Wisc. Humane Society Raises $12,000 With Custom Portraits of Donors’ Pets

The classroom in the Wisconsin Humane Society’s Milwaukee office is usually reserved for school field trips and staff training. Last Tuesday, it looked more like a kindergarten art room, with crayons, markers, colored pencils, and stacks of paper covering the tables.

“We have a pool of staff and volunteers standing by, eager to turn your animal into a timeless work of art (or at least make you laugh),” the group posted on its Facebook page. During the fundraising campaign, the organization offered to create custom portraits of the pets of donors who gave at least $15.

About 50 volunteers and staff, some of them more artistically inclined than others, assembled to create the portraits.

“It was an absolute blast watching crayon-wielding adults struggle to make art out of digital pictures,” Angela Speed, the organization’s vice president for communications, said in an email. “Although we had a few professional artists helping, you can tell that we don’t have many art majors among us!”

5 Languages

The campaign quickly went viral. By the next afternoon, the Humane Society had received 832 photo submissions and raised more than $12,000. The group added an update to the original post to stop further pet pics from flowing in. Staff and volunteers are still working on finishing the drawings.

Fundraisers haven’t had a chance to dig into the data yet, but Speed estimates that about half of the submissions came from outside southeastern Wisconsin. (Plus, when donors give through Facebook, charities don’t receive donor data, so the group may never know for sure.) But Speed says the shelter and rescue group, which serves 40,000 animals annually, was tagged in Facebook posts written in at least five languages and was shared in countries including Canada and Ukraine.

The campaign was inspired by a similar drive run by Barcs, an animal shelter and rescue group in Baltimore. The Wisconsin Humane Society’s marketing manager got in touch with the Baltimore shelter, which offered guidance about doing the fundraiser.

Speed isn’t sure her organization can replicate the viral success of last week’s campaign, “but we’re already talking about what we could do to make it even more successful and streamlined if we decide to do it again,” she said.

Some staff had to push some other work back for a couple days, she said, “but it was totally worth it.”