
If you’re a shelter professional, dedicated volunteer or run a rescue organization, we want you to join us! Bookmark the link below and we will see you on Monday!
Note: The calls are recorded so if you can’t make it, you can listen in later. If you haven’t already, join the Facebook group to access the link to recorded calls and to connect with others on there.
These calls are for all shelter personnel, paid and unpaid. If you want to connect with colleagues from the US and Canada about how they’re navigating sheltering in a post COVID world, grab a coffee and start your week out with 300 people who have the same questions, ideas and worries as you.
