Thank you for being a foster care provider (AKA hero)! Fostering is one of the most rewarding ways to help a dog in need, and we are grateful for the time and care our fosters put into helping the dogs in our program.
Need help with introducing your foster dog to your own resident dog or cat? Wondering about how to crate train a dog or help him settle into your home smoothly? Check out our resources webpage for answers to most questions you might have about dogs and your foster experience.
Also, please check out this page for helpful articles on these topics as well as many others.
Aside from providing a home and lots of love, another way you can help your foster dog is by providing us with information that will help us match the dog with a great adopter.
Dog Bio Questionnaire: Once you’ve had your foster dog for a week or two and have observed their personality and habits in the home, please fill out this form and email it to us at sspadogs@gmail.com so that we can write an accurate bio of your foster dog. Of course, a week or two isn’t a lot of time to get to know your dog, and surely you will observe more about your foster dog or perhaps find that some of your initial observations need to be revised. Please do email us updates any time! We are happy to add to or revise dog bios, because we strive always to present the best information available on our dogs.
The dog bio information from you is incredibly helpful. However, there are a few extra fun things you can do as well if you enjoy taking photos and/or videos.
Photos: We can build a web page to help promote your foster dog to adopters as soon as we have some good photographs (and information) available to present. Please do bring your foster dog in to the shelter if at all possible on a Sunday morning to meet with our photographer and get some awesome professional studio shots. We also love getting good-quality snapshots of our foster dogs. Photos of dogs in the foster home really help adopters visualize him or her in their own home. It’s also great to get shots of dogs with family members, or doing some of their favorite activities such as playing with toys, swimming or lounging in a sunny spot. Photos taken in natural light (outdoors or near a window), with your camera flash OFF, look the best. Also try some shots getting down at the dog’s eye level for a fresh look. Extra photos beyond the studio shots aren’t necessary, but if you want your foster dog to stand out from the crowd, they really help.
Video: If you have the ability to take short videos of your foster dog hanging with the family, doing something cute, working on obedience skills, or playing, we would love to add video to his or her web page! Videos are another great way to help your foster dog stand out to adopters. The easiest way to send us video is by uploading it to your own YouTube account and then sending us a link to the YouTube video. From there, we can embed the video on your foster dog’s page. If you are unable to do that, you can also email us short videos. Don’t be intimidated with the video option. We don’t need anything fancy. A short, simple video, even with noise in the background, can still be helpful to adopters who are looking to connect with the right dog. But if you have tech skills and want to make something fancy with photo-editing software, that’s great too!
Watch this great example of a video that illustrates the fun you can have with video-editing software to show off your foster dog:
And here’s an example of a good, simple video that’s still very appealing for adopters, because it allows them to see the dog at play with other dogs:
Send all information, photos and video/video links to sspadogs@gmail.com.
(For the bio questionnaire, very brief answers are fine! Feel free to skip anything you don’t know and/or send updates as you learn more about the dog.)
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