Answers to the most common questions about starting an Adopters Welcome program
Photo by Nicole Marie Thomas/Humane World for Animals
Welcome to Adopters Welcome!
How is Adopters Welcome different from traditional adoption policies?
Traditional adoption policies are implicitly or explicitly designed to determine if a potential adopter is “good enough” for the pets in shelters and rescues. They tend to include lengthy applications with yes/no questions that an adopter either passes or fails. While the goal of traditional policies may seem worthy—to ensure the best home for a pet—they are misguided and leave many community members feeling judged and frustrated while shelter and rescue pets wait longer for a loving home.
In contrast, Adopters Welcome celebrates adopters, thanks them for considering adoption, and through a conversation, helps to connect potential adopters with a pet(s) that best fits their needs. Open-ended questions and active listening help counselors understand what is most important to the adopter, identify any services that a pet owner may need, and know that an adoption conversation is the start of long-term relationship between a pet lover and their organization.
Why should I switch to an Adopters Welcome program?
Shelters and rescue that follow the Adopters Welcome philosophy are able to connect with more potential adopters and place more pets into loving homes. They’re also able to engage with adopters in a positive and respectful way that enables them to be a resource throughout the life of the adopted pet and beyond. Bonus: Switching costs nothing, yet can save time, money and lives!
Does embracing Adopters Welcome mean I have to say “yes” to every single adoption?
No, it doesn’t. But the goal of Adopters Welcome considers the impact of every “no” and challenges the organization to consider whether that “no” is really the best decision. Consider the effect each “no” has on the pet to be adopted, other pets in need, the adopter, the adoption organization, the animal welfare community and the competition (e.g., pet stores and other sources for pets).
Do organizations see an increase in returns when they use Adopters Welcome policies?
Adopters Welcome is premised on data and studies that prove that returns don’t increase when adoption restrictions are lifted (see the list of research cited in the Adopters Welcome manual). While it’s true that some agencies that dramatically increase their adoptions may see an increase in raw numbers of returns, there’s typically no increase in the overall percentage of returns. Regardless, it’s important to recognize that returns shouldn’t be viewed as “failures.” They’re an opportunity to learn more information about the pet so that a better match can be made in the future. In fact, increased returns can be viewed as a positive—they may indicate that your adopters trust you enough to admit that a match isn’t working and look to you for support moving forward, rather than fearing they will be judged if they need to bring a pet back to you.
How can I convince my board, staff and community to try Adopters Welcome?
How long should it take to implement Adopters Welcome?
While Adopters Welcome can’t be achieved “overnight” because it involves much more than just moving from an adoption application to a questionnaire, it doesn’t need be a long, cumbersome process. Set a time frame that’s realistic for your organization. Make full use of the tools Adopters Welcome offers. Keep your trainings fun and interactive. You’ll be celebrating your success in no time!
Policy review: Are your existing policies working for or against you?
My written SOPs are already in alignment with Adopters Welcome. Is there anything else I need to do?
Be sure all decision-makers for your organization are on board and to check your community for neighborhoods you’re not yet reaching. You need to have in place self-assessment plans as well as marketing action plans to share your Adopters Welcome approach with your community. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you need all team members to be on board, to practice and be trained, and then be ready to engage and support adopters!
What if my organization has a policy not listed in the Adopters Welcome guide?
We don’t anticipate that we have covered every potential policy or circumstance that might arise. See Put your policy to the Adopters Welcome test to help you determine how to use the Adopters Welcome approach in each situation.
What about areas that have breed bans in place, pet limit laws, or licensing and vaccine requirements? Does Adopters Welcome promote adoption of pets where they aren’t permitted?
Some communities may have arbitrary breed restrictions or pet-keeping laws. Unless your organization is charged with enforcing those laws, your role in adoptions isn’t to serve as checks and balances—it’s to connect adopters with pets. Instead, find ways to support pet owners through negotiations with landlords or free vaccine clinics for pets at home. Even better, work to change local ordinances or state laws that may prevent community members from adopting.
How do I guarantee people won’t just tell me what I want to hear? Can I trust that our animals will find safe homes when we replace screening and checks with conversation and being a resource?
You can’t guarantee that potential adopters aren’t telling you what you want to hear with traditional screening in place. Chances are your adopters have already become conditioned to provide “right” and “wrong” answers, particularly if they have been previously denied by an organization. By replacing traditional screening with Adopters Welcome-style conversation and open-ended questions, you remove the “yes/no” questions and create opportunities for open, honest dialogue with adopters.
What if someone says they’re going to declaw the cat or chain the dog outside?
Not everyone who suggests a practice we disagree with is inherently cruel or a bad adoption prospect. Someone could have had only positive experiences with declawed cats and may not know what declawing entails. Or a family dog was always kept outside because the dog seemed to enjoy it and was chained to prevent the dog from running off or being hit by a car. Automatically dismissing people as potential adopters cuts off any opportunity you might have to understand the reasons behind these choices, and it eliminates any opportunity to share information that could help them make better choices. While Humane World for Animals agrees that cats shouldn’t be declawed and dogs shouldn’t live their lives on chains, we recognize that the only way to help people make better choices is through dialogue and information sharing.
What about the people who pick a pet who isn’t a good match for them?
Data shows that most pets are acquired from sources other than shelters or rescues, so people are successfully picking pets every day without any help (or judgment) from us. We’ve all had experiences with adoptions we were convinced would never work that lasted a lifetime and some we thought were perfect that didn’t work out for the long-term. Adopters Welcome recommends that agencies avoid making blanket determinations about what matches will and won’t work and instead work with adopters to help them succeed even if they’re committed to a pet we believe isn’t ideal for them.
Are we risking impulse adoptions by using “same day adoptions” and other similar marketing techniques?
Research shows that marketing techniques such as same day adoptions, pets as gifts, reduced or waived adoption fees, and other adoption promotions have no negative effect on the care and love animals receive once they’re in their new home. And getting pets home as soon as possible protects them from stress and illness, even euthanasia. Having a strong marketing plan that gets more adopters interested in your pets actually saves lives.
I’m already short-staffed and pressed for time. Won’t Adopters Welcome take even more time?
Although it may take some time to fully implement an Adopters Welcome approach, over time Adopters Welcome will actually save you time. Effective conversations with adopters don’t have to take more time than the application reviews, reference checks, etc., that you were doing. You can even measure this as a metric of success. Track the time potential adopters are spending waiting to speak with someone, meeting with a counselor, filling out paperwork, putting a hold on a pet, waiting for a landlord or veterinarian to call back, driving back to the shelter, and finalizing paperwork and compare it to a more streamlined approach with Adopters Welcome.
The more quickly adoptable animals are moved through your facility and into new homes, the more time you will have to devote to other lifesaving efforts. More positive adoptions also directly translate into higher staff and volunteer satisfaction, and adoption teams that have positive interactions with people find more pets homes than they used to. They have more time for other important work, have higher job satisfaction and less risk of burnout.
We can keep animals for as long as it takes to find the perfect home. Why should we change our policies when we don’t have to worry about euthanizing for lack of space?
While you could keep animals for any length of time, you shouldn’t. Length of stay is an indicator of physical, emotional and behavioral health for all pets in shelters, and the longer animals are waiting, the more at risk they become for disease and stress-related behavioral challenges. Even more, the ability to adopt out animals efficiently has an impact on the broader animal welfare field since the space that becomes available in your shelter can be used to help pets in another community.
In addition, great homes come in all shapes and sizes and may look very different from our preconceived notion of “perfect,” which is often rooted in our personal life experience. Searching for “perfect” can be a sign that we’re working from a place of implicit bias. Also, intensive adoption screening is only a snapshot of someone’s life today. They may own a home and have a fenced yard and then move six months later. Our role is to help people adopt, not judge them for who they are today.
I see how Adopters Welcome could work in other places, but my community is different. How can I make it work in my community?
Almost everyone believes their community (and its animal care challenges) is unique. People are people. There’s no evidence that behavior of pet owners changes from state to state or region to region. Asking your community what barriers they face and how support and resources can help overcome potential challenges should be part of a holistic approach to supporting pets and their families in your community.
What if we have a policy in place because a terrible thing happened and we want to prevent it from happening again?
Sometimes, adoption policies and requirements stem from a significant and specific incident. It’s normal for staff, volunteers and others to carry the stress and sometimes trauma of bad things that happen to pets and to adopters. Having an organizational culture that prioritizes resources for staff to work through difficult situations is paramount whether or not you have an Adopters Welcome program.
In deciding whether to remove a policy that’s tied to fear and trauma, be sure your team members have access to mental health resources, consider bringing in a trained mental health practitioner to support the team, and recognize that trying to control outcomes for pets and their families isn’t possible in this work. When you’re ready, put the policy to the test by considering the negative implications for pets and families if you keep the requirement in place.
Procedure review: Are you reaching and engaging every potential adopter?
Is it really necessary to revisit all of our procedures, communication channels, web pages, etc.?
Yes! The public is your pool of potential adopters. Your adopters connect with your organization long before they get to the adoption approval stage. From the first moment they connect with you, they’re deciding whether yours is an organization they can trust to help them find their new family member. If your website has language describing a difficult process or no information at all, they may decide it’s not even worth the effort to try. If they inquire about a pet but don’t hear from you for a week, they may give up and go to a source that will respond immediately (such as a pet store or internet sale). Don’t skip this important step and unknowingly allow barriers between your organization and potential adopters to remain.
Why is it important to analyze my adoptions by zip code?
Because you’ll find more homes this way! Chances are there are neighborhoods or other segments of your community that aren’t using rescues or shelters to acquire their pets. It may be because you aren’t convenient to them, they don’t know you have pets they’d be interested in adopting, or they aren’t even aware you exist. Follow the steps laid out in Identify adoption barriers and put your policies to the test to do just that.
Is it a good idea to adopt to an underserved community where pet support programs don’t exist and there is no access to vet care?
Approximately 20 million pets in the U.S. experience poverty with their families, and 70% of those have never had access to veterinary care. We know that a deep connection with pets transcends socioeconomic, racial and geographic boundaries. At Humane World for Animals, we believe no one should be denied the opportunity to experience the benefits, joy and comfort of the human-animal bond.
People love pets, and they will find a way to have a pet in their life, just as we would. By denying individuals an adoption, we leave people feeling judged and frustrated, and we may send them to a source for pets that doesn’t provide any long-term support and whose animals aren’t vaccinated or spayed or neutered. By adopting pets to individuals who struggle to access veterinary care, we not only learn more about the challenges they face so that we can create programs to address the gaps, we also elevate the animal health in the community by sending home pets who are up to date on vaccinations and already spayed or neutered.
Set the stage for success
What are the best resources to help my team handle questions about pet care?
What if I have team members who are unable to accept Adopters Welcome?
As with any program shift your organization makes, there may be some individuals who simply can’t adapt. At some point, if they stymie your organization’s progress, you may have to make the difficult decision to either move them to a position that won’t undermine the new approach or encourage them to move on.
Train your team
Do my foster homes need to participate in this adoption training?
Yes. We encourage all staff, volunteers and fosters to complete this adoption training. It’s important for anyone who will have direct contact with potential adopters to be well-versed in Adopters Welcome. They must understand and help communicate the reasons behind your new policies in order for you to maximize the impact of the program.
How can I be sure my team is ready to have conversations with adopters?
Get a good gauge of your team’s comfort level with the new approach through the Adopters Welcome role-playing exercises. Everyone on your team can practice using open-ended questions to draw potential adopters into conversations that help highlight what’s most important to an adopter in their new pet. Having team members review the resources you have laid out with the Adopters Welcome training tools and the role-playing will make their delivery confident and smooth.
We’re always pressed for time. Is it enough if our counselors just watch the webinars?
Watching the webinars is a terrific way to jumpstart your team’s knowledge of the Adopters Welcome approach, but there’s no substitute for using the entire Adopters Welcome DIY action plan to ensure your team is fully able to put the philosophy into practice.
Celebrate your new program
Do I need to have a special Adopters Welcome celebration?
We highly recommend that you celebrate your new Adopters Welcome program and announce it to your community! Host an adoption open house, take out advertisements, ask your municipal officials to pass a proclamation—explore every opportunity to celebrate this important milestone in your organization’s history.
