For IndyHumane
Without growing your staff to do it
We send a watercolor card to every IndyHumane adopter on their Gotcha Day, personalized to their pet’s name and breed. We do the art and the mailing. You add a donor touchpoint between the spring gala and the year-end appeal.
$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. You send us the list
Address, pet name, breed. Same export your annual-appeal team already runs, just filtered to adopters. We start with the 1-year cohort and grow from there.
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. You approve proofs before anything mails.
3. The donation moment
Tagged so you track every gift back to the Gotcha Day cohort. The campaign sits cleanly alongside Mutt Strut and Fur Ball reporting, not on top of them.
Different breeds, different styles. Each card is matched to the pet.
You’re 120+ years old, you run a 96% live-release shelter, and you have a donor program that knows how to convert. That makes you the organization most likely to actually measure whether Gotcha Day cards drive net new gifts, instead of just running them and hoping.
The pitch is incremental. Mutt Strut is the spring moment. Fur Ball is the fall moment. The annual appeal is the year-end moment. Gotcha Day cards are the 11 other months. Same audience, different touchpoint, no new staff overhead.
$8.4M
FY2024 revenue
~2,900
Adoptions in FY24
120 yrs
Indianapolis institution
A 250-card pilot is $375. At a $61 average first-time gift in animal welfare (Faunalytics), here is what IndyHumane keeps.
| Conversion rate | One-time donations | LTV at 15% sustain* |
|---|---|---|
| 7% (best case) | $907 (2.4x) | $7,500 (20x) |
| 5% | $648 (1.7x) | $5,300 (14x) |
| 3% (our working estimate) | $389 (1.0x) | $3,200 (8.5x) |
Once the pilot proves out, mailing your 1-, 2-, and 3-year adopter cohorts each year is about 9,000 cards. $13,500 in IndyHumane annual spend.
| Conversion rate | One-time donations | LTV at 15% sustain* |
|---|---|---|
| 7% (best case) | $33K (2.4x) | $269K (20x) |
| 5% | $23K (1.7x) | $192K (14x) |
| 3% (our working estimate) | $14K (1.0x) | $115K (8.5x) |
*LTV at 15% sustain assumes 15% of first-time donors become monthly sustainers worth ~$2,500 over three years. The $887-per-year per-sustainer figure is derived from RKD Group 2024 Animal Welfare Benchmark data: monthly sustainers are 8% of donors and 33% of revenue at a $215-per-donor average. RKD describes existing animal-care donors as “uniquely wired to become sustainers” because of emotional connection to individual animal stories. We believe Gotcha Day cards amplify that connection in adopters specifically, which is why we use 15% as our working estimate versus RKD’s 8% baseline for the broader donor population.
Adopters sit between house-list donors (5-9% conversion at industry average) and cold prospects (0.5-2%). 3% is our defensible midpoint, not a promise.
Animal welfare organizations 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 with you.
RKD Group describes existing animal-care donors as “uniquely wired to become sustainers” because of emotional connection to individual animal stories. Adopters who aren’t yet donors share that connection. The category just hasn’t published what happens when you systematically ask them.
IndyHumane is the organization with the donor maturity to actually measure this. 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 share what our consumers do: care enough about a relationship to put something in the mail.
Jennifer, want to talk through a pilot?
Send a note and I’ll walk through the data ask, the proofing process, and what a 500-card cohort would look like inside your existing annual calendar.
Send a noteOr reply to the postcard or on LinkedIn. Whichever’s easiest.