Practice Event Planning for Lucky You Animal Rescue

Event Planning Session Questions

• The overall purpose of my event is to encourage people to adopt and to spread awareness about spaying and neutering their pets. It is a combination of a fun event, a fundraiser, and a food drive. We will be letting potential adopters meet that cats and processing adoptions as well as giving a raffle ticket for every can of food donated.
• The event is for both the audience and the organization. Lucky You! Animal Rescue relies heavily on donations so the collection of food, as well as monetary donations, will help the rescue save more cats. It also benefits the audience, which in this case is anyone who is interested in adopting a cat or who donates and could win a raffle.
• Financial success is not important for this specific event. We are not making any type of monetary investment to hold this event, so even if no cats get adopted and not much food is donated, the event could still be successful due to customers in the store becoming aware of who we are.
• We will be spreading awareness of the importance of spaying and neutering your pets, both cats and dogs, as well as community cats to help control the outdoor cat population. We can also teach them more about the benefits of volunteering, fostering or adopting and what they can personally do to make a difference.
• I chose this specific store location as it has more room than one of the other stores we do events at and more foot traffic than the other store where we have a habitat. Money is not an issue and people likely will not be traveling from very far.
• We have adoption events almost every weekend and have cats at two pet stores, so the date is very flexible for this kind of event. I will be holding it on one or two days of a weekend in September depending on which days the most volunteers and fosters have availability.
• Our target audience is anyone who is interested in adopting a cat or learning more about the world of animal rescue and how they can get involved. For the most part, these are like-minded people or people who have an interest (or requirement) in volunteering.
• Fosters would want to attend this event to get their cats and kittens some exposure, while the general public would want to attend to see some cute cats and try and find one that is perfect for their family.
• The event is optional and no one will be paying.
• This is a free event. There is no cost for registration, travel, lodging, etc. No one will be coming from far away so there is no need to take that into consideration.
• We do not have a budget. We should not need to spend anything on this event as we are just setting up the cats so they can be seen by potential adopters.
• The space we are using is an area of a local Petco where we already have a habitat for cats that are for adoption.
• We will be reaching out to local businesses to make donations that can be prizes for the people who make a donation to our food drive. These could be gift certificates, tickets to sports games, merchandise, and more. This is not necessarily a source of funding, just a way to encourage more people to donate.
• In a sense, this is a repeat event. We have informal adoption events all the time, as well as more formal ones almost every weekend. This one is different as we will be having the raffles and hope to get more foster parents and volunteers to attend at one time. Each event can vary greatly in terms of the number of applications submitted or cats adopted due to the day of the event and anything else that may possibly be going on, including weather, travel, other commitments, etc. The only thing that needs to be done differently is asking the volunteers when they are available and then scheduling the event once we have an estimated number of volunteers and fosters as it is sometimes hard to get a lot of people to bring their cats.
• Some of our participants could be repeats who have previously adopted or have seen some of our cats but haven’t found the perfect one yet. Others could be people who like our Facebook page but have not yet been to an adoption event. The third type of participant is someone who happens to be shopping in the store and sees that we are holding an event.
• Networking is not an important component of this event.
• An exhibit, in a typical sense, is not required, but we will have a table set up with the adoption applications, volunteer applications, and some information on rescue, spay/neuter, and TNR.
• We do have cats at another store that isn’t too far away so if someone doesn’t find what they are looking for, we can direct them to the other store or to our Facebook page.
• We should use reusable or recyclable dishes for food and water when the cats are in their crates. We can also limit the number of paper applications and pamphlets that we hand out and instead direct them to our online application or websites/social media accounts that have good information.
• Our rescue focuses on the importance of helping the community. We are not a national organization where you can not see what happens to your donations. We are a close-knit group of people and are very open about what our expenses are. We make an effort to rescue cats from local owners who are looking to rehome them, people who found them nearby or local shelters that are low on space. This is not a normal CSR since we aren’t using resources for this specific event.
• We do not have specific environmental standards, but they are not needed for this event.

Goals and Objectives

The goals of this adoption event are to…

• Educate the public about animal rescue, including the benefits of spaying/neutering cats and dogs and trap-neuter-release programs for feral or community cats
• Find adoptive homes for some of the cats and kittens currently in foster care
• Collect cans of wet food in exchange for entries into raffles
• Recruit new volunteers and foster parents to help with our mission

Objectives for this event:

• Receive donations from five or more different businesses for the raffles with at least three weeks remaining until the event.
• Design and print two different quarter-page handouts with information and resources related to spay/neuter and TNR at least two weeks before the event
• Two weeks before the event, choose a qualified volunteer(s) to be at the table to speak about TNR throughout the day.
• Have at least 50 people marked “interested” on the Facebook event page two weeks before the event.
• With a week or more remaining until the event, decorate a box for the canned food donations that can hold approximately 100 cans of cat food.
• A week before the event, find out the availability of foster parents, create a schedule so that at least ten cats/kittens are at the store at any given time, and determine how many crates are needed throughout the duration of the event.
• On the Thursday before the event, confirm that all animals are up to date on shots and microchipped. If they are not but are eligible to receive those things, the foster parent must take them to the clinic on Friday or Saturday for shots if they want them to attend the event. Kittens under three pounds may not receive the rabies shot but can receive FVRCP.
• Since adoptions can not be done the same day an application is turned in, finalize five approved adoptions during the event (to receive the grant money) and collect five new adoption applications.
• Have at least two new people sign up to volunteer or foster due to speaking with us at the event.
• Collect at least fifty dollars of monetary donations in cash or through our PayPal, excluding the adoption fees.
• Collect at least fifty cans of wet cat food.

Definitions and Examples