Here’s the Data Supporting Open Adoption Practices
When Helping Hands Humane Society in Topeka, Kansas, tested their fears of fee-waived adoptions, they found their worries didn't stand up to the data.
The organization had tried everything else they could think of, and their daily intake was consistently outpacing their daily live outcomes. Helping Hands decided to run a 6-month pilot to test out waiving adoption fees, because they felt they had no other choice.
The results showed they’d made the right decision: a 25% increase in adoptions, with a 7% increase in first-time adopters. Moreover, Helping Hands saw a decrease in returns for financial reasons, and an increase in donations, with none of the neglect or abuse cases they’d feared.
We know that change can be scary. That doesn’t have to be the case with open adoption practices that make adoption and fostering faster, friendlier, and more accessible to people in your communities — and we’ve got the data to prove it.
Even small changes can make a big difference! That can mean reducing adoption fees, shortening applications, eliminating home checks, offering multilingual adoption and foster support, and more.
How much of a difference? During Best Friends’ first Bring Love Home Challenge in June 2024, participating shelters and rescues achieved significant lifesaving results that continued even beyond the June challenge: 34,557 cats and dogs were placed in adoptive or foster homes in June 2024 — 3,548 more than the same time the year before.
The organizations saw an 11.4% increase in adoption and foster placements in June 2024, and a 7.6% increase in adoptions between June and September 2024. Over 90% of reporting organizations told us they were still doing the practices they’d piloted during the challenge, three months after the challenge completed.
Your organization can experience these lifesaving results, too! Some changes are scary, but these don't have to be.
You can find more about the research behind the data on open adoptions in Best Friends’ compilation and review of the literature on adoptions.
Worried that reducing or waiving fees will result in adopters not caring as much about their pets, or returning their pets at higher rates?
People love their pets regardless of what they pay to acquire them! A 2006 study focused on cat adoption found no difference in the level of attachment that adopters expressed, whether they paid $0 or $75 to adopt.
Both groups of adopters — those who paid the regular adoption fee, and those who paid no fee — were strongly attached, and had positive things to say about the shelters they’d adopted from. There’s no reason to believe that the results would be different for dogs.
Waiving fees doesn’t lead to greater rates of returns, either. A 2011 post-adoption survey conducted by Maddie’s Fund found 95% of dogs and 93% of cats adopted with no fee were still in their homes, six to 12 months after adoption.
Not just that, according to the Maddie’s Fund study “there were no significant differences between the two groups” — pets adopted with a fee or without — “based on pet attachment level, post-adoption lifestyle or healthcare, or perceptions regarding the adoption event.” This consistency across the two groups included whether the pets lived primarily indoors; slept on the family bed; and received medical care. An Australian post-adoption study of cats, published in 2017, similarly found “no evidence for adverse outcomes associated with free adoptions.”
More adoptions may mean more returns overall — that's just math. But waived or discounted adoption fees should not lead to a higher percentage of returns.
With a little planning, the returns that do happen don’t have to feel overwhelming. Check out how some of the most effective rescues in the country prepare for the occasional return with care, compassion, and efficiency.
Concerned that waiving meet and greets, landlord checks, or long applications could increase your returns?
Data shows “conversation based” open adoptions are just as successful as those that include home checks, landlord checks, and meet-and-greets for all the household’s pets.
A 2013 study compared adopters who went through a traditional adoption process including resident dog meet-and-greets and landlord checks, and those who went through a conversation-based process with neither.
Thirty days later, almost all adopters in both groups reported their resident dog got along with the new dog, and 96% of adopted pets were still in their new home, with no difference in pet retention between the two groups.
And if your adoption process feels invasive, judgmental, or takes a long time, you’re likely losing great adopters!
Another study shows that while 60% of people who acquired a dog in the past year considered adopting, only 39% actually did adopt. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t get a pet and become a great pet parent.
The American Pet Products Association has found that only 33% of dogs are obtained from rescues and shelters. The other pets were acquired directly from breeders (21%), from friends and family (18%), pet stores (16%), and people finding the pet (4%). (“Other” made up 8% of pet acquisition.)
Does losing a few great potential adopters that were put off by the invasive process really matter?
Yes, it does!
Best Friends’ own data analysis has shown that if 6% more families adopted, we would be a no-kill nation. This illustrates why the balance of welcoming, inclusive customer service and responsible pet placement offered by these data-backed open adoptions practices is so key!
And speaking of great adopters you may not be reaching — yet...Are you family-friendly?
Research published in the Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science found that “individuals in their child-rearing years are most likely to have mixed-breed dogs yet are less likely to have acquired them from shelters. Awareness campaigns targeted to families promoting the availability of child-friendly mixed-breed dogs at the local shelter also appear warranted.”
Highlighting family-friendly dogs and welcoming families to adopt can increase your positive outcomes.
Nervous that the adopter hasn’t thought it through enough?
There’s a lot of stigma surrounding so-called “impulse” adoptions, but an American Humane Association study found pet owners who plan and do research before adoption don’t have better retention rates than those who don’t.
Other research suggests that considering adopting for a long period may actually cause analysis paralysis! The Center for Canine Behavior Studies found that “less forethought, ideally less than one week, was found to have a positive effect on eventual owner satisfaction.”
Important note: It probably goes without saying, but in case not — don't let this study deter you from adopting to planners, either! Make sure your adoption process welcomes all kinds of adopters so that if they’re ready now, or a month from now, you’ll be the place they come to adopt.
Anxious about pets being given as gifts?
Look, we’ve even heard about shelters that don’t do adoptions for the whole month of December because they're so worried about pets as presents! The data says don’t worry and embrace the holiday season as an opportunity for placing pets in loving homes.
A 2013 study by the ASPCA found 96% of the people receiving pets as gifts “thought it either increased or had no impact on their love or attachment to that pet.” Eighty-six percent of the pets in the study were still in their homes.
Use the conversation-based adoption approach for pets being given as gifts, just like you would with any other adoption. The aim is to make a good match!
Now that you’ve seen the data, ask yourself what might be happening in your process to push away great adopters before finalizing their match. How can you remove the barriers getting in the way of them adopting and fostering — and make adoption appealing and accessible to more people in your community?
In addition to the Bring Love Home Challenge web page, our pet adoption and foster programs resource pages have all kinds of materials to help you get started — including our Adoption Playbook, a roundup of resources advocating for fee-waived or reduced-cost adoptions, foster programming online course, the Successfully Marketing and Adopting Hard-to-Place Pets Town Hall, and so much more.
Not sure if you, your staff, or your board are ready to make the leap? Try piloting one or two open adoptions practices for a month, just like our Bring Love Home Challenge participants did, then look at your data to decide if you want to continue. We bet that like 90% of our challenge participants, you and your team will be pleasantly surprised with that you see in your data and in your day-to-day!
Because the thing is, open adoptions aren’t just a good, data-backed idea. They address an urgent, and truly solvable, need.
A new group of adopters and fosters might even be right there in your community, just waiting for you to open your doors to them so they can bring home their new best friend!
Will you try out a new data-backed open adoption practice today?
Arin Greenwood
Senior Strategist, Network and Advocacy Communications
Best Friends Animal Society