2014 is shaping up to be a big year for the blog. In addition to continuing to feature 90%+ and Worth Watching communities, I’m working on a couple of special projects.
The first project is a big numbers crunch on the communities listed in the right sidebar. There is no universally recognized way for shelters to report their statistics, and that means that statistics vary widely in consistency and completeness. Even so, I have quite a bit of data now on public shelters that are saving 90% or more of their intake, and it’s a good sample size to start asking some questions about what makes these shelters so successful. For example, what type of management structure is most common in successful public shelters? What public shelters are most successful at return-to-owner, and how do they do it? Is human population a limiting factor for adoptions in a typical community? Do communities with managed intake policies have higher stray intake? What is the rate of growth of the number of 90%+ communities? I hope to be able to present some data on these issues and more as the year goes on.
The second new project for 2014 is a book I’m working on with a couple of well-known No Kill advocates. The book will have shelter stories and much more! We’re very excited about this project and hope to have the book available by the end of the year.
A couple of housekeeping notes: I’ve added a “Running Total” page to keep up with the number of individual shelters in the 90%+ communities, the population served, and the number of Worth Watching public shelters. As for 2014 updates, I will be doing revisions of each existing blog post instead of supplemental posts. Things change rapidly in the shelter world, and doing a revised post will allow me to fix broken links and update general information as well as statistics. The result of an update will be that the old post disappears. The new post will list the date of the original post at the end.
I’d like to thank everyone who helped me with the blog in 2013. Your tips, e-mails, and comments were appreciated, so please keep them coming.
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