Humane Society for Hamilton County

Turn 3,000+ adopters a year into your warmest donor channel

We send a watercolor card to every HSHC adopter on their Gotcha Day, personalized to their pet’s name and breed. We do the art and the mailing. Adopters open the mailbox and remember exactly why they chose HSHC.

You pay $1.50 per card. If donations don’t cover the cost in 90 days, we donate the difference.

How it works

1. You send us the list

Everyone who adopted a year ago this month

Address, pet name, breed. PetPoint and Shelterluv both export this data cleanly. We start with the 1-year cohort and grow from there once the numbers come in.

2. We make the personalized cards

One unique watercolor per adopter

A unique watercolor in a hand-painted style, captioned with the pet’s name. Printed on cardstock and mailed first class. You can see proofs before anything mails.

3. The donation moment

A QR code on the back goes straight to your donate page

Adopters who want to give back have an obvious place to land. You track every gift back to the campaign. We track every card from print to mailbox.

The pilot

  • ·Cohort: the adopters who brought a pet home one year ago this month. About 500 cards.
  • ·Price:$1.50 per card. If you don’t raise more than the cost of the pilot, we’ll donate the difference.
  • ·Timeline: 2 weeks from signed scope to first card in the mail. We can confirm proofs with you before anything prints.
  • ·Safeguards: returned/deceased filters against your returns and medical records before mailing.
  • ·What we measure: donation count and dollar volume from card recipients in the 90 days after mail date. You keep the data.

The math, in plain English

A $1.50 postcard can drive $13 in donor value. At scale, that’s $130,000.

If the pilot is successful, full scale would mean HSHC’s 1-, 2-, and 3-year adopter cohorts, mailed every year.

3,300 adoptions/year × 3 years10,000 cards
10,000 cards × $1.50/card$15,000

Adopters sit between cold prospects (0.5–2%) and house-list donors (5–9%). 3% is our conservative estimate.

10,000 cards × 3% conversion300 first-time donors

$61 is the average first-time gift in animal welfare. Year-one donations already exceed the $15,000 annual spend.

300 donors × $61/donor$18,300 in one-time donations

But the bigger number is donor lifetime value.

Some of those donors turn into monthly sustainers. We estimate 15% because Gotcha Day cards specifically tap into the emotional connection adopters have with your organization.

300 donors × 15% sustain45 monthly sustainers

Industry average 3-year LTV is $2,500 per-sustainer.

45 sustainers × $2,500 LTV$112,500 over 3 years

Total HSHC value

$130,800

$18,300 in one-time donations + $112,500 in sustainer LTV

Return on $15,000 annual spend

8.7x

See it with your assumptions

Defaults are our estimates from above. Adjust any slider to model your own.

Total HSHC value

$130,800

$18,300 in one-time donations + $112,500 in sustainer LTV = $130,800 total

8.7x return on $15,000 annual spend

10,000
3%
15%
$61
$2,500

“Retention strategies are important for new and recaptured donors… Consider anniversary direct mail acknowledgements, quarterly omnichannel impact reporting, live stewardship calls and handwritten cards .”

— RKD’s 2025 Animal Care Benchmark

About BetterFriend

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 our art on the front. We’re building this shelter program because shelters share what our consumers love: telling personalized, emotional stories at scale.

Want to talk through a pilot?

Send a note and I’ll walk through what the first 500-card cohort would look like for HSHC.

Send a note