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Operation Catnip began serving Alachua County in 1998 as a low-cost/no-cost spay/neuter clinic run in conjunction with the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine. Since then they have facilitated over 33,000 cat sterilizations and have broadened their outreach into the community as a nonprofit agency. Their innovative Trap-Neuter-Return program has reduced the number of community cat deaths by 40% locally, and is the model for like programs across the United States, many with their coaching and assistance.
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• Operation Catnip has relied heavily on donations from volunteers who trap cats and bring them to their monthly spay/neuter clinics. They write for a few grants, send one annual appeal to the University of Florida community and do one end-of-year mailing. They were doing no community outreach nor were they telling their very impactful story. Very few in the local community knew of them or the financial and community-wide impact they bring. To continue, they needed to consider a more robust and coordinated fundraising and community awareness program.

• ISF Group began by cleaning all of the clinical and donor/volunteer data and merging it into one database. All available information for each constituent was merged into one, searchable record that included giving history, accurate mailing address, number of cats delivered to clinics, etc.


• Next, ISF Group worked with Operation Catnip staff to standardize their brand and core messaging. ISF Group researched, designed and produced an “impact piece” to better tell their story and to describe the impact of their work locally and in the greater spay/neuter community. This impact piece was merged with a targeted appeal letter, using content contained in their donor database, to reach out to the UF community during a recent campaign.


• ISF Group will continue to build an annual giving campaign beginning with an end-of-year appeal that will use a more personalized and targeted approach.


• Operation Catnip volunteers signed up on paper forms that then had to be inputted into a spreadsheet and utilized. ISF Group created an online Volunteer registration site to better capture volunteer information accurately and more quickly.