Humane Society of the Palouse case study

// Case study

Nonprofit

The animals nobody was coming for, and the shelter nobody trusted.

17
hard-to-place animals adopted: and donations up 60% year over year

Role: Board member and digital marketing lead
Dates: 2016 to 2018, Moscow, Idaho
Industry: Animal welfare nonprofit
What I owned: Social, content, graphic design and photography for two shelters. Unpaid, by choice.

// Context

I have had animals in my life longer than I have had memories.

I grew up with chameleons and cats, and I have been pulling dogs off the street, nursing baby birds through the night and carrying turtles out of the road for as long as I can remember. If something needed help, I helped. That instinct never went anywhere, so when a seat opened on the board of the Humane Society of the Palouse, I did not think about it very long.

What I found was a shelter the town had stopped trusting. A stretch of poor staffing and poor customer service had done its damage, and the animals were paying for it: a community that does not trust its shelter does not adopt from it, volunteer at it, or give to it. The board asked me for social posts. The problem was two levels deeper than that.

So I did not start with the animals. I started with what the shelter was for, and I spent two years making sure the town knew.

// The work

What I did

Social media
The channel everything ran through, and the first thing I rebuilt. Reputation first, resources second, animals third, in that order, because the order is the strategy. People had to believe in the place before they would walk into it.
Content creation
Get-to-know-you posts for the longest residents, written to each animal's personality instead of a template. A messaging reset that led with what the shelter gave the community before it asked for anything back.

Photography
Studio portraits shot with staff, pointed at seniors, bonded pairs and special-needs animals. Strong portraiture makes an animal far more likely to be adopted. Everybody in shelter work knows this. Almost nobody acts on it.
Graphic design
Adoption profiles designed as magazine covers, with a name in display type, a cover line, and a few words about who they were. Every animal got the same treatment, whether or not they were going to be easy to place.

// Process

How I did it

01
Make the shelter a resource before making it an ask
Before I posted a single adoptable animal, I showed the community what was already on offer and nobody knew about: the pet food pantry, discounted vet services for adopters, spay and neuter assistance. The shelter was not only where you went to find your next family member. It was where you went when you had hit a hard stretch and were trying to keep the one you had. Leading with that changed who was willing to engage with us at all.
02
Show the town what had changed
The staffing and service problems had been fixed shortly before I joined. The reputation had not caught up. I put the improvements in front of people week after week until the old story stopped being the only one they had heard.
03
Point the camera at the hardest cases
I worked with staff to shoot portraits that showed each animal's personality, and I pointed that effort at the longest residents rather than the easiest adoptions. The portraits became magazine covers. Thor, Oreo, Squigglez, Foxtrot: each one a name, a date, and the line that would get them home.
04
Take the format across the state line
Fifteen minutes away in Pullman, Washington, the Whitman County Humane Society had the same problem: long-term residents nobody was coming for. Nobody asked me to help them. I had a format that worked and a shelter that needed it, so I reached out and shot their covers too. Squigglez went home in November 2017.
05
Run Forever Home against the animals nobody was asking about
Seniors, bonded pairs and special needs. The ones that get passed over because they are harder to place, not because they are harder to love. Forever Home found homes for 17 of them. Donations rose 60% year over year across the same period, which is what happens when a town decides its shelter is worth believing in again.

Sometimes an animal just needs one chance to show how well they do outside a shelter.

// What I would do differently

The honest part

I did not measure the thing I changed first. Reputation was the problem underneath the brief, and the resource-first messaging fixed it, but I never ran a before and after on sentiment or on sign-ups for the pantry and vet programs. The adoption and donation numbers are solid. The turnaround in how the town talked about the shelter is something I watched happen and cannot put a number on. Today I would set up a simple survey before the first post.

I also built the portrait program around my own camera and my own weekends, and when I left the board it went with me. I would have trained two volunteers on the shoot and the copy in the first six months, so the format outlived the person who started it.

// Footnote

Why this one is on the site

Everything else on this site is measured in pipeline. This one is measured in Thor, who went home in August 2016, and in sixteen others like him. It is unpaid work for a small nonprofit in a town of twenty-five thousand people, and it is on a marketing leadership portfolio on purpose.

It is the clearest example I have of the thing I am best at. Nobody asked me to fix the shelter's reputation. They asked for social posts. The reputation was the reason the social posts were not working, and finding that, and fixing it with the shelter's own resources and a camera, is the same job I do now with a CRM and a budget. And when it worked, I did not stop at the town line. The shelter fifteen minutes away had the same animals waiting, so I went and did it there too. The stakes were different. The method was not.

And I am prouder of it than of most of what I have been paid for. Seventeen animals got a couch. A town that had written off its shelter started giving to it again. I am always going to be the person who stops for the turtle in the road. This is what that looks like with a marketing budget of zero.

// Outcomes

The results

17
hard-to-place animals adopted through Forever Home: 60%
year-over-year increase in donations: 4
magazine-cover adoption profiles that each ended in a home: 2
years on the board of a nonprofit I had no obligation to join

The full results

Hard-to-place animals adopted through Forever Home: 0 17
Year-over-year donations: baseline +60%
How the town saw the shelter: a place to get a pet a community resource with a pantry, vet discounts and spay and neuter help
Adoption profiles: text listings portrait-led magazine covers
Animals featured: the easy adoptions the longest residents first
Budget: $0 $0

What moved	From	To
Hard-to-place animals adopted through Forever Home	0	17
Year-over-year donations	baseline	+60%
How the town saw the shelter	a place to get a pet	a community resource with a pantry, vet discounts and spay and neuter help
Adoption profiles	text listings	portrait-led magazine covers
Animals featured	the easy adoptions	the longest residents first
Budget	$0	$0

// The stack

The tools

CANVA
PHOTOSHOP
LIGHTROOM
FACEBOOK
INSTAGRAM

// Proof

Proof

Thor. Adopted August 2016. The first cover, and the one that proved the format.
Oreo. Big eyes, wild hair, cute sweaters. Adopted October 2017.
Squigglez, Whitman County Humane Society. The format worked in Moscow, so I took it across the state line to Pullman. Adopted November 2017.
Foxtrot. The cover line did the work: "Can you help me find my home?"
Studio portraits, pointed at the longest residents rather than the easiest adoptions.
Same treatment for every animal, whether or not they were easy to place.
Not every portrait needed a backdrop.
The cats got covers too.