The Importance of Funding Animal Shelters and Rescues
Animal shelters and rescues serve as safe havens for abandoned, abused and neglected animals. Often it’s their last chance. Shelters and rescues help nurse and rehabilitate vulnerable animals, and can get them back into loving homes through adoption.
However, running animal shelters or rescues requires substantial resources, financial and otherwise. Effective fundraising is critical to keeping shelters and rescues viable. Fundraising can help expand activities and care, ensuring your shelter or rescue can offer the best care and outcomes to as many animals as possible.
Understanding the Funding Requirement of Animal Shelters and Rescues
Caring for the needs of animals is time consuming and expensive, especially when medical care is involved. Running even small shelters and rescues can be an intensive and expensive endeavour that requires considerable on-going funding.
Typical Costs for Animal Shelters and Rescues
Funds are needed to cover staff wages, maintain premises and pay for utilities. Cash is required for animal feed and shelter, and for veterinary services and medical care. You need regular funds to cover other day-to-day running costs too.
Money is also needed to support activities like adoption programs, rescue operations, outreach and education, and to cover fundraising promotion.
Funding Sources for Animal Shelters and Rescues
Funding for your shelter and rescue can come from a wide range of sources. If you need to increase the funding you get for your animal shelter or rescue, consider:
- One-off donations from individuals
- Continuing donations from individuals, such as through adoption schemes and from easyfundraising
- Fundraising events, both offline and online
- Corporate sponsorships
- Grants and foundations
How to use easyfundraising to Support your Animal Shelter or Rescue Centre
easyfundraising offers you a unique way to receive donations. And importantly, your supporters can raise money for your shelter or rescue without it costing them anything more than what they’re already spending.
How Does easyfundraising Work?
We’re an online platform that allows individuals to support charitable causes through their everyday online shopping.
Your supporters can register with us to create a free easyfundraising account. Then, when they shop online with our 7,500+ partner retailers, including Amazon, Tesco, Asda, eBay and Apple, those retailers will donate a portion of what they spend to a given charitable cause, such as your animal shelter or rescue.
easyfundraising is simple and quick to use, and all the donations will be taken out of what your supporters are already spending. The donations won’t cost them any extra, making us an attractive way to raise money for charity.
How to use easyfundraising to Raise Money for your Animal Shelter or Rescue
In order to receive donations from your supporters, you’ll first need to register your shelter or rescue with us as one of our good causes. Once you’re registered, your supporters can join us and create their own accounts to donate to you as they shop online.
We’ll also provide you with a suite of tools to help you promote easyfundraising as a way for your supporters to donate to you. These include pre-written templates for social media posts, email campaigns and WhatsApp messages, so you can easily spread the word about your animal shelter or rescue.
Promoting Your Fundraising Efforts
Effectively promoting your fundraising initiatives can dramatically improve their efficacy and their capacity to generate awareness and continued donations.
Using Social Media to Increase the Impact of your Fundraising Efforts
Social media has the capacity to greatly enhance the effectiveness of your promotions. It can allow you to reach large and diverse audiences, often at a modest expense. However, social media efforts can fall flat if they aren’t employed with careful planning.
To improve the impact of your social media promotions, aim to:
- Use a comfortable range of social media platforms and tailor your content to what works best on those platforms (you can research what other, related organisations do successfully online).
- Share engaging stories that focus on individual animals to evoke emotional responses.
- Share eye-catching visual media, particularly photos and video.
- Use a small set of appropriate hashtags.
- Encourage your supporters to engage with your posts, such as liking, commenting and sharing.
- Share fundraising updates, so supporters can see progress and the impact of their donations.
- Include links in all your social media posts that people can use to make donations, including links to easyfundraising.
Encouraging Friends and Family to Join easyfundraising
Inviting friends and family to join easyfundraising can allow them to contribute to your shelter or rescue with their online shopping. Try to emphasise the importance of fundraising to your shelter, share your passion, and highlight that they’ll be able to help you via easyfundraising at no extra cost to themselves.
Other Ways to Support your Animal Shelter and Rescue
A range of fundraising options are open to animal shelters and rescues. But due to the nature of your work, you have opportunities not open to other organisations, like volunteering positions and animal adoption schemes.
Volunteering and In-Kind Donations
Supporters can contribute to your shelter or rescue through donating their time and skills, rather than money. Volunteering opportunities you can offer can include roles as:
- Animal care assistant, aiding in feeding, cleaning, grooming and other care
- Dog walking
- Animal socialiser, as many animals lack for attention, affection, and play
- Administrative support
- Event volunteer
You can also encourage supporters to donate much needed items to your shelter or rescue, like:
- Pet foods and treats
- Toys
- Blankets and bedding
- Cleaning supplies
- Medical supplies
- Office supplies
- Professional services, like accounting and tax assistance, legal advice, marketing and social media help, graphic design and photography, and website development
Fundraising through Adopting and Fostering of Animals
Adoption is the ideal goal of caring for and rehabilitating domestic animals. Having them homed with loving, capable new families is the perfect result for all the animals you’ve looked after. It’s advisable to offer animals for adoption for free, or you can ask for voluntary donations if you’re comfortable.
Fostering schemes can provide temporary homes for your animals before they find their forever homes. Foster parents play a crucial role in caring for animals, helping them recover from illness or surgery, providing training, and offering love, support, and play. By fostering animals, supporters contribute to the successful adoption process, ensuring that animals are prepared and ready to be taken into their new homes. Fostering can also contribute to your shelter or rescue by temporarily relieving you from the cost and resources required to care for your animals.
<h2> Using easyfundraising to Help Support your Animal Shelter or Rescue </h2>
Animal shelters and rescues do valuable, much needed and often underappreciated, work to protect and rehabilitate some of the most vulnerable members of our society. But running an animal shelter or rescue is a time-consuming, expensive undertaking that often requires substantial fundraising and other resources to support.
Securing ongoing donations can provide peace of mind and can help ensure your shelter or rescue can continue to offer the level of care you’re striving for. Here we’ve given you clear advice and inspiration on sources of fundraising and how to effectively promote your fundraising initiatives, plus ideas for other ways people can support your shelter or rescue.
<h3> Fundraising for your Animal Shelter or Rescue with easyfundraising </h3>
We offer you a unique and cost-effective way to receive donations from your supporters. Discover more about how easyfundraising can help you with your fundraising, then register your animal shelter or rescue with us and use our marketing Toolkit to begin receiving donations.