As you may have heard, there is a new list of No Kill communities in town, maintained by an organization called Saving 90. In a quick inspection of the site I did not see a list of founders or directors of Saving 90, but this new organization appears to be linked to the No Kill Advocacy Center, since the two sites link to each other and Nathan Winograd has been promoting Saving 90.
I’ve been trying unsuccessfully to get other people interested in doing shelter stats for years now, so I am thrilled to see this new site. The listings do not entirely agree with my listings, and Saving 90 says there are only 9 million people living in No Kill communities compared to the 15.6 million in my list, but the general message is the same — No Kill is possible pretty much anywhere. One advantage that Saving 90 has is that Winograd has a much bigger audience than I do, so hopefully his list will reach more people.
I’m also happy about the debut of the Saving 90 site because having someone else do “the list” will mean that I can spend more time on No Kill news. So here’s the plan going forward. I will leave my existing list up for now, at least until I make sure that Saving 90 is going to stick around. But instead of doing statistical analyses of existing No Kill communities, I’m going to switch my focus to day-to-day news about No Kill. This news will still include a lot of reporting on No Kill communities, but the emphasis of the blog will shift from reporting statistics to reporting on what communities are doing – new programs they are trying, new coalitions, problems and how they are addressed, what the national organizations are up to, etc.
There appears to be a real need for this type of reporting, as I’ve seen based on the response to the News Bits page over the last few months. News Bits has been more popular than any other page on this blog except for my post on the coming shelter dog shortage. And e-mail subscriptions to the blog have been on a sharp upward trend since I started News Bits.
So now that someone else is handling the statistics and “the list,” I’m looking forward to integrating the news into blog posts. That way it will go out directly to e-mail subscribers and be directly sharable. If you have any opinions on how you would like to see this done — daily blog posts, “news summaries” once or twice a week, or some other format, let me know, either by commenting or sending an e-mail to the blog.