PETFINDER: AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY LIFESAVER
Located in a predominantly rural county fifty-seven miles southwest of Birmingham, the small college town of Tuscaloosa, Alabama is not exactly on the beaten path. But thanks to Petfinder, a searchable database of homeless animals, Tuscaloosa’s all volunteer West Alabama Animal Rescue can showcase and potentially adopt out some of its abandoned animals to Petfinder’s six million unique visitors each month.
In years past, most shelter animals were placed in new homes through large organizations in big cities with high community visibility. Now, Petfinder has leveled the field so that every animal welfare organization can be an important player in the lifesaving business. By enabling even the smallest rescue groups from communities all across America to display their homeless pets, and by focusing so many pairs of eyes on available shelter animals, Petfinder has revolutionized the animal welfare industry.
There are 9,000 municipal agencies, traditional shelters and grass roots rescue groups in Petfinder’s database. According to Petfinder surveys, one-third are brick and mortar facilities, one-third have shelters and maintain foster programs, and one-third are non sheltered foster only organizations. Petfinder sign-ups are growing fastest in the non sheltered foster only segment.
Kristen Marshall manages Helping Hands, a small rescue group operating out of the West End Animal Hospital in Gainesville, Florida. “Four years ago we were doing about 20 adoptions per year—now we’re up to nearly 300. About 70% of our adopters start with Petfinder. It has been great for us since we don’t have a regular shelter or set shelter hours. Our organization consists of five volunteers and two paid staff—maintaining Petfinder is important enough that it’s one of the paid positions.”
Small to medium sized shelters get a huge boost from Petfinder as well. Cheryl Gibson is the Executive Director of Gainesville Pet Rescue in Gainesville, Florida. Her group started with Petfinder four years ago. Since then, adoptions have nearly doubled, from 500 per year to 900 per year. “Our adopters aren’t coming to us through print ads or other forms of advertising,” says Cheryl. “We know from exit surveys that 60-70% of them start with Petfinder. What generally happens is that people see a pet on Petfinder, then go to our website. We recently got a big donation from a family in California who found our site through Petfinder. Petfinder is an incredible tool for pointing people to animal welfare websites that wouldn’t otherwise get the traffic.”
Folks generally search for a particular size or breed as they scroll through the pet pictures and stories. For some, these factors are more important than proximity. “We do a lot of out of state adoptions,” says West Alabama Animal Rescue’s Lisa Doss. “We’ve shipped pets as far as New York and Texas. Says Gainesville’s Cheryl Gibson, “We don’t do that many out of state placements, but a lot of our adopters routinely spend five or six hours driving up from South Florida.”
Petfinder has become everything Betsy and Jared Saul hoped for when they started the company ten years ago. Their vision was to use the new technology of the internet to help small non-profits gain access to full-color direct marketing—something they wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford. “We got goose bumps when we came up with the idea, and decided to see if we could make it work,” says Betsy. “At first, our goals were modest. We started with thirteen shelters, figuring if we saved one animal each month we would call it a success and keep going.” It wasn’t long, however, before adoptions were booming and word of mouth had shelters signing up in droves. Today, Pefinder figures it is responsible for 1.5 million adoptions per year--7 million adoptions since inception.
“Petfinder’s expansion of adoption opportunities through the effective use of internet technology and its broadening of the safety net of care for our companion animals are fantastic,” says Maddie’s Fund President, Rich Avanzino. “At the same time, focusing the public’s attention on the plight of homeless animals to such a high degree is really a wonderful accomplishment. All of us in the sheltering world owe a big debt of gratitude to Betsy and Jared Saul.”
“We have certainly increased the demand for shelter pets,” says Betsy, “and proven in the process that ‘too many pets, not enough homes’ is a myth. But creating such a huge demand is a double edged sword. Now we’re finding that some shelters don’t have the customer service capability to respond to the demand we’re creating. Solving that problem will be our next big challenge.”
Petfinder Facts:
According to Nielson Net/Ratings, Petfinder is the 124th most viewed site on the internet. On any given day, the site contains as many as 190,000 pets. Six million unique visitors go to the site monthly, and the average visitor views 60-90 pages. Petfinder believes that its 9,000 shelter/rescue members represent 90% of all animal welfare organizations. In response to a recent survey, 3,000 members said 63% of their adoptions came from Petfinder. Extrapolating from this data, Petfinder estimates that it is responsible for 1.5 million adoptions per year.
