How the Ontario SPCA Maximizes its Budget with this Multi-Use MarTech Tool

Non-profit organizations, small and large, continue to struggle with finding the right balance between their budgets and marketing needs. On one hand, they want to create an educational campaign for the community, on the other hand, they need to create social media campaigns to help spread the word quickly. For most, this means two different platforms, money spent on subscriptions and personnel needed to learn said platforms. Fortunately, the Ontario SPCA and Humane Society found a tool that helps them create out-of-the-box campaigns while reducing money and time spent. 

Ontario SPCA and Humane Society X ShortStack

The Ontario SPCA and Humane Society has been operating for 150 years with 13 adoption centers, and they partner with dozens of shelters and clinics throughout the province in Canada. The Society provides care, comfort and compassion to animals in need in communities across Ontario.

“The Ontario SPCA and Humane Society offers a variety of community support services to help you care for your furry family members, including health and wellness care for our shelter animals, animal adoption, re-homing, spay/neuter services, pet insurance, humane education, animal advocacy and much more,” according to Adam Maiolo, the Marketing Manager of Ontario SPCA and Humane Society. 

Adam has been using ShortStack since June 2023 and has been impressed with the platform. Initially, the Ontario SPCA and Humane Society needed a solution for building quarterly marketing campaigns. While using ShortStack, they have found other ways to reduce their need for developer work and additional application costs. 

Adam describes the value he has found in ShortStack below: 

The main attraction for me, personally, was the amount of creative options the “actions” feature of ShortStack opened up for me. It’s allowed me to do some pretty creative stuff using ShortStack, such as creating a registration system for our spay/neuter services and also creating a volunteer login portal for our Humane Education volunteers to access school presentations. There are things I never would have thought ShortStack could support, but it’s very flexible software. I think that would be the biggest value to me about ShortStack over other competitors: you have way more tools at your disposal, and the software is far less restrictive/oppressive than others on the market. That flexibility leads to creativity.

The flexibility Adam describes has allowed the Society to utilize ShortStack for more than just interactive contests. It has become a vital tool for everyday data collection and a portal for volunteer education.

Veterinary Appreciation Contest

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Every year, the team at Ontario SPCA and Humane Society like to honor the best veterinary clinics through customer appreciation. The goal of this campaign is to say thanks to those who take care of our animals and to collect valuable leads. 

In this year’s campaign, animal lovers had just under 2 weeks to nominate and vote for their favorite veterinarians and veterinary clinics/hospitals. The Society team reviewed nominations daily to ensure all veterinary practices were approved and added to the pool of eligible entries. Over the course of 12 days, just over 500 veterinary practices were nominated. 

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At the end of this contest, there were over 7,000 total entries, and Algonquin Animal Hospital in Ottawa, Ontario, CA ended up with the most votes. Algonquin Animal Hospital won a paid luncheon for all of their staff and a plaque to proudly display in their clinic. 

Results

This campaign was primarily promoted on social media, with 67% of visitors coming from Facebook. They also had paid online advertisements, email marketing, and information on their website that pointed to the campaign. 

Adam Maiolo and his team were quite impressed with the results of their first campaign using ShortStack. They collected 4,160 entries nominating veterinary offices, 3,067 entries for voting on the nominations, and 607 leads for their partner organizations, where entrants opted in to receive information from just these organizations. 

The Society was really excited about how many leads they collected and who opted in to their mailing lists, of which they received over 1,900 opt-ins. According to Adam, this campaign increased from last year’s (created outside of ShortStack) by a whopping 241%. The opt-in rate was truly outstanding and a high praise point for the team. Overall, the Ontario SPCA and Humane Society managed to stay within budget and exceed their ROI expectations- a win for everyone!

Flexibility Leads to Creativity

Overall, Adam and his team have been impressed with the flexibility and capabilities of ShortStack’s software. Currently, they are running educational campaigns at schools. These campaigns were made using ShortStack and are accessed by team members through a special code. With this feature, Adam ensures his team has access to the information without inadvertent web traffic from the general public. 

Through learning the ShortStack Builder, Adam also found that the “scalability to mobile devices is seamless.” With mobile devices more popular than ever, building landing pages with mobile users in mind has to be a top priority for all companies.

While ShortStack was built with contest and interactive marketing in mind, the uses are endless, as the Ontario SPCA and Humane Society found out.