Spur Magazine Features the Bow Valley SPCA
When Lauren Hudspith started volunteering at the Bow Valley Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals BVSPCA) shortly after it opened 10 years ago, she was a cat owner. But, after a beautiful white dog named Kayla snuggled up to her while she was visiting the shelter, she fell in love. Hudspith, who is now the president of BVSPCA’s board of directors, was compelled to adopt Kayla, who had been surrendered to the shelter by a family who no longer had room for her.
“I’d never had a dog before, but she came into a room, sat on my feet and looked at me and that was it,” Hudspith says. “She was a dream dog, very relaxed and very laid back.” To date, the BVSPCA has adopted out nearly 1,000 cats and lose to 500 dogs. A rare no-kill and no-cage shelter, the facility does not euthanize any animals (unless the situation is completely unavoidable) and lets them roam in rooms within its Canmore building and green space rather than restricting them to kennels. These policies have earned the BVSPCA fans beyond its catchment in the Bow Valley, often attracting pet-lovers from Calgary and area who would rather surrender to or adopt from a no-kill facility.
Nature-lovers and environmentalists tend to prefer no-kill and no-cage policies because they place greater value on animals’ lives. The BVSPCA extends this sentiment globally by taking in rescue dogs from as far away as Thailand, where there is a significant overpopulation of stray dogs. Since the BVSPCA is a bit of a trek for some clients, it’s essential that the organization have a well-functioning website to update potential adoptive families on available animals.
In 2011, Calgary Foundation gave the BVSPCA a grant to create a user-friendly website that could easily be updated by staff and board members. Last year, the organization received a second grant to update the site and make it responsive on mobile devices. “In a month, we might get only 150 people coming into the building looking for animals, whereas our website gets approximately 3,500 visits a month,” says Joseph Potts, chair of fund development on the BVSPCA board of directors. “People mostly come to the site to look for dogs and cats, but we also want to tell them about who we are, and how to get involved in programs we run.”
The new BVSPCA site was also created with open source software, meaning that the platform is available for other users to build their own website. This allows similar Humane Societies in other regions to create their own sites without having to start from scratch.
For Hudspith, who has adopted a second dog from the BVSPCA (Kayla passed away last year), the site allows other people to have the same rewarding experience that she’s had with her pets. The more exposure the BVSPCA gets, the more likely others will find the dog or cat meant for them. “Our last website was not mobile-friendly, which put us behind so many other shelters,” she says. “People could find us, but they couldn’t really see what they needed to see. It’s all about the visual now. The pictures of dogs and cats are what grab people.”
