For Friends of Indy Animals
We send a watercolor card to every IACS adopter on their Gotcha Day, personalized to their pet’s name and breed. FoIA is the name on the back. We do the art and the mailing. You add a donor relationship at the scale only IACS produces, without growing your staff to do it.
$1.50 a card. If donations don’t cover the cost in 90 days, we donate the difference. Your downside on the pilot is capped at zero.
1. IACS exports the list
Address, pet name, breed. We start with the 1-year cohort.
2. We make the personalized cards
A unique watercolor in a hand-painted style, captioned with the pet’s name. Printed on cardstock and mailed first class. FoIA’s mark is on the back, with language you sign off on.
3. The donation moment
Adopters who want to give back have an obvious place to land. You track every gift back to the campaign. The donor relationship is yours from the first dollar.
You’re 92% donor-dependent. Every donor relationship is structurally more important to FoIA than to a shelter sitting on 25% government funding. New donors at scale isn’t a nice-to-have for you, it’s the model.
You also have something the rest of Indiana animal welfare doesn’t: the biggest adopter pool in the state, attached to the 501(c)(3) that can transact with it. IACS produces the adopters. FoIA owns the donor relationship. We sit in between and make the introduction land in a mailbox.
$2.64M
FY2024 revenue
92%
Donor-funded
~5,500
IACS adopters / yr
You pay $1.50 a card. We pay $0.92 in real costs (postage, print, AI). At a $61 average gift in animal welfare (Faunalytics), here’s how the conversion rate maps to FoIA’s bottom line per card.
| Conversion rate | Raised per card | FoIA net per card |
|---|---|---|
| 7% (house list, animal welfare) | $4.27 | +$2.77 |
| 3% (RKD-defensible estimate) | $1.83 | +$0.33 |
| 2.5% | $1.53 | +$0.03 |
| 1.5% (break-even) | $0.92 | $0 |
Adopters who aren’t yet on the FoIA donor file are a different cohort than your house list, which almost certainly converts higher than 7%. The 3% line is our working assumption, not a promise.
Run those same numbers across the full IACS pool (~5,500 adoptions a year). At 3% conversion that’s a five-figure addition to your annual fund with no new staff and no new event on the calendar. The volume is where the math gets interesting.
Animal welfare orgs lost 14.8% of new donor acquisition year over year in FY23. The category needs new donor sources.
Past adopters are the most obvious untapped pool. They have emotional connection and have already spent money on a pet from your partner shelter.
RKD Group describes existing animal-care donors as “uniquely wired to become sustainers” because of emotional connection to individual animal stories. Adopters who haven’t yet donated share that connection. The category hasn’t yet published what happens when you systematically ask them.
FoIA’s IACS volume makes this the cleanest dataset the category could produce. You become the case study.
We’re a consumer postcard service in Indianapolis. People use BetterFriend to send real, printed postcards to the people they love, with their own photos or AI art on the front. We’re building this shelter program because adopters are already exactly the audience we serve: people who care enough about a relationship to put something in the mail.
Kristin, want to talk through a pilot?
Send a note and I’ll walk through the IACS data ask, the proofing process, and what the first 500-card cohort would look like.
Contact usOr reply to the postcard or on LinkedIn. Whichever’s easiest.