COON RAPIDS, Minn. – (Feb. 19, 2015) – More than 15,000 animals were adopted last year from the Animal Human Society. The organization has five campuses including one in Coon Rapids. The adoption space in Coon Rapids recently received a large scale renovation. Cindy Johnson, Customer Service Director, explained some of the goals they wanted to achieve.
“We’ve really tried to open up the space, not quite so crowded and cramped,” Johnson said.
Nearly 50 percent of the animals surrendered to the Humane Society are cats. The renovations at Coon Rapids were done with an emphasis on showcasing the large cat population.
“We put glass doors on the rooms, we created a couple more colony rooms with glass doors so people can really see the cats now and we have found that the cats now come to the door almost to like invite you in,” she said.
Johnson believes that the renovations also help break the myth that shelters are dark and sad places. Another change is a redesign of the way that adoptions are handled.
“We used to have this very large counter in this space and it made the process feel very transactional and also people ended up standing for 30, 35 minutes so we removed the counter and instead put in these seating areas so that people can sit down comfortably with our staff and with our volunteers and do the adoption process,” Johnson explained.
The staff and volunteers all carry tablets and wear two way radios, which is not new technology but it is new way of doing business for the Humane Society. With the tablets staff and volunteers are now able to call up information about a specific pet right when a customer asks instead of having to go find it on a computer somewhere else in the building. They have also taken the big step of eliminating the paper adoption application.
“We basically have been able to eliminate the application from the process and use conversation to learn information about our customers,” Jonson said.
“The application was really for us a tool to help learn information about our customers and the household and are there kids in the home, are there other pets in the home, to really help us learn information about the household and the potential adopter, so it was never really intended to be any sort of test or, you either pass or you fail type of thing it was more of a tool to get information, and we have found that with the new process we’re able to get that information just by conversation.”
So far the response from the community has been very positive.
“Well we’ve been getting a really positive response for those people that are walking into the shelter seeing the changes for the first time, those people that have been here before, walking in now, we hear a lot of ‘wow, this looks great,’ ‘wow, this is really nice,’ and we’ve also heard from customer after the adoption’s been processed that the experience felt much more comfortable, much more conversational and less transaction like,” Johnson said.
With a more welcoming adoption center and a more personal adoption procedure the Humane Society is hoping for engage new and returning customers in more ways than even before.
“We’re hoping that the experience that they have here is a very positive one and that they’ll want to continue to come back, come back and visit, come back and adopt, or even engage with the organization with other program and services. We’ve got a great training program that has classes here, we’ve got a number of program and services,” Johnson said.
To learn more about pet adoption with the Animal Humane Society click here.
