3/27/20
The most important message I’ve ever sent to our customers
In moments of true crisis, peers will call your actions paranoid and alarmist. In hindsight, they’ll call them inadequate.
In animal welfare, we haven’t seen anything like this in the last ten years, maybe longer. The twin blows of the COVID-19 virus and an oil price war are going to change all of your organizations forever.
The stock market is still falling, despite a coordinated federal response, and the virus continues to spread, despite first-in-a-lifetime societal responses of shelter-in-place and reduction of non-essential travel. Here’s what’s going to happen to you:
- Donations are going to fall off precipitously -- quickly creating a massive hole in your operating budget.
- Unemployment could hit 30% before summer -- your intakes are going to rise rapidly as people move and have to relinquish animals.
- Adoptions will fall initially, and then pick up, but not enough to match your increase in intake. This will drive your Length of Stay and animal population up, and for many of you, your Live Release Rate down. Your ability to leverage and grow foster networks will be the difference between a small and large change here.
It’s not my place, here anyway, to make organizational recommendations, but if you are interested, please email us at help@shelterluv.com and we can add you to a working group.
Here is What Shelterluv is Doing For You:
- We’re going to be calling many of you who are not yet getting everything you can out of our donation boosting and cost saving features to help you get the most from them.
- We’re digging into our foster functionality, start to finish. We are going to be looking for ways to achieve foster at scale so you can survive this surge in in-care animal population. We will also be digging into best practices to try to help those of you looking to grow that function now.
- We’re re-examining donation capture, looking at various ways we can help encourage even more donations from the adopters (present and past) still able to donate. This will be done to try to offset some of the donation drop you will experience elsewhere.
- We have always worked to drive down the price of our software. Going forward we will be looking even more aggressively at things that we can use to offset our costs, so we can continue to employ the best engineers, product managers, and support staff to deliver the best software at a lower and lower price to you.
As always, please do reach out to me and anyone else here with questions, comments, and suggestions.
Thinking of all of you, and hoping that you, your loved ones, and the animals in your care are safe.
Greg