Happy New Year! I’m excited that the first post for 2014 is one that may help you help homeless animals. When Beth Burstein mentioned she was working on a educational webinar offering tips to help increase adoption rates, I asked her to let me know when it was ready so I could help spread the word.
From Beth: “We created this on-site presentation for shelter and rescue group employees and volunteers almost two years ago. After we presented it at the Animal Welfare Federation of New Jersey Annual Conference in early 2013, Petsmart Charities approached us about doing it as a (free) webinar for the educational section of their website. We are very excited that it will now appear on their website as a live webinar (with a brief Q & A at the end) on Tuesday, January 7, 2014 at 12:00 pm EST/9:00 am PST. Everyone is welcome to watch it!
In our presentation we offer simple and effective tips for creating winning on-line descriptions and photos of adoptable animals, helping to achieve more adoptions, more quickly. We’ll offer tools to help adoptable animals’ online profiles attract great adopters.
Beth Cruz of Shelter Showcase, a seasoned animal welfare professional, offers writing tips for the animals’ on-line profiles, and also discusses using video.
I’ll discuss photography. Photographing shelter animals is very different from photographing one’s pet, and it can be challenging to take photos of them. These days many are pets who have been surrendered, and they can be confused or scared, and the shelters are often noisy and loud. But they can make great pets once out of the shelter environment and given the time to relax and settle into a new home. Sadly, a good photo can sometimes mean the difference between life and death for these animals, so I’ll discuss simple tips anyone with a point-and-shoot camera or even a camera phone can use to produce effective photos of even the most difficult-to-photograph shelter animal.
To register for the live January 7 session on the Petsmart Charities website folks can go to www.petsmartcharities.org/pro/learn, then click on the “Join Our Learning Community” button on the right of the screen. They can create an account there, and then find us in the webinar catalog. It will also be archived on their website after the 7th.
Please encourage other people who care about homeless animals to register for the webinar. For more adorable pets and wildlife photography, be sure to follow Beth on Facebook.
About Beth Burstein Photography: Based in Montclair, NJ Beth photographs in NY, NJ, CT and also the San Franciso Bay area. In addition to photographing people’s pets, Beth takes portraits of people and is in her second year of volunteering her photographic services for Antler Ridge Wildlife Sanctuary, a wonderful, busy wildlife sanctuary in Western New Jersey. They use her photos of their rescued baby mammals and farm animals in their annual fundraising calendar and greeting cards. She also donates her services to numerous local rescue groups.
This is great! Thanks for sharing!
What a good idea! I’m signed up and passing this along to my rescue organization!