How to Find New Fosters in Your Community

PLEASE NOTE: This episode is from the 2025 Foster 50 Challenge, so some details and timing are out of date. For information on the 2026 Foster 50 Challenge, visit PEDIGREEFoundation.org/Foster50.

Tired of asking the same people over and over to foster? This episode is all about fresh recruitment ideas and proven ways to bring in new faces from all parts of your community.  

GUESTS:  

• Whitney Fang, Founding Executive Director, Hearts and Bones Rescue 
• Meaghan Colville, Founder and Director of Shelter Operations, Cincinnati Animal CARE Humane Society  
• Lauren Nickerson, Executive Director, Hawaii Island Humane Society 
• Sam Wolfman, Director of Behavior and Pathway Planning, Animal Welfare League of Arlington 

LINKS: 

• Foster Caregiver Recruitment resource collection
• Foster Caregiver Market Research Report
• Comprehensive Recruitment Plan
• Need more foster caregivers? These 6 questions can help! (3 min. read)

Transcript

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SPEAKER_02 0:00

Welcome to Foster 50, the audio playbook. I'm Kristen Hassan. And I'm Kelly Dewar. And today we are here to talk all about recruiting all the fosters you need. I wanted to just talk through this thing I think we both realized about foster early on. It had this ability to change things in the blink of an eye. And I will always go back to the story about Patty, who was a dog that we had had in the shelter for a couple of months. And her level of anxiety, she was just like she would try to bite at your feet, if I remember, and who just could not calm herself down. The first time I saw Patty, I was there for a playgroup training. They went through all the dogs and then somebody was like, well, should we try Patty? And they were like, oh, OK, bring her out. And so somebody went and got her. And when she came out the door with the caretaker, it looked like she was being kidnapped. She was so stressed and just frantic. And she went into playgroup and she was okay, just very, very unsocialized. And then one of the staff took her out for foster after we had tried everything in the shelter, all the quote behavioral modification in the shelter. And she stepped one paw off of the shelter property and turned into like the laziest dog in the world. At the time, my family was doing weekend foster. and we came in to get the dog we were planning to take home and the operations director who had taken her home came up to me and said hey can you can you please please take patty she does really well outside the shelter she just can't handle it and so we took her home and as described she was the laziest most loving dog My daughter had her wisdom teeth out and Patty was like her little heating pad for like three days. That was when we were, we could only foster on the weekends, but with Patty, we couldn't bring her back because she just did so poorly in the shelter and we ended up keeping her for about three weeks. We did everything we could to market her and she was adopted at the end of those three weeks. And then we came later to find that she had been locked in a hot car. I don't know why we didn't know that. I think the animal control notes were not tied to the record and came to find out she had been locked in a hot car and almost died. They had to break her out of the car. And so it all made a lot more sense why then when she was trapped in a cage, she would be so anxious. I think foster lets us connect the dogs to a story they're so decontextualized when they're in a shelter that you really know nothing about them and then if they come in a stray there's no way to get that history but that the foster allows us to almost build a little history for the dogs build a little bit of a self for the dogs i think you've learned that lesson over and over and over again right for sure there are so many things that we cannot see in the shelter The behavioral repertoire is just not the same as it is at home. This series is really meaningful to me, this podcast series we're doing, because... I so desperately want people to stop normalizing what the experience of animals in shelters really is and stop feeling okay about that. And I consult with dozens of shelters every year. I think I've caught hundreds of animal welfare workers. We've both been at this for more than a decade, teaching people coming into the movement how to do the work differently. And one of the frustrations I find is that we run into some of the same systemic challenges over and over and over again. And one of those that I really wanted to talk about today was recruitment of getting the helpers to come to the table and how do we actually create an environment where we bring helpers in and we make it really easy for them to help. Part of the Foster 50 Challenge, we're asking animal shelters and rescues to grow their programs and to think differently about them. But that all starts with how we talk to people in the first place. Studies show that word of mouth, people talking to people, is a particularly effective foster recruitment tool. Hearts and Bones Rescue, which is one of our nation's highest volume foster programs, uses a variety of approaches to foster recruitment successfully, including word of mouth. Here's Founding Executive Director Whitney Fang discussing the strategies

SPEAKER_03 5:08

that are gaining them the best return on investment. From what I'm hearing, there's kind of the standard methods and what I describe as grassroots methods. Both are equally effective, but they target completely different audiences. So I would encourage if you guys aren't already doing them to do both methods. Let's go through the standard methods first, since that seems to be kind of the obvious thing, right? Most people use volunteer match. Most people use social media, right? Working with your local shelter. Maybe there's a volunteer there at the shelter that you can convert. Those are still very effective strategies. That being said, the grassroots methods really have taken our ability to expand our fostering program a lot more. And let me go through some of those strategies that have really worked really well for us. The first is networking via places that have animals. So like doggy daycares, right? Vet clinics, right? In places that house dogs, because guess what? You already know what your baseline is, right? You know that people love dogs there or people love cats there, right? And so, you know, people with pets, so say they're bringing their dog to the vet clinic, right? And you have a flyer there that had, or like you talk to the receptionist in advance, go like, hey, we're XYZ rescue, right? And this is what we're trying to do. Then oftentimes they can do word of mouth and many flyers that we have posted everywhere, recruit vet techs, recruit vet assistants, recruit other people with pets, right? And that word of mouth piece, actually we've found oftentimes is even stronger than just a general social media call because guess what? All of us are on social media. All of us are flooding the waves and people who love dogs probably see this all the time, right? So how do you stand out It's networking within your own community and places that house dogs, places that work with dogs are going to be a great, great grassroots place to get started. The other piece of it with grassroots is also just having your existing fosters and volunteers network within their own networks. Right. So this is, of course, more of a pre-COVID strategy. But, you know, people talk about like water cooler talk or like when they're at work, you know. send out those flyers, have them print that, right? And then post that in their cafeteria at work, right? If you're at a large corporate company, right? If there's a bunch of people that gather in one place, oftentimes they'll probably know you as, oh, that's the dog lady, right? That's the cat person. And post that flyer up in there and they'll oftentimes come find you, right? My daughter loves dogs and they'll talk about their dog. It's like, well, guess what? You know, there's opportunities to foster. And that human connection through these grassroots methods oftentimes have been much more successful for us in recruiting fosters than just social media blasts. And don't get me wrong, those work too. And we do do those as well. But grassroots methods in particular have been ultra successful for us. The other piece that I would mention in terms of effective strategies to recruit foster caregivers, in terms of the advice I give, there's just kind of the three T's, so to speak. It's timeline, training, and transform, which is a little bit of the grassroots that I've talked about. But that's an easy way for me to remember, at least. It's creating a really positive experience for your current foster so that they will continue to spread the word about fostering, right? Timeline is that process. One critical piece, right? Do you want indefinite fosters until adoption? Are you fostering for transport? How about just two weeks to start, right? Just being extremely clear with what the timeline is. So, so important in terms of creating a good experience so that your fosters will advocate for you when they're also recruiting down the line. Training, of course, is the second piece of it, right? One-on-one training with new fosters, offering that upfront in your flyer, right? Every new foster gets training with a one-on-one training, a group training or whatever it is. Just be clear about what you're offering in your flyers, in your word of mouth conversations. Do a little elevator pitch that, you know, you can copy and paste an email and tell fosters to go through, you know, when they're having these conversations. And then the third T of course is the transform, right? That's the conversion of people in your community, donors, volunteers, you know, coworkers, things of that nature. to fostering and really encouraging temp foster signups. And what I mean by that's the transform piece, right? People are like, I can only foster for four days, right? And maybe that's fine, especially during Christmas, right? We all have these needs during Christmas when everyone is going on vacation, right? But oftentimes, again, if they have a good experience going back to the first two Ts, then you can transform them into standard fostering. And we've also seen that as a really, really big success. And you're like, oh, wow, it wasn't that bad this time, right? Give them that easier dog the first time, give them a good experience and they'll come back. And sometimes these guys become behavior fosters over time. So the three Ts is really key to the development of our foster program and with a big asterisk and highlight on the grassroots piece of it.

SPEAKER_02 10:16

i just moved to a new city and i'm having to find doctors and dentists and all the things you have to find when you move to a new city and it's it's been a lot as i've been thinking about this this podcast it's been a real lesson learned because first of all i want when i go to websites i want to have multiple ways to get started the ones that tell me i have to call them i immediately am like no way the ones that make me fill out a lot of paperwork in the beginning i'm like no way I've been reading Diffusion of Innovations and there you talk about the research on how innovations get diffused throughout society and two of the major things that are having people talking about it and making it easy for people to start. So the ability for a person to kind of dip their toe in the water before they jump in the pool, it is a major factor in whether people will try something and i think this is really important because short-term foster is that flexible opportunity my husband and i never thought we could take dogs home or cats for a long period of time we were like oh we both work you know and when the shelter started a weekend foster program we were like we can do that okay and then patty came And we realized that we actually can do this all during the week and became much longer term fosters. But one of the things that I've noticed is that a lot of people end up doing this kind of thing. When we were at Fairfax, there were 14 behavioral fosters and I surveyed them and it turns out that the 13 of them started as weekend fosters. Field trips are even easier. So giving people that range of options is really key to getting people to try it. One of the things we've heard in market research is that when people have uncertainty about foster, they don't want to try it. It's less comfortable for them to want to try it. And so giving them these low risk options can be just a total game changer. I'm the average person. I want to foster a pet. The first thing I'm going to do is Google it and find the websites of the organizations that offer foster. When you go to most foster pages and you're going to see something like, we need fosters, nobody really explains what that means. No one explains what fosters are needed, how long they're needed for. Or if they do, they're like, we need fosters for our kittens and it's a minimum commitment of four weeks. And you have to pass a background check and you have to have this application. Like they tell you all that up front. And instead, when I get excited about foster, it's when I see the pages that are like, you can show up in foster, sign up here. We'll contact you. We have multiple foster events. You can do the training online. You want to learn more. Here's some information in a video. And we have lots of ways you can foster. You can take a dog out for an afternoon. You can take some kittens home and bottle feed them. And here's why fostering is great. And here's some testimonials about people who have fostered. I think that it's probably one in 25 pages I see that have that marketing-focused foster message. And if you think about how we consume everything, it's testimonials. Everything you do is like, I'm looking at the ratings online. I'm looking at how many stars. I'm looking at who said this was a good thing to do or a good product. Kelly, can you talk a little bit about the do's and don'ts of recruitment on your website when it comes to foster? From your first page, make sure that it's clear that foster is important to you. If a person can go to your website and they look at your first page and they can go through it and have no idea that you need fosters or want fosters or fosters are awesome, then you're missing a huge opportunity. You need to be telling people from the first page of your website, fosters are really important here. And not only on your website, but also in your email signatures, in your newsletters, in your social media posts, making it... Very obvious that fosters are needed and they're valued by your organization. So it should be either in the main menu or in like the first drop down list. You should have a foster landing page where it explains what the foster program is and why you need fosters and has an online sign up. Ideally, people can sign up either online or in person. The tone of the foster landing page needs to welcome people in. It's not just telling them how to sign up. It's actually getting them excited. Like I know there are certain animals that I can take home that'll fit into my life pretty well. And I think that what people, when people think about fostering, they think about, oh gosh, I have pets. I don't, I can't keep my animals separate or I have a job. But what I think people don't realize is that there are fosters that can fit into almost any lifestyle and including, I think weekends and overnights are the, what did you call it? The gateway drug to fostering. Yes. Letting people take home an animal for a little while and then having them bring back some notes on that animal is really invaluable. And shelters often say no to this stuff. So I think that we have to just say, Any opportunity to get an animal out for any amount of time is a good thing. Yes, absolutely. So we have research that shows that dogs who go on field trips are five times more likely to be adopted. And dogs who go on sleepovers are 14 times more likely to be adopted. And this is because we get to know the dogs. Nobody wants to take the risk of taking a very large dog who nobody knows and who's acting weird in the kennel. But if they've seen a picture of this dog snoozing on somebody's couch and you have some information on the way that they behave in a home and people that potentially the doctor could even talk to. It's a completely different game. People are a lot more likely to try it. One of the things I think is really, really important here is social proof. I was talking with a foster coordinator from a very large shelter about five years ago, and he was asking me, what do we do to get more Fosters? And we talked for a little while, and I said I'd call them back. So I looked at their Facebook page. I went through the whole thing and went through a month of it to see how often are they talking about Foster? Because when people see others who are like them talking about doing something, it makes it much more comfortable for them to try it. That organization... I believe he had said that they got in maybe 10 foster applications in a month, which was not even close to enough because the shelter was very, very large. They spoke about foster in zero posts, which got me thinking, I need to look at the organizations that have the biggest foster programs. So I did and went through all of them for a month. Turns out that these organizations are talking about foster in 30% on average of their social media posts and communications. They're talking about it more than once a day. they're working it in they're not just doing pleas for fosters they're saying so and so is available for adoption and here's what his foster said about him working it in so that it's just part of the the language and supporters get used to it and it becomes the norm in their community what was awesome was last week i talked to the same guy and i'm not gonna cry Their organization now is doing some of the best work in talking about foster on social media that I've ever seen. They placed 6,000 pets in foster last year. And can you say what shelter that was? The Animal Foundation. Animal Foundation in Las Vegas? Yes. And I guess, Kelly, why does that make you want to cry? What comes to your heart and mind when you say those words? Oh my gosh. Just that the change was so easy to make and it made, makes such a huge difference to thousands of pets every year. I mean, it wasn't a massive change. It was just a little bit of being creative and it really made a huge difference and it's saving lives. Cincinnati Animal Care Humane Society started their foster program from scratch in 2020. Their program, particularly dog foster, grew incredibly fast. Nearly 1,000 dogs were placed during 2021, and now they place thousands of dogs into foster homes each year. Next, we'll hear from Megan Colville, their founder and director of shelter operations, about how they've created a huge community of foster caregivers.

SPEAKER_01 18:58

Yeah, I think for us here in Cincinnati, the biggest thing that we've done with recruitment is that fostering is everywhere for us. Whether we're on social media, we're on the news, we're sending an email out, we're sending out fundraising information. Pretty much anything that we are doing or saying or writing or mailing or sending has foster in it. That was a big transition for us. Probably about a year in. We're pretty new. We're about three years old in Cincinnati. Fostering was relatively new to our community, but just getting it in front of as many people as possible has been important. And then also just staying flexible. Fostering can kind of sound scary. For us, we're all like, well, everyone on here obviously understands what fostering is, but not everybody does. And So just being flexible and meeting people with whatever they can provide, whether it's a short-term foster. Our team has stayed late because somebody couldn't pick up during our hours. We'll kind of bend over backwards to make sure that if somebody is willing to put the time and work in, we're willing to help them. And then one other cool thing, just with like direct mix, which I know some people kind of get away from or think it's a little pricey. We were able to do a heat map and figure out kind of what parts of our community We're not as engaged with fostering. And if you go to the USPS website, they will mail stuff for you and they'll do it for just pennies. But we've got about 3000 people on our foster Facebook page. People have asked how we did that. I can actually say, I don't know. It caught some energy and some momentum early on. And so it's very active. And so getting posts up on the Facebook page for some organizations wouldn't work, but because ours is so active, it does work pretty well. One thing that we started doing this fall, I think like a lot of shelters were experiencing a kind of a decrease in foster engagement. I know a lot of people are experiencing a decrease in adoptions. With our fosters, we started making individual phone calls and reaching out to individuals. That relationship building is just huge. I think it was mentioned by Whitney earlier, just getting in front of people and having those conversations are really important. It's easy to kind of breeze by a Facebook post or breeze by a, you know, not open an email, but when you're actually calling and, and, and really in some ways singling people out in a good way, telling them that you did such a great job with that last litter of kittens. We would really love for you to come in and help with this litter as well. People feel good about that. And a couple other things we've been doing is getting some on-deck teams ready to go. So we're trying to turn our focus more to specialized fostering rather than just general fostering so we can go directly to the people that we know that we need And another thing that we do is we have a life-saving update that goes out each week, and that is our list of our most urgent dogs. A lot of them are bigger dogs. So a lot of our fosters are signed up for that update, and they can see immediately who's most in need, who's the most urgent to get out of the building, either for a short-term foster, obviously long-term is great, but just again, building those relationships is probably the biggest way to get please answered. with your foster base.

SPEAKER_02 22:13

Rule number one, make all of your volunteers automatic fosters. Volunteers are your number one group of potential fosters for your longer stay dogs. Why is that? Because they know them and they love them and they want to do something to help them. Enroll them as fosters as well so that when you are recruiting for fosters, they're also getting those emails. Also letting volunteers know with a big sign in the office, if you'd like to take home one of these animals for foster, just let us know and you can take them home today. They know the pets and they have that emotional connection with individual pets. I remember vividly volunteering in this shelter and seeing dogs go downhill and But knowing that when my current foster was adopted, I was going to take them home. We need to start kind of asking everybody, and this goes for what's happening in our shelter too. In your shelter, you can have signs up that say, like, I'm available for foster. Ask me about fostering. You can have a QR code that lets people sign up to foster right there. But we know that if you go to your... Average, middle-sized shelter, a large shelter, you know that about half the people are going to walk out of the shelter without adopting a pet for a number of reasons. But if we offer them foster as an alternative, or we offer, some people call it a trial adoption, foster to adopt, whatever it is that we can capture more of those folks and get them to take home an animal. Here's Lauren Nickerson, Executive Director of Hawaii Island Humane Society, to tell us a little about their successful Foster to Adopt program.

SPEAKER_00 23:53

Our Foster to Adopt program was really born out of innovation. So when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March of 2020, we realized that we would have to, like all shelters, close our doors to the public. And immediately that night, I didn't sleep all night and I had a panic of how are we going to get the animals out? And so we literally launched our foster to adopt program overnight as a means to get our animals out the door and into homes. At that time in March of 2020, we made every single animal eligible for foster to adopt. So kittens and puppies were included in this. As a pilot, it started as a two-week period, and all adoptions had to be finalized in person. So we had some of these interesting details that we have since learned from. As the program proved to be successful, we were seeing animals go out the door. We decided to stick with the program. From October to December of 2020, we placed 182 animals in foster to adopt. So that is just that last quarter of the year. The changes that we have made to the program since then is that it is reserved for adult animals ages six months and older is really who the target population is, we will have behavior cases that are potentially under socialized puppies that are potentially four to five months old, we will make exceptions and allow them to be eligible on a case by case basis for foster to adopt.

SPEAKER_02 25:22

Here's a great technique for engaging with fosters and matching dogs up with fosters from Sam Wolfman, Director of Behavior and Pathway Planning at the Animal Welfare League of Arlington.

SPEAKER_04 25:33

I'm Sam Wolfman. I'm from the Animal Welfare League of Arlington. We're located in the DC area. When we were doing our emails and sending out our pleas and trying to match as best as possible in that moment, it still wasn't working for us because people are just seeing a picture. And they're hearing all the things and they're like, yeah, well, they see the dog in the kennel and a lot of dogs' kennel presentation is not great. And I know that's true of a lot of shelters. So we could say as much as we want about the dog and say, this dog would be perfect for your household. And if the dog is barking in the front of the kennel, they're like, I don't know about that. What we wanted to do was find a low-cost way to bring people into the building and start making connections with dogs again. We started doing these BYOB events. We do the event once a month. We send out an invitation that people are welcome to RSVP to. We have people come in. They can bring their own drinks. It doesn't have to be alcohol. We do have the ability to purchase some things for the event, but you can always do this at very, very low cost. People can always bring their own stuff. They're welcome to bring snacks. We ask people to leave their kids and dogs at home. We also get a head count on who is able to take a dog home right away. It's not a requirement, but it helps us kind of be prepared before the event. We have bags of basic supplies. ready to go for people who can take home the same day. We have foster case managers who come here and help work the event, and they can talk about their past experiences fostering as well. Our training and behavior team usually participates. Usually we have a couple handlers here. We have a dog runner. We're very blessed to have this room where there's two doors. So one is our incoming door, one is our outcoming. We also have an X-pen set up for the initial dog coming in so that it's not overwhelmed for the dog. We have everybody sitting again, so it's not super overwhelming. We're basically highlighting our favorite things, the good things first, then we talk about their history and then we say now like the dog has adjusted it's time for you guys to meet the dog so get your treats out and we open the gates and the dog just gets to hang out and in honestly it doesn't matter what we talk about with the dog people are so engaged in the fact that there's an animal in the room that they're just like oh my god like this is awesome and so we ask oh do you have further questions about this animal while he's rolling around we get to learn more about the animal too in the moment because if they're a little nervous of like when the gates open it's like okay so let's all just you know turn our bodies and you know we'll drop some treats on the ground like no eye contact and we coach in the moment we pass out treats for them to give to the dog once we finally do the full introduction usually we have at least four people take home same day which is fantastic for us and then the rest of the people can usually pick up during the week overall it's been really fun i think that the staff who have participated think it's like awesome the volunteers love it and the fosters have a really good time we have a lot of repeat people coming.

SPEAKER_02 28:40

How could it look different, Kelly, if we were recruiting fosters continuously from the public? How do shelters do that? One of the things that they do in child welfare is create comprehensive recruitment plans. So they plan out how they're going to recruit all year round. I think this is really important for larger foster programs now because you'll be able to have a steady stream of new fosters signing up. You'll want to make a plan for things like word of mouth recruitment, signage for your lobby. How often are you going to solicit local news attention? Website. social media, all of the different areas where you can be recruiting fosters. But I think we're just not asking the public. And this goes back to the bigger conversation of barriers. Like if we're not just saying, show up and foster, Come on in. You can foster a pet today. If we're not doing that, we're making it too hard. Like I think shelters should have signs in their shelter that say, ask, ask about fostering or take home a foster pet today. They should indicate which kennels are available. They should, Right. For the Foster 50 Challenge, we're awarding prizes and grants based on innovation and fostering. One of those areas of innovation is recruitment. So we're hoping to see participating shelters think of all kinds of new ways to recruit fosters. Maybe it's through recruiting stray pet finders. Maybe it's through a massive public campaign to recruit fosters. But the recruitment is the first step to getting it right. Because I think the first thing we hear is we can't find fosters. When you and I present, I think almost every time the first thing is, well, we can't find enough fosters. Nobody's willing to foster. No one wants to foster these dogs. So we're really hoping to see some really cool innovation in this area for the Foster 50 Challenge. Absolutely. And I will put a couple of finder to foster agreements in the show notes in case you need one. Yeah, so we have a couple sample agreements as examples that you can use, but this is one of the lowest risk things you can do as well. And when we are looking at shelters euthanizing for space or doubling up kennels because they're over capacity, this is one way to maintain capacity for care, prevent euthanasia for space, and keep animals that have homes in homes until they can be reunited with their owners.

UNKNOWN 31:27

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 31:28

I want to talk specifically about recruiting from an existing body of people versus recruiting for the public. So we promise whether you're in a rural, urban, suburban community, regardless of the demographics, the economics, the geography, you can find all the fosters you need. In our next episode, we'll be talking about getting pets adopted from foster homes. Finn Dowling and I will be available to give you personalized support in growing your foster program every Monday in May 2025 during our office hours, 12 p.m. PT, 3 p.m. ET. Thank you all so much for listening to today's podcast.