At the end of a Maddie’s Fund webinar in June, somebody asked the only question that really matters. They ran a small organization, they were convinced by the prevention argument, and they wanted to know where to start on Monday.
I had about ninety seconds and I gave three answers. I have been turning them over since, because they were the right three and I did not have room to say why. So here they are properly, including the reason each one gets skipped and the thing that has to happen before any of them count.
None of this requires money you do not have. Two of the three are free.
One. Map your call data
You are already collecting the most valuable prevention data in your county and most organizations throw it away every day.
Here is what I mean. Almost every shelter logs intake. Species, age, altered status, stray or owner surrender, and then the outcome. That is a record of what happened. Almost nobody logs, in any structured way, why the person was calling in the first place.
The reason is the whole thing. Surrender is not a category, it is an outcome with a cause behind it, and the cause is usually sitting in a sentence the caller said in the first thirty seconds. Landlord said no. Can’t cover the vet bill. Moving and can’t take him. She had puppies again. My hours got cut.
So the instruction is narrow and it is free. For the next thirty days, log the reason on every inbound contact, in the caller’s own words, before you route them anywhere. Not a dropdown. A sentence. You can clean it into categories later, and you will be wrong about the categories if you build them before you have the sentences.
Thirty days of that will tell you things your intake data cannot. It will tell you which problems are one-time and which are structural. It will tell you whether your county’s problem is housing or cost or reproduction, which is a different answer in different places and determines what you should build. And it will tell you how many people called, got nothing useful, and hung up, which is a number almost nobody has and every funder wants.
Why this gets skipped: it feels like paperwork during the part of the day when you are busiest, and the payoff is ninety days out. That is also true of every other prevention activity, which is the recurring problem.
Two. Add one partner you do not have yet
Not a coalition. Not a memorandum of understanding with eleven signatories. One partner, from a sector you are not currently talking to.
Most prevention failures are not capability failures. Somebody in your county can almost always solve the specific problem in front of a family. The failure is that no handoff exists between the person holding the problem and the person holding the solution, so the family runs out of road and ends up at your intake desk.
Look at your thirty days of call reasons and pick the most common one you cannot solve. Then find the organization that solves it and ask them one question: if I send you somebody, what is the best number to send them to.
That is the whole ask. Not a partnership agreement, not a joint program, not a grant. A phone number and a named person who expects your call.
The sectors most worth your time are the ones animal welfare does not usually talk to. Property managers and landlords. Food pantries and benefits navigators. Hospital and clinic social workers. Senior services and home health. Domestic violence advocates. Those organizations are already working with the exact families whose pets are at risk, and most of them have no idea there is anybody to call about the dog.
Why this gets skipped: making a cold call to a sector that does not know you is uncomfortable, and it does not show up in any report as a number. It is also, per unit of effort, the highest-return thing on this list.
Three. Run cost per intake in both directions
Both directions is the part that matters, and it is the part I rushed in the webinar.
The first direction is what it costs you to prevent one. Take a program, divide its annual cost by the number of intakes you believe it prevents, and you have a number you can defend. For our spay and neuter program that lands near $44 per intake prevented, because a unit costs $180 and we model it against 4.5 prevented intakes. The specific figure matters less than having run the calculation on your own program with your own costs.
The second direction is what the intake costs once it happens. Not what it costs you. What it costs the system that has to absorb it, which is usually a public shelter on a county line item. Our modeling puts the avoidable handling and medical cost somewhere between $250 and $450, and the full loaded cost, counting daily care, up around $900.
Both numbers are modeled and I am going to say so plainly, because the whole reason this publication exists is that our field circulates numbers nobody checked.
These figures are modeled estimates, not audited outcomes. Intakes prevented are projected from program multipliers, not a count of verified surrenders avoided. Avoided shelter cost uses full first-month shelter cost per intake; the share that becomes real budget savings depends on a shelter’s fixed-versus-variable cost mix and whether intake falls enough to change capacity. AAF captures self-reported surrender risk at intake and tracks 30/60/90 day outcomes to move these numbers from modeled to verified over time.
Run both directions and you can finish a sentence no commissioner has heard before. It costs us roughly this much to stop one, and it costs you roughly that much to handle one, and here is the spread.
One warning, because it is the mistake I see most. Do not walk into a county budget meeting and tell them prevention means they can cut animal control. It does not, and saying so makes an enemy of the agency you need. Bite cases, dangerous animals, hoarding, abuse and cruelty investigations all still require municipal response. What prevention reduces is the share of intake that should never have been intake. The sentence that works is that their budget shifts from absorbing preventable cases to handling the cases that genuinely require enforcement. That protects the agency and makes the argument at the same time.
Why this gets skipped: it requires admitting you do not know your own numbers yet. Most people would rather tell a story than run the arithmetic, right up until they are in a room with somebody who runs arithmetic for a living.
The step that is not on the list
Here is what I did not have time to say in the webinar, and it is the one that decides whether any of the other three survive.
Prevention succeeds invisibly. When it works, the thing that happens is that nothing happens. The family you kept together does not generate a record. The litter that was never born has no file. There is no field in your software for the animals that did not arrive.
Which means that if you do not write down where you are starting from, before you start, you will never be able to show that anything changed. And an unprovable program is a program that gets cut in year two, when the line looks flat and the board starts asking what the money bought.
So before step one, spend an afternoon writing down your baseline. Total intake for the last three years. Owner surrender versus stray. Intake by age, because reproduction shows up in the under-six-months line first. Return rate. Whatever your county spends on animal services. Put a date on the page and save it somewhere you will find it in two years.
It is an afternoon. It is the difference between a program you can defend and a program you merely believe in.
What I would tell somebody starting now
I am about a year into this and I want to be honest about what that means. These three steps are what I would do if I were starting over this morning, with what I have learned so far. They are not a validated curriculum and I have not run a controlled test of any of it. Anybody who tells you they have, in this particular corner of the field, is telling you something that is not in the literature.
What I can say is that all three are cheap, all three produce something a funder will read, and all three are things you can begin before anybody gives you permission or money.
Thirty days of call reasons. One phone number in a sector you have never called. Two numbers that let you finish the sentence in a budget meeting. And a baseline on a dated page so you can prove it later.
That is the whole answer. It took me ninety seconds in June and two thousand words here, and the ninety-second version was not wrong.
Join the shift to prevention.
Donate to Prevention and fund what happens before the shelter.
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Sources and notes
Origin: closing audience question, Maddie’s Fund Community Conversations webinar, June 1, 2026. Related unanswered audience questions answered in AAF_Maddies_Webinar_QA_V1.docx, reviewed by Sara Pizano.
Cost figures: AAF Impact Calculator locked constants. SNIP $180 per unit, 4.5 projected intakes prevented per unit, giving about $44 per intake prevented. Avoided variable cost $250 to $450. Full loaded cost per intake $900 (about $31 per day for 14 days plus the processing and medical package). Source of truth: PROJECTS/AAF_PRODUCTS/AAF_Impact_Calculator_Positioning_Keys_V1.md.
Animal control framing: adapted from BJ Adkins’ answer to the webinar question on whether counties respond to prevention by cutting animal control budgets.