Charitable Contributions and Volunteering

It was her last three days. She woke up, alone in her room, and looked out onto the world. She had spent her days trying to sit up and look happy just in case someone looked through the window long enough to catch her eye. But they never did. She’d go to sleep, wake up, and do it again. It was now down to her last few days. Time was running out. After three more days, she would be dead.

As you may know, last year HRC launched our Grassroots Research Fund, which provides up to $5,000 of research services to small animal protection groups. Our goal is to help less-funded groups better understand their audience, measure their effectiveness, and generally improve their advocacy.

It's the time of year when many animal groups are planning their budgets for 2012. According to the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, nonprofits should devote five to seven percent of their program/campaign budgets to conducting evaluation. If you spend less than five percent, you might not be doing enough to determine your impact. If you spend a lot more than seven percent, you might be able to find a way to do research more efficiently.

Want to know what HRC has been up to over the past month? Here's a quick recap of our major projects, a highlight of one of our clients, and the most popular database entries and blogs for the past month. We also say goodbye to a wonderful employee -- Katrina Munsell served a variety of roles for HRC over the past five-plus years, from database guru to analyst to copy editor. She recently left HRC to spend more time with her family and work on some new projects. Good luck, Katrina! You will be missed.

June was another productive and exciting month at the Humane Research Council. With just hours to go until the initial deadline for our new Grassroots Research Fund, I am pleased to report that we have some great applications. We look forward to giving away free research services to help inform the efforts of small groups and the animal protection movement overall. We will announce the winning applicants by the end of August. If you missed today’s deadline, don’t worry... you have another chance to submit an application before the next deadline on January 1, 2012.

Thanks to people like you, more and more advocates are harnessing the power of research to inform and improve their efforts and help more animals. HumaneSpot.org makes this possible by serving as the world's most comprehensive resource for animal-related opinion and behavior research. The website is also home to a variety of useful and free tools for animal advocates, all of which are provided by the nonprofit Humane Research Council.

Every year, the Humane Research Council conducts an annual survey of U.S. adults that we call the "Animal Tracker." The survey enables advocates to track and understand how public opinion and behavior is changing over time, with respect to a wide variety of critically important animal protection issues. HRC has just completed year four of the Animal Tracker and the report is now available (for free) on HumaneSpot.org.