There is an old saying, “There are three kinds of lies: “lies, damn lies and statistics.” Our profession is one that lives on statistics. When someone is looking at your shelter, they want to know the live release rate, even if they don’t know what that means. The people that we work for want to know how we compare to the shelter in the next town.
Municipalities became so concerned as to comparing statistics, that in Florida they created the Benchmarking Consortium so as to compare apples to apples when looking at the size and structure of organizations. I was tasked to provide benchmarking for the animal services area.
The easiest way to benchmark is to compare statistics to the population size of your community. It is one thing to say that you had 1,000 adoptions for the year compared to the 500 in the next town, but if your population is double that of the next town your statistics are the same. So in comparing intakes and outcomes by population, you begin to see a better picture as to how communities compares to another.
Benchmarking is a great way to present budgets for under budgeted organizations. City/County Managers are always looking to cut budgets and the animal shelter is on top for cuts. It is easier to show that your budget at $1.23 per capita is low to your neighboring city’s budget of $4.67.
When your local advocates are screaming at you for not doing more, you can use benchmarking to show that you are doing just as well (or better) as anyone else in your area or that you have budget constraints that hinder peak performance. Statistics can be your friend.