Give LIVE: Puppy Love, Rescue Websites Powered by GiveWP

Buzz to the Rescues has everything you need to run your animal rescue or shelter website. Here's how it works.
Puppy Love: Rescue Websites Powered by GiveWP

Rescuing animals is hard enough. The technology you use to run your organization should make your life easier, not harder.

Most animal rescue organizations are run by volunteers who know animals really well. They have less time to think about their technology and need more time, as well as money, to run their organizations.

A few years ago, when Laurie Paquette was approached by a local Los Angeles animal rescue organization to build a new website, she recognized a need for more comprehensive and easy to use rescue organization software. Now, it’s ready for your rescue organization to use! Here’s how it works.

Watch the live conversation here, or read the summary below.

What is Buzz to the Rescues?

Buzz to the Rescues helps pet rescues, sanctuaries, and shelters run their programs through a single website platform. Best of all, their donations are powered by GiveWP, but the software is built to enable rescue organizations to manage everything in one place.

A Gap in the market: Easy to use website, pet management software, donation management software, and business management software all in one platform.

Buzz to the Rescues provides each organization with a self-branded website to recruit adopters and volunteers, process applications, raise funds, and store pet owner and pet medical records. It’s simple to use and can be fully-integrated with Petfinder and PayPal to help highlight available pets as well as manage donations and receipts.

An example homepage for a rescue website would include a CTA to adopt a pet.

Each website has a general fund donation form as well as forms and profiles for each individual pet. Buzz to the Rescues even helps create and manage specific fundraising campaigns throughout the year.

The general giving fund specifies what each donation amount will cover, including medical needs, food, and shelter.

They’ve even customized the donor wall to have paw prints!

A donor wall shows the "Pets who pawed it forward in 2019."

How a Buzz to the Rescues Website Works

The agency has created a custom, but uniform back-end interface for all of their clients. The dashboard includes an overview of your donation history as well as information about your adoptable pets, adoptees, and more.

The WordPress dashboard is customized by Buzz to the Rescues so it's more intuitive for rescue workers to use it as their management software.

When a pet is entered into the system, a custom post type is created along with two GiveWP donation forms that are associated with that pet’s profile. The first form is for general donations to support that animal and the second is for the eventual adoption of that pet.

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All income and expenses for each animal are tracked in their profile. You can also add all of the pet’s information, such as medical needs and temperament, etc. Then the public-facing information is made available and internal information is kept in your WordPress database.

Each animal profile is a custom WordPress post type so you can manage everything, including expenses, donations, medical information, and temperament, all in one place.

Each animal’s profile is automatically populated with the data you enter through your dashboard.

Ginger's profile shows everything we entered on the back-end in a beautiful front-end profile.

Managing a Pet’s Information

One of the best features of the Buzz to the Rescues software is that it automatically generates PDF documents with needed information.

You can download PDFs with each pet's things their new family should know, medicine routines, vaccinations and preventative care, and routines.

This way, when someone adopts a pet, or a new volunteer comes in, you can provide the necessary information in a simple printout within minutes.

The PDF function creates a printable information sheet with a single click.

Between the printable materials, the ease of managing donations, and the beautiful interface you get… Buzz to the Rescues is well worth a look if you’re running an animal rescue website.

The Future of GiveWP

Laurie let us know that one of the reasons they chose GiveWP for their software is the fact that we are constantly developing and listening to feedback.

“It really has been an excellent, excellent integration for us. I can’t imagine how long it would take us to launch our software if we had to go out and build even a quarter of what you guys have… I wouldn’t build a nonprofit website without GiveWP.”

So, we shared our upcoming plans with her.

Peer-to-peer Fundraising and the New Form Field API

First and more importantly, we are making daily progress on Peer-to-peer fundraising! Our goal is to provide a robust peer-to-peer experience with everything you need to manage fundraising teams.

In order to do this, we are currently developing a new Form Field API, which will give developers more control over presentation of fields in forms. This will pave the way for peer-to-peer fundraising with GiveWP.

Donor Profiles

Last, but not least! Our team is extremely close to launching donor profiles for all of our users. Profiles will include:

  • The ability for donors to log in and control their profile on your website through the front-end.
  • Donors can update Recurring Donation payment methods, etc.
  • Profile badges will add a sense of gamification.
  • Easy receipt access for individual donations as well as Annual Receipts.
  • Custom avatars so donors can upload their profile photos.
  • The choice to keep donations public or private by opting in or out of being on the donor wall.
  • An easy way to give again, directly on their dashboard.

The GiveWP donor profile includes a summary of giving statistics, a way to donate again, profile badge icons for gamification, and additional tabs for add-ons.

GiveWP Feedback

Our product roadmap is determined by user feedback. All of these new features have been voted on by Givers like you. If you’d like to see or add more feature requests, visit our feedback board.

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