Best Friends Animal Society has been named a Brand of the Year* in the 2021 Harris Poll EquiTrend® study. This is the sixth time in the past 10 years Best Friends has been named Animal Welfare Nonprofit Brand of the Year.
Measuring brands’ health over time, the EquiTrend Brand Equity Index is comprised of three factors - Familiarity, Quality and Purchase Consideration - that result in a brand equity rating for each brand. Brands ranking highest in equity receive the Harris Poll EquiTrend “Brand of the Year” award for their respective categories. (For nonprofits the Purchase Consideration is asked as likely donation.)
“To be named, once again, the animal welfare nonprofit most trusted/loved brand, based on the 2021 Harris Poll EquiTrend Study is an incredible honor,” said Greta Palmer, Chief Brand & Communications Officer, Best Friends Animal Society. “This award shows public momentum for Best Friends goal to take our country no-kill by 2025.”
“When Best Friends was founded in 1984, an estimated 17 million pets were being killed in America’s shelters each year. A milestone was achieved in 2019, when the total number of cats and dogs killed in America’s shelters for a given year dropped below the one million mark. Now, that number has dropped to around 625,000, but it is still too many. That is 625,000 lives cut short simply because these animals who could have been cherished pets did not have safe places to call home. It is tragic. But it is solvable. And we can end the killing for good and help the country achieve no kill by 2025,” Palmer said.
No-kill is defined as saving every dog and cat in a shelter that can be saved. A 90 percent save rate for the animals entering a shelter is the common-sense benchmark for measuring lifesaving progress and considering a shelter no kill.
Typically, the number of pets that are suffering from irreparable medical or behavioral issues that compromise their quality of life and prevent them from being rehomed is not more than 10 percent of all pets entering shelters.
Since 2012, Best Friends has led No-Kill Los Angeles (NKLA), a citywide initiative which in 2020 achieved no kill for the first time and became the nation’s largest no-kill city with a 90.49 lifesaving rate by the year’s end.
In 2019, Best Friends launched the pet lifesaving dashboard, an award-winning data visualization tool that recently garnered Best Friends a spot in Fast Company’s list of most innovative companies in the world for data science.
Best Friends’ pet lifesaving dashboard provides comprehensive “noses in and noses out” information to the public right down to the shelter level and shows how many animals are entering and leaving U.S. shelter systems regardless of category (healthy, treatable, owner requested euthanasia, etc.). Just simply, how many animals entered a shelter and how many left a shelter alive.
In addition to the pet lifesaving dashboard and the successful program in Los Angeles, Best Friends runs lifesaving programs across the country as well as the nation’s largest no-kill animal sanctuary. Best Friends also maintains lifesaving partnerships with thousands of animal rescue organizations and animal shelters throughout the country — all of them working to help homeless pets and create no-kill communities where they live.
