October 17, 2010 | Read Time: 4 minutes
Best Friends Animal Society, in Kanab, Utah, rescues abused, neglected, and abandoned pets. Yet the dogs and cats featured in photograph after photograph on the group’s Web site, fund-raising appeals, and promotional materials all look happy and healthy, if not also adorable.
“In this field, the traditional way of doing business is to rally support by raising people’s guilt with horrible pictures of abused animals,” says Gregory Castle, Best Friends chief executive, and one of its co-founders. “Our philosophy from the start was to have a positive approach, to emphasize the value and pleasure pet animals bring into people’s lives, and, yes, also their cuteness.”
That strategy appears to have served the 26-year-old group well, especially in recent years as donations to Best Friends have more than doubled from 2003 to 2009. An 18-percent jump in giving last year, to $43.5-million, put Best Friends on The Chronicle’s Philanthropy 400 list for the first time, ranking No. 389 among the organizations that raise the most from private sources.
But floppy ears and balls of fur aren’t the only things behind the group’s fund-raising success. Five years ago, Best Friends began restructuring and professionalizing its operations, hiring experienced top staff members, inviting new trustees onto its board, and putting major-gifts fund raisers in full-time positions in three cities around the country. Until then, the organization’s executive staff and board had been dominated by its founders—a group of about 25 friends passionately devoted to animals but not all necessarily experienced at running a growing nonprofit organization.
Grass-Roots Beginnings
In the early years, the group’s founders would fan out across the West and Southwest, setting up tables in shopping malls and other high foot-traffic areas to sign up members and collect donations. It took as many as seven years, but the group collected about 25,000 names of potential supporters and started reaching out to them with a newsletter.
Now Best Friends has nearly 300,000 active donors and a direct-mail fund-raising operation that brought in more than $20-million last year. Gifts of $5,000 or more accounted for $4.6-million in revenue in 2009, up from $460,000 in 2007. And the group’s efforts to attract planned gifts, which started just five years ago, garnered $12.2-million in 2009, mostly from bequests, including those made through an arrangement whereby supporters can bequeath not only money but also the responsibility to take care of their animals after the pet owners die. Although Best Friends did post a record year in private support last year over all, the recession did appear to put a dent in total annual donations from individuals, which declined on average by about 2 percent per donor. At the same time, though, the group was able to persuade 2,000 more donors to make monthly gifts after lowering the minimum monthly gift from $20 to $5. So far this year, Best Friends has attracted another 2,000 new monthly givers.
Scenic Sanctuary
Best Friends had set what staff members considered to be a conservative fund-raising goal for this year—$42.3-million— and it expects to hit that mark within the next couple months.
The group’s mission, on the other hand—fine-tuned and expanded last year—is anything but moderate. The organization’s goal—and now trademarked phrase—is “No More Homeless Pets.” To get there, Best Friends is working with a growing network of animal groups around the country, promoting pet adoption, spay-and-neuter programs, and the humane treatment of animals.
The centerpiece of the organization’s work is its sanctuary, a 3,700-acre facility sprawled through the red-rock landscape of the group’s headquarters in southern Utah, where it tends a couple thousand animals each day. The sanctuary was featured recently in a National Geographic television series, called DogTown, which chronicled how Best Friends took in nearly two dozen of the rescued pit bulls from the dogfighting operation run by the professional football player Michael Vick.
Terri Shoemaker, head of direct-marketing efforts at Best Friends, says the television show inspired more people to visit the sanctuary. And, she says, those visitors—now up to roughly 33,000 a year—typically become dedicated donors.
“It’s hard to come here and not get hooked-on the animals, on the scenery, on the work we do,” Ms. Shoemaker says.
Robert and Marilyn Richards, of North Bend, Wash., first got hooked on Best Friends when they volunteered to help the group with its search, rescue, and adoption efforts in and around New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
The couple volunteered for 11 days at a Best Friends temporary rescue shelter in Mississippi and then followed up with their first donation to the group. Not long after, the Richards visited the Utah sanctuary.
“What I saw in both places was incredible passion coupled with incredible efficiency, professionalism, and skill,” says Mr. Richards, a retired banker. “That is the kind of organization, like the kind of business, that I would invest in and continue to invest in.”
