United Hope for Animals

I had created a blog earlier, never posted anything (no surprises there) and finally figured out how to delete it - surprisingly non-intuitive. This blog should have a longer lifespan because it is a blog with a purpose.

I have involved myself with a local animal rescue group United Hope for Animals. I have never had a pet and when I began my volunteering about 2+ months ago, I had no strong sense of mission about animal rescue. There were a variety of other motivations - a general desire for the volunteer experience, a conviction that there must be something I am good at that I could contribute to a worthwhile cause, a strong desire to do some hands on work with animals - arising mainly from countless hours of watching animal planet, etc. Volunteermatch was a good resource - the logical choice would have been to help out at the Pasadena Humane Society which is very close to my residence, but their volunteer page never seems to have any openings!! The only statement on the page seems to be that they have enough volunteers and the website visitor should check back after a couple of months.


I have always fancied myself perhaps incorrectly as a 'photographer' and I thought animal photography for adoption purposes was a better use of my time in addition to routine photography on vacations and other occasions. I have also begun to appreciate the challenges facing non-profit organizations especially in the area of fundraising. I have absolutely no experience with non-profits but educating myself about fundraising fundamentals seems to be worthwhile not just for this volunteering experience but in general as a 'management' challenge.

The shelter dogs we photograph are uploaded on Petfinder, 1-800-Save-a-pet, and the UHA website - here and here. With a distributed and somewhat decentralized pool of people volunteering their time, it seems impractical to create a tracking mechanism that will allow us to evaluate which of these sites is generating the most adoptions or even evaluate the ratio of adoptions that take place by people directly visiting the shelter and falling in love vs visiting a website looking for a pet to adopt. I am sure there are many books that claim to teach you about leveraging the power of the internet, but I am skeptical of their value especially in this context.

A few ideas I have tried out so far are listed below - comments and additional suggestions are welcome!

• Creating a flickr photostream and uploading photographs that are of sufficiently good quality to be of interest to a flickr regular.
• Joining various flickr pools (Adoptable Pets, Looking for a home, RescueMe) that promote adoptable pets
• This blog

Interestingly, the photos from flickr have started getting featured in other blogs, although I don't know the readership of those blogs. Leslie from cuterbythehour.com has featured two of my photos (Curly, Ollie), and Terry Bain has featured three of my photos to date (Curly, Destiny, Rocky) on his website and one (Sissy Lala) on his blog.


More later.