Basics to know about animal shelter finances and HR - Ep25

11/09/20 • 22 min

Guest: Chelsea Staley joined the Petco Foundation team as the Director of Lifesaving in May 2020. Chelsea oversees the Foundation’s grants team and supports animal welfare organizations nationwide. Before joining the Foundation, Chelsea served as the Executive Director of Kanawha-Charleston Humane Association in West Virginia. She also has an MBA from the University of Charleston.

Main question: What basics should shelter leaders know about finances and human resources?

Takeaways:

Essentially, nonprofits are businesses. Their mission is different, but they still only run well when using sound business practices.

Financial stewardship and trust with donors are crucial, so it can be worth contracting with a skilled bookkeeper and accountant.

Hire people who align with your mission. Recognize signs of stress in employees and reach out to them.

Progressive discipline or corrective action can be hard when you are starting out in a leadership role because most of us avoid conflict. Thinking about corrective action differently can help. You want the person to keep their job and, to do that, they need to follow protocols. You are offering them opportunities to grow as an employee. It’s your job to stand up for the animals. If an employee is dropping the ball, the pets can’t alert you. You need to monitor performance and speak up on behalf of the animals. It doesn’t have to be confrontational, but there need to be consequences for poor performance.

Links:

Petco Foundation

Leadership recommendation: Jim Collins' "Best New Year's Resolution? A 'Stop Doing' List"

Recorded Sept. 22, 2020

Main question: What basics should shelter leaders know about finances and human resources?

Takeaways:

Essentially, nonprofits are businesses. Their mission is different, but they still only run well when using sound business practices.

Financial stewardship and trust with donors are crucial, so it can be worth contracting with a skilled bookkeeper and accountant.

Hire people who align with your mission. Recognize signs of stress in employees and reach out to them.

Links:

Petco Foundation

Leadership recommendation: Jim Collins' "Best New Year's Resolution? A 'Stop Doing' List"

Recorded Sept. 22, 2020

Previous Episode

Tech solutions for animal foster care programs - Ep24

Guest: Chris Roy is a technology guy by day, and the founder of Doobert at night and on weekends. Doobert helps you help animals and is the only software that organizes transport, and the only foster management platform allowing you to send and receive texts with fosters.

Main question: What technology solutions are there for organizations that find themselves with greatly expanded foster care programs?

Takeaways:

A new app called FosterSpace by Doobert is a texting-based solution for communicating with foster caregivers individually and en masse, such as for sending scheduled or one-off messages to just dog fosters or just neonatal kitten fosters

Email is not a good enough system for communicating with fosters because not all of them sit in front of a computer but almost all have smartphones, plus FosterSpace syncs with existing shelter management software.

FosterSpace allows fosters to post pictures, videos and updates on animals in their care (with organization oversight) and helps promote them on social media, saving time and effort on the organization side, tracking down updates.

RescueTube is another Doobert app that makes it easier to transfer videos shot by volunteers and staff from their phones to the organization for use on social media and for donor solicitations. It also helps animal control officers send videos from their investigations more simply.

Links:

Doobert

FosterSpace

RescueTUBE

Leadership recommendation: "What I learned from 100 days of rejection" TED Talk by Jia Jiang

Recorded October 22, 2020

Next Episode

End-of-year fundraising tips and ideas - Ep26

Guests: Humane Network CEO Diane Blankenburg and Humane Network president and Shelter Success Simplified podcast co-host Bonney Brown

Main questions: Why is fundraising so important in the final six weeks of the year, and what can people do to be more effective in their year-end fundraising?

Takeaways:

Fundraising is like retail sales – most donations come in at the end of the year.

Dec. 1 is biggest online fundraising day of the year, and the last week of the year, especially Dec. 31, are also extremely big for donations.

Make sure it’s easy to donate to your organization. You can test this by trying it out yourself with a small donation.

Matching programs greatly boost donations. This is different than company-match programs. Instead, this is where a donor – likely someone who was planning to give a large donation anyway – agrees to match donations. This inspires the top donor as well as the smaller donors because they know their money will go even further.

One fun easy idea is to highlight your favorite 12 saves or rescues of the year over 12 days in December.

And be sure to focus on individual animals in the stories you tell. These are more meaningful to donors than stories about your overall efforts or the overall need in your community.

Links:

Video of end-of-year fundraising webinar

PDF of end-of-year fundraising presentation

Leadership recommendation - "Strategic Planning: Five Steps to a More Secure Future”

Recorded November 18, 2020