How a ‘no-brainer’ Facebook push helped a Sacramento animal shelter boost save rates

From pet-tle bell workouts, weather reports on cat-egory five purr-icanes and donning a yellow leotard as Catman, the Front Street Animal Shelter is trying to go viral for all the right reasons.

The Front Street Animal Shelter is seeing a surge in save rates, which have soared from 20 percent in previous years to 85 percent in 2019. The shelter categorizes an animal as saved when it has been adopted to a new home, returned to its previous home, taken in by another shelter or when a stray animal has been fixed.

The shelter attributes this success to its adoption of Facebook seven years ago. The animal welfare organization has accumulated nearly 200,000 followers and millions of video views.

“I think Facebook was basically invented for cute cat and dog videos, so being an animal shelter, even though we face a lot of struggles, we also have animals and animals are one of the most marketable things in the world,” said shelter public information coordinatorRyan Hinderman. “It was sort of a no-brainer as far as using social media to promote all the different things we do to save lives.”

According to Hinderman, the shelter’s biggest obstacle has been overcrowding. The decades-old space, which Hinderman says was not built as a life-saving shelter, sees an influx of 10,000 animals each year. The shelter was in danger of shutting its doors in 2012, when Sacramento considered outsourcing animal care services to a nonprofit organization.

In addition to Facebook, the shelter has found success in reuniting pets with owners through Lost2Found, an automated text messaging system which nabbed the shelter a $250,000 investment from the Petco Foundation’s “Innovation Showdown” in 2018.

The shelter has also focused its adoption and reunification efforts through platforms such as Craigslist and Nextdoor which are helmed by the shelter’s Sacramento Missing Animal Response Team, also known as SMART.

“Facebook is definitely been the best platform for us, because it’s very focused on storytelling, which we do a lot of,” Hinderman said. “Twitter we use as well, though not nearly as much. Twitter moves a bit faster and the video length limit and character length limits are lower, which means it can be a bit harder to tell the full stories we’re trying to tell, but after Facebook our Instagram page is growing really quickly. We have over 30,000 Instagram followers now.”

The shelter in 2017 shared the story of Quinn Scharn, a teenager who’d lost his right leg to cancer and had been asking his mother for a three-legged companion for more than two years. Then they caught wind of a canine amputee named Logan.

The video capturing the match was selected by Petco from a pool of 3,500 entries depicting adoption stories, garnering the shelter a $100,000 award.

“My kind of approach to social media is that emotions create motion, and that motion being liking, sharing and commenting,” Hinderman said. “If you’re just posting a picture of an animal that’s not really creating any emotion or engagement, there’s nothing specifically that’s capturing details. Typically people need details that kind of inspire them to share or to give this animal a chance.”

Hinderman said that the most popular video the shelter has produced was in 2016. It featured a woman who agreed to pay for adoptions throughout the holiday season. The video generated 13 million views and may have inspired similar philanthropy locally and nationally as the shelter has employed fee-free adoptions on several occassions since, with Coors Light recently announcing an initiative to reimburse 1,000 adopters $100 through Feb. 21.

Hinderman said that he and the rest of the team at the Front Street Animal Shelter are continuing to use any means at their disposal to share the stories of the animals in their charge, with hopes of continued success – which has, at times, meant being a good sport.

Hinderman, who began working for the shelter in five years ago, has exercised humility as well as his social media skills in attempts to catch the public eye. Hinderman has donned a yellow leotard to personify the hero Catman and acted as a meteorologist combating an influx of kittens, which was attributed to a cat-egory five purr-icane, Hinderman says.

“The shelter used to really have a bad reputation,” he said. “We have longtime workers who used to tell people that they worked for Front Street and people would say, ‘Oh, how do you work there?’ And now when people find out that someone works there they reply, ‘Oh, you get to work there.’ There’s really been a change in perception both internally and externally, and we have a lot of pride in what we do.”

This story was originally published February 10, 2020 at 5:00 AM.