See what past contestants say about how they benefitted from the Challenge as they rate their own experiences and offer essential, hard-won advice to new shelter competitors like you!

Did being in the Challenge pay off?

• For the past two years, more than half of the contestants rated their experience as very good to excellent!
• Eighty-one percent say their experience was between very and extremely valuable.
• Seventy percent of the shelters broke their own records for saving lives! (If that’s not a huge payoff, we don’t know what is!)

Were expectations met?

Yes! Accomplishments last year surpassed expectations according to 68% percent of competing shelters.

What worked best?

• Waiving or reducing adoption fees
• Cute, attention grabbing themes
• Huge adoption events held with other shelters
• 24-hour long adoption drives
• Tons of Facebook updates

Of new strategies and programs tried, what will shelters continue to use?

How did shelters keep volunteers and staff motivated?

• Frequent meetings and updates
• Pep rallies
• Sound animal care protocols
• Tons of Facebook posts
• Keeping everyone focused on the lives being saved
• Running tally indicator in the lobby
• Praise, thanks and atta’ boys and girls
• Opportunities to brainstorm and create
• Food! (particularly cupcakes)

What advice do past contestants offer?

• Anticipate the amount of work it’s going to take and double it!
• Be relentless about planning ahead.
• Get your community engaged as early as possible and don’t stop engaging them all the way through the Challenge.
• Dive in! Don’t hold anything back!
• Use the Challenge to try all sorts of innovative, new techniques. Just try, try, try!
• Gather a great team of volunteers to help out and keep the enthusiasm high.
• Start early and think outside the box.
• Have fun! (This is essential.)

How many more lives have been saved in the three years of the Challenge?
Thousands!

But how do past Challenge contestants feel about it?

Check out just a few of the many Challenger testimonials in this blog post about the 2011 Contest.