Sunday, July 12, 2009

Get to Know Adopt a Pet.com

At Happy Dog Land, we are dedicated to helping animals in need. For instance, on our book tour, we will be partnering with companies to help raise money for local and national animal welfare organizations. (Stay tuned for more details!) and our soon to be ready website www.happydogland.com will highlight stories from our readers who have helped animals. Billy and Jill also volunteer at Chicago Animal Care and Control and other Chicago animal welfare organizations.

We are always meeting new people and organizations that help animals. Today we are talking to Jeff Howard of Adopt-A-Pet.com to learn more about the organization.

Q: What is Adopt-a-Pet.com?
A: Adopt-a-Pet.com is the world's largest non-profit adoption website. We are like an ad agency for shelters and shelter pets. Sadly, there are 4 million healthy and adoptable companion animals killed in shelters each year due to overcrowding. We do our best to relieve that problem and put pets from shelters in the homes of pet seekers all over the country.

Q: What can we find on your website?

A. Our website makes it easy for anyone with an internet connection to find profiles and pictures of adoptable animals by location, breed, gender, age, size, and color. Over 8,000 shelters posts pets on our website displaying over 125,000 pets available for adoption at any given time. We also help volunteers connect with shelters, and currently host thousands of people listed in our volunteer database for shelters.

Q: Do you work with any other animals in addition to dogs and cats?
A: Yes we do! In addition to dogs and cats, we now feature all kinds of pets for adoption, including rabbits, farm animals, ferrets, hamsters and other small animals, horses, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and even fish. This was a major initiative that took many months to research and program into the site, and it is being well-received within the shelter community.

Q: What are some of the unique features on your website?
A: On our website, people can use something we call “Search Saver.” This feature will notify users by e-mail when a particular pet fitting their specifications in available for adoption. For example, I can tell “Search Saver” where I live and what type of breed I am looking for. When that animal is available, I am notified the next time a pet matching my search is added on Adopt-a-Pet.com.

As of this summer we have now made it easy for our visitors to find pets and then recommend them to friends and family via Facebook, Twitter and other social applications. We are calling the idea “Social Petworking.” Here is how it works; once you have searched and found a pet in need, on the pet details page simply hover over the button labeled “SHARE,” there you can send the pet details page to any of your friends.

Q: You've teamed up with a well-known artisit to help raise awareness and money for animals in need. Please share this exciting news!
A: We have teamed up with renowned street-artist Shepard Fairey, who designed the iconic Obama "Hope" image. As a result, we have available a number of stylish ways to promote pet adoption. Shepard was able to translate his work with Obama to an image that can be used to represent pet adoption support. You can download the image to share, embed it on your website or print it. T-shirts and clothing and stickers are available too and these purchases help raise money to help homeless pets.

Q: What other kind of information can we find on the website?
A: Adopt-a-Pet.com has recently begun blogging, and every week we publish posts from two separate columns. On Tuesday, we blog about pet care tips, and on Fridays we do our best to find heartwarming stories about adopted pets all over the country. Here are a few highlights from our blog:


Adopt-a-pet is also on Facebook and you can follow it on Twitter at AdoptaPetcom.

2 comments:

  1. Having a pet adoption now is so easy because there's a lot of competitive adoption center nowadays, and we must support every pets that need home and family.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Before adopt a puppy for free online you must need to learn various tactics to handle the dog and you need to know about the breed of a dog which you are thinking to adopt and learn to manage all the things like a pet owner before adoption.

    ReplyDelete