Show 17: Pet PR for Animal Shelters
If you’re helping an animal shelter get some buzz, this episode is for you. This week, Whisker Report hosts Mary Tan and Alexane Ricard are talking to Sarah Bhimani, the communications director at Animal Humane Society (AHS), just outside of Minneapolis Minnesota. AHS is one of the largest private, open admission shelters in the United States. Sarah shares her experiences doing PR for animal shelters, which means managing public relations and internal communications for the largest animal welfare nonprofit in the Upper Midwest. From addressing PR challenges to fostering community engagement, this pet PR professional offers practical advice and valuable strategies for nonprofit organizations looking to amplify their message, advocate for animals, and drive action.
Show Recap: The Pet PR Playbook for Animal Advocates
Sarah: I’m Sarah Bhimani. I’m the Strategic Communications Manager at Animal Humane Society. I’ve been at Animal Humane Society for just over five years now. My primary focus is internal communications and PR. Animal Humane Society is one of the largest animal welfare organizations in the Midwest. We help over 11,000 animals through our shelter every year. Plus, thousands more through our programs and services that we offer to the community. So we’re more than just a shelter. We are really focused on keeping people and pets together too, so that we offer low-cost vet care. Our outreach, education and training programs are really robust. We also do humane investigations. So we have our hands in a lot of different areas in animal welfare here in Minnesota.
Pet PR Challenges: Breaking Through the Noise in Animal Welfare
Alex: What PR challenges do you face in advocating for animals in adoption initiatives?
Sarah: I would say, there’s kind of two big challenges that come to mind for me. So the first one is probably universal for any industry, and that’s just breaking through the noise, right? People are bombarded with information all the time. There’s so much going on locally, nationally, globally. Lots of people love animals, many of our stories are feel-good types that can help balance negative news cycles. With so much happening, our news is probably one of the first things to get cut. That’s the first challenge.
The second challenge, specific to Animal Humane Society, is that we just do so much. It’s sometimes hard to cohesively explain all that we do to the public in a way that they will remember. A lot of people know us for animal adoption. We’ve been doing that for decades and decades. We do so much more than that, especially now with our focus of keeping people and pets together. It can be really hard to explain what you do when you only have a three minute TV segment, right? What happens is we end up focusing on one aspect of our work, and then people don’t see everything.
Strategic Pet PR: Choosing the Right Story Angle
Alex: How do you decide which aspect to highlight?
Sarah: It kind of depends on what’s happening. So if we have a brand new program, we’re going to promote that, of course. And that kind of makes it newsworthy because it’s new. If there is some sort of national observance going on, for example, Domestic Violence Awareness Month, we have a temporary pet housing program that helps victims with their situations. That’s a good opportunity for us to talk about our temporary pet housing program, because there’s a time-based relevancy there. Other times, if there’s a deadline coming up, or if we have an event where people have to purchase tickets, that makes it timely. So just looking at what’s going on in the world and what makes this relevant for sharing right now.
Integrated Pet PR and Marketing: Aligning Messaging for Impact
Mary: So you’ve been there now five years. How has your approach to PR evolved?
Sarah: I think one way that we’ve evolved is really our process on how we work with our marketing team. When I first started, the marketing team was very siloed and the PR team was very siloed. We didn’t really coordinate our messaging very well. The PR team might be off talking about one thing, and the marketing team would be posting on social media about something totally different. One simple step we took was having our PR person sit in on standing monthly marketing meetings. Not only does this let the PR team mine stories from different areas of our organization, but it also helps keep us in the loop with what’s going on on the marketing side. Hopefully, by coordinating those efforts, we’re hitting people with the messages, not just in TV media or print media, but also on social media, the website, and in email.
Check out the full episode for more!
