Summer is almost over—although it doesn’t feel like it here in Texas—and the holiday season is about to start, which allows for plenty of fun campaigns starring the shelter dogs. Think Howl-o-ween and Black Dog Friday, dogs wearing costumes and posing with winter-ready scarves, and maybe some new green-screen adventures of the dogs going on vacation (accepting destination suggestions now).

Before planning any campaigns in detail and creating content for them, I had to first do what I had so enthusiastically announced in an earlier post about taking my marketing of the shelter dogs to the next level: dive into analytics.

The Platform

I outlined a lot of big plans for marketing shelter dogs in my initial post, but as of right now, I have access to (and, admittedly, time for) only one channel: the shelter volunteers’ Facebook page. So, I am starting with Facebook and will go from there.

The Team

Because I am describing my campaign plans, my ideas, and my experiences here, you may get the impression that this whole marketing-shelter-dogs adventure is a one-woman show. In the spirit of transparency and to not take credit that I don’t deserve, let me clarify: It is not. I am just one of many team members behind the volunteer page, and everyone brings something different to the table that adds value and helps achieve the goal of getting the shelter’s dogs adopted. We have early-morning posters, weekend content creators, late-night storytellers, afternoon updaters, and evening uploaders—and I am incredibly honored to be a part of that amazingly dedicated team.

I am documenting and sharing my shelter dog marketing experiences here in the hope of sparking an open conversation that leads to the exchange of ideas and ultimately to more dogs finding those coveted forever homes. Both in my professional life and in my volunteer endeavors, I believe teamwork is key to achieving the kind of success that exceeds expectations and makes a real difference. No one, in any setting I can imagine, benefits from a Game of Thrones–like approach to getting a job done.

So, if you’re following my Marketing Shelter Dogs series of posts, I hope you find inspiration for your own (shelter) campaigns and, in turn, share your feedback with me.

The Analytics Data

This week, I finally dove into Facebook Insights for the volunteers’ page and looked at the posts from the past two weeks. Now, I know two weeks isn’t exactly representative, and I won’t base all future content creation on that data, but looking at the performance of content posted over the course of a couple of weeks did provide some interesting insights.

Facebook identified the post types that performed best, and unsurprisingly, the most successful posts were the ones that included photos, followed by those that included videos. But even for this initial audit, I wanted to dig a bit deeper, so I decided to focus on post reach and engagement in two categories: (1) reach over 1k and (2) reach over 5k.

The posts that reached over one thousand but fewer than five thousand people contained one of the following:

• pleas for shares/donations for medical treatment
• personal stories about the dogs
• updates about dogs being adopted/rescued
• funny memes
• photos of dogs with people
• stories about urgent dogs

The posts that reached over five thousand people contained one of the following:

• sad, personal stories about the dogs
• stories about urgent dogs + their photos with people

Reaching people is key to getting shelter dogs adopted, and not everyone who sees a dog’s post and winds up adopting will first engage with the post, but engagement is what we need to reach more people and to really boost the dogs’ social media exposure and chances at finding their forever homes.

Some of the above-listed types of posts reached a lot of people, but they didn’t get much engagement—to my disappointment, the funny memes didn’t perform as well as I had expected. However, there was one clear winner in terms of reach AND engagement: the posts that featured stories about urgent dogs and included photos of those dogs with people.

The Takeway

Besides showing which posts performed best, Facebook Insights also identified when our audience is online, so we can target specific times to post from now on. This may impact the performance of individual posts, of course, but it is clear that one post type performed better than others overall and that is worth monitoring over the next few weeks and months.

Although the stories about urgent dogs along with photos of them together with people performed best, the other post types are still extremely valuable. My theory is that no one wants to see only sad posts and that without the happy updates and funny content in between the emotional, heartstring-tugging stories, the page would lose followers and not reach as many people in moments when it really counts and when the dogs depend on every view, like, and share.

So, for now: more posting and more digging through data.

Marketing Shelter Stories Weatherford Shelter