Explaining finances

Cambridge Evening News came over for a photo-session at the clinic today, with a view to doing a follow-up on the feature they did last month. I think they found my explanation of how our finances work confusing, if not positively evasive, and I'm wondering how it can be made more understandable.

Part of the problem seems to be an assumption that most charities have some kind of regular funding, either from grants or donations, which may dip (if the grant is cut, for example), in which case they then have a fixed sum they need to appeal for in order to fill the gap.

In our case, our regular income is generated by our shops. The good thing about this is that it's possible to increase it by working harder. The downside (and what's confusing) is that shops have running costs, so it's possible to have a very impressive turnover  (money taken) but relatively modest profit (money generated for use by the charity). 

So, for example with our new shop in Newmarket (I've rounded up the figures):

Monthly takings: £6,500

Monthly rent: £2,300

Monthly Wages: £1,000

Rates, heat etc: £300

That still means a net monthly profit over running costs of nearly £3,000 (although you need to bear in mind that we spent money fitting out the shop, so it's not an actual profit until we've fully covered those costs, which we should do in 10 months time). 

This is why the shop takings we need to achieve in order to fund our clinic and the rehoming and emergency veterinary treatment are such a lot larger than the costs of the programs themselves.

Once the shops' fixed running costs have been covered, everything else is a bonus, so if we can generate more sales, increase donations of items we can sell and so on, the percentage profit available to finance animal welfare will increase. More sales mean some extra overheads (for example electricity used to heat water for steam cleaning donations), but they're comparatively minor.

Rollercoaster week

After the high of our dog show, I got home to find Bambi hiding under my bed and obviously not well. Taxi to the 24 hour vet and she was put on a drip to support her liver, but sadly further tests and a scan showed that she'd finally gone into liver failure, 3 years after I adopted her, having been signed over to the branch by her previous owners, who couldn't cope with her medical condition.

Fifteen years isn't bad for a cat who developed a chronic condition at twelve, but I'm torn between relief that she had good quality of life right up to the last few days and sadness that it all happened so suddenly. Cycled over to the vet after working in the shop last Sunday and she's now buried in my garden.

As we approach the holidays, schools and youth groups start to think about end of term activities, and it's excellent that the St Matthews school Brownie pack and Barton Primary school were both kind enough to organise fundraising events to support us. Let's hope the children who got involved will be the RSPCA volunteers and trustees of the future.

Saturday was horribly wet, but today we had one of the best Sundays at the Burleigh St. shop for a long time, taking over £250. Very many thanks to all the people who donated so many really attractive items. 

The desperate need to keep funds coming in was made all too clear too, as I had two calls for help with the consultation fee for very sick animals. If we hadn't been here neither of them would have been seen by a vet today. 

This always involves very difficult decisions when we're called outside normal consulting hours, and the animal isn't registered with our clinic, as it's so expensive just to be seen and any help we give would go much further if it could wait until morning. Vets can't always tell whether something really is serious by asking the owner over the phone. 

Occasionally their judgement can be hopelessly wrong, as happened to me some years ago when a vet assured me the owner was just making a fuss, but in fact the cat didn't survive the night. I felt dreadful, and of course the owner blamed the RSPCA for the cat's death.

Plasma cell pododermatitis

Poor Taylor and his sore feet enjoyed minor celebrity status at the clinic today with all the students gathering round to see them.

He's got plasma cell pododermatitis, an unusual problem, which fortunately doesn't seem to be as painful as it looks and is relatively cheap to treat. The picture below gives some idea what it looks like (image freely available under GPL from the veterinary dermatitis site).

The pads of Taylor's hind feet are almost completely healed now, and the sore area of his left fore foot is better than it was, but his right forefoot still looks horrible, although some of the swelling has shrunk.
Update (11th January 2012)
Taylor's feet are looking pretty good; slightly puffy and with thinner, softer skin than a normal cat, but no bleeding or splitting. He's been off medication for several weeks with no deterioration so it looks as though his condition can be managed by keeping him in an environment where he's not running on anything hard or sharp and monitoring his feet for any inflammation that indicates he needs another course of steroids.

RSPCA bookshop at 188 Mill Road

These charming "Four Seasons" and cat prints were donated to our Books and Prints shop at 188 Mill Road.

Spring

Summer

Autumn

Winter

Mill Road doesn't really attract many shoppers during the week and the area is becoming more and more just a "dormitory" where people who work more centrally return at night. This means we can't justify paying a manager's salary for the shop, as we'd never sell enough to cover it. 

At the moment we can usually only open on Fridays and Saturdays, when we have enough volunteers. I've been on holiday from my paid job for the past few days, so I've experimentally taken in some of the branch paperwork I need to catch up with and done it at the staff desk. Results have been patchy. Thursday afternoon was pretty good, but yesterday was hardly worth the effort, with most people browsing rather than buying.

We do get a lot of good donations, that donors might not make the effort to cart all the way to our Burleigh Street shop, and I would really like to make the effort to keep 188 open for a full six days. If you have an interest in books, music CDs or pictures and think you might like to get involved, even for just a few hours each week, please email volunteering@rspca-cambridge.org.uk

Talking Tigger

Huge Tigger cuddly toy donated to our Burleigh Street Shop. Press his tummy and he talks.

First pics from the dog show

These were taken from my phone, and some of the people with proper cameras will have better shots, but they do give a feel of how the day went.

In spite of a few heavy showers everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and we raised over £500. The Shelford Feast organisers have said they would be happy to consider letting us do the show as an annual event and it looks as though there's lots of scope for improving our total next year with the experience gained from this time.

Rain clouds blowing up

Heroic collector in dog suit

Rehydrating our shaggy dog collector

Face painting

Judging the best veteran

All in all this was a really positive event, with several visitors taking membership leaflets, and some of them taking advantage of the opportunity to get their dogs chipped.

Crisis upon crisis

Message from Vanessa, one of the Animal Collection Officers, to say she's just dropped off four seven week old GSD X Rottweiler cross pups after getting them signed over to the RSPCA.

Meanwhile, the other side of the county, one of our Inspectors is desperately trying to arrange treatment for an elderly dog owned by an even more elderly gentleman with no money. He's been quoted over £300 at a private vet.

We need more volunteers!


Fosterers, fundraisers, shop helpers, donors... You name it, we need it!

Horrendous morning at clinic

These pictures are a bit dark, but do at least give some impression of how swollen and sore this poor stray cat's pads had got. The pic immediately on the left is actually the underside of one of his front feet, and you can just see the claws round the outside.

I have a horror of really bad injuries to cats' feet ever since the time I trapped a feral tom who was literally walking on bone because abscesses had rotted away all the flesh of his pads.

To my enormous relief, the vets think this cat's problem is an immune-related dermatitis which is causing horribly painful swelling and bleeding, but isn't destroying the tissue in the way an infection would do.

He's got to go on steroids and antibiotics for a week and be confined in a hygienically-clean cat pen while (hopefully) the open, bleeding wounds heal up. Unfortunately all this will mean he can't be released where he came from as he'll almost certainly need to take steroids for the rest of his life, so he's yet another kitty looking for a permanent home.

The clinic was just non-stop busy, with two difficult questions about clients from long distances which illustrate the enormously worrying vet treatment situation. First was a gentleman who takes in rescue dogs and had been in the habit of using our clinic. Ironically he lives just next to Block Fen animal home in Wimblington, but we just can't allow him to keep registering extra animals. Second, and much more troubling was a couple from just outside our catchment area who'd been quoted £500 (which they didn't have up front) by a private vet to operate on their cat's broken jaw. We can't let them register because the University simply wouldn't accept it if we did, but I'm afraid they will be another group of people who'll go away and tell all their friends that "the RSPCA doesn't care about animals". 

I do care; we all care, but we do not have unlimited funds, and, like the PDSA, will be able to help fewer and fewer animals every time someone withdraws support because we can't help with everything.

Update
Three weeks on Taylor's feet look a lot better. The really bad one (shown in the photos) is still red and sore, but the swelling's gone down, and his other three feet look almost completely normal - would look normal if you didn't know what you were looking for.

Animal Welfare Statistics for June

In June our clinic treated 274 dogs, 106 cats, 13 rabbits and 5 miscellaneous "small furries" - a 6% increase compared with June 2010. We neutered 20 dogs, 3 cats and 5 rabbits, and chipped 13 dogs and 7 cats.

We rehomed 2 dogs and 2 cats, but took in 1 dog and sixteen cats, so we urgently need more offers of permanent and foster homes. Please email rehoming@rspca-cambridge.org.uk if you are interested in adopting or fostering animals.

Repeat AGM

We didn't get the 10 members needed to hold a valid Annual General Meeting, so will be trying again on 2nd August. If you are an adult member of the branch you'll receive your notification by post towards the end of this week. 

The repeat meeting will be at 61 Burleigh Street, and will be slimmed down to the bare minimum required to elect a committee to keep the branch in existence, so it should only take about 30 minutes. 

I very much fear that the problems with branch AGM's are just symptoms of something wider and more troubling. In our area, roughly 5% of the population make use of some of our branch services during the course of a year (this isn't just the clinic; it's also things like helping with injured stray animals, advice and so on and it's not necessarily the same 5% each year). 

Roughly 0.2% of the same population are branch members, and roughly 0.02% are active volunteers.

Either we convince more people that we are not a statutory service and without participation there will be no service, or in a few years we will be a "downed branch" with no help for owners with sick animals and minimal ability to rehome animals from the inspectorate.

If you are not a member of the RSPCA, please consider joining. You can do it online by going to www.rspca.org.uk/membership, or pick up a leaflet from any of our charity shops. Membership gives you a vote at branch and national level and means you can (if you wish) stand for election to your local branch committee and to regional and national trustee boards. 

Dining table for sale at Burleigh St charity shop

Varnished pine dining table to seat 6 people, plus chairs, for sale £80.

Wayne and Ffiona managed to collect it from the donor in their hatchback, but you would need a car with the capability of folding down the back seats to take it away.

(The crockery is not included).

So, what needs to be done?

Really not a huge amount per individual person. Our current problem is that the number of people who see the RSPCA as a service to be used is just too big in comparison to the number of volunteers who are struggling to provide the service.

1. If 400 extra people donated just one carrier bag of saleable items at any of our charity shops, it would raise £4,000
2. If they all completed a gift aid form that would add another £1,000.
3. If 20 people with an interest in books and reading volunteered for half a day each week at our 2nd hand bookshop on Mill road they'd raise an extra £12,000 each year.
4. If 5 more people volunteered for half a day each week at our Burleigh St shop they'd raise an extra £200 per week — £10,000 over the course of a year — by increasing the rate at which donations could be processed for sale.
5. If 100 extra people visited our shops each week and all made just one purchase at each visit it would raise £13,000.
6. If 200 people from our branch area did nothing other than join the RSPCA, we would have £1,000 as our share of their subscription fees.
7. If 20 of them regularly attended our AGM each year we wouldn't have the annual worry that the AGM would be invalid and need to be held again,  due to low turnout.
8. If 2 of them were prepared to join our committee it would mean we could be certain of having enough trustees to comply with the regulations for a valid RSPCA branch. 
9. If 100 people each volunteered to collect for just one hour during RSPCA week (and were prepared to collect their tins etc. from us rather than having one of us deliver it to each of them) they'd raise £2,400.
10. If ten people each got together with friends and organised their own fundraising event (coffee morning, open garden, car boot sale etc.) they'd raise £1,000.

That would secure the basic fee we have to pay for veterinary services at our clinic and mean our existing fundraising activities would comfortably be able to cover the additional costs of boarding and rehoming injured strays and cases from the Inspectors and ensuring that animals needing surgery could be treated.

Desperately worrying

Vets' charges seem to be going through the roof. We've just been quoted £400 for an x-ray on one of our rescue dogs to confirm that her broken leg is now healed. We may be able to get some reduction by shopping around, given that there's no desperate urgency to have it done immediately as it's simply confirmation she can stop being kept on restricted exercise. However it's a desperately worrying trend as it must indicate that an owner with no pet insurance is facing a £2k bill if their dog breaks a leg, which must mean that, for many dogs, a broken bone is now a death sentence.

Anyone who reads Cambridge Evening News will have seen the excellent write up they gave for our clinic's 75th anniversary. I originally wanted my quote about the situation of our clinic to say that around 4,000 animals are at risk of being put to sleep by their owners if we can't raise the money to stay open, but was advised to change that to say they were at risk of needing to be rehomed to avoid the possibility that, "RSPCA says 4,000 pets will be put down" would become the story. I'm not totally sure I was right to agree, because I think there's danger in trying to minimise the real situation, so as to put over a positive story, because it means no-one takes us seriously until we actually do fall off the cliff. 

Ultimately it's not physically possible for 43 volunteer workers to raise enough money to fund a service for over 3,000 people and we're very close to the point where we either succeed in recruiting more help or everything simply falls apart.

Update
I see from their Facebook page that the PDSA are evidently in difficulties too as they appear to be having to be more restrictive about the conditions to access treatment at their clinics.

Walkies?

We periodically get enquiries from people needing help with socialising (rather than training) young dogs, so I was interested to find there is a local group who organise monthly communal walks: Big Walkies. Most of their events seem to be concentrated around St. Ives, where the main organisers live, but they do list some walks in Milton Country Park, and I would imagine they may schedule more this side of the county if they get enough interest. 

Membership is free (they request a donation of £1 per dog per walk to cover admin costs), so this may be an option for people who can't afford formal dog training classes but want to encourage their dog to develop a positive attitude to other dogs.

They have some sensible Terms and Conditions which walkers are expected to comply with:

• Ensure that any dog(s) I bring to Big Walkies will be fully vaccinated.
• Have valid pet insurance for any dog that I bring with me OR agree to financial liability for any injuries received by myself or my dog, as my pet is uninsured. (If your dog happens to cause/receive injury on a walk we encourage that any costs occurred are claimed via your pet insurance or via the civil court. Big Walkies accepts no liability for personal or dog injuries).
• Have full control and responsibility for any dog(s) that I bring with me to Big Walkies.
• Ensure that any dog(s) I bring has a fair temperament (due to member safety we cannot accept known aggressive dogs on our walks. We are here to help dogs socialise, but will not take any unnecessary risks therefore if a dog becomes aggressive/causes injury towards either another dog or a person on the walk they will be asked to muzzle their dogs on future walks or even asked to leave Big Walkies group).
• Ensure that any mess that the dog(s) that I bring to Big Walkies creates is picked up and disposed of legally by myself.

(Disclaimer: as always, the RSPCA can't take responsibility for events that are organised by someone else).

Just donated at Burleigh St

This pic doesn't give a really good impression of how large these dolls actually are. They're porcelain with attractive costumes—rather the kind of doll little girls had in Victorian novels, although I think these are much later replicas.

Many thanks to the generous person who brought them in.

Who owns Tinker?

I'm fostering a very elderly fluffy grey cat who must have an owner out there somewhere as she's wearing a collar that looks almost new and is in good body condition considering her age - vet estimates at least 15+.

Unfortunately she's not chipped and her collar has a bell but no tag.

Cats!

I don't know what's got into the cat population of South Cambs. Over the past seven days we seem to have had nothing but calls about sick or injured strays, mostly turning out to be very old cats with "senior citizen" problems rather than traffic injuries or infections. 

I can only think that some of them are ones who don't go out unless the weather is really nice so that the neighbours don't normally see them. Many old cats do look thin, so from the neighbours' perspective it's not unreasonable to assume that the unknown cat suddenly appearing in their garden is lost and thin through lack of food. At least two of the current crop turned out to have owners who were very distressed that their pets had apparently been "kidnapped", and of course it's potentially quite dangerous if cats who are on medication are removed and don't get their pills at the correct time. There's also the worry that some owners may not know how to search for missing cats—unless they phone round vets and animal homes rather than relying on putting up posters they may never trace a cat who's been picked up as a stray.

I can't stress enough how important it is to ask around and put up notices before insisting that animal welfare charities should take away an apparently stray cat who is simply thin and somewhat unkempt-looking, rather than having any obvious injuries or infections. Removing an owned elderly animal is stressful and potentially dangerous to the cat and can cost the charity hundreds of pounds repeating veterinary tests which the real owner may already have had done.

Volunteer Opportunity: animal fosterers

We urgently need to recruit more volunteer foster homes for animals who are recovering after treatment.

These are usually cats (some dogs) who are recovering after surgery to repair broken bones and need to be confined in a cage to prevent them from running or jumping until the bone has healed. This is essential because the repaired section of bone remains fragile for several weeks after surgery and can break again if it's subjected to sudden force from violent movement.

Ideally fosterers would be fairly close to Cambridge as most of the animals will need to come back to our clinic there for several re-checks before they are full fit.

If you think you might be able to help by fostering animals, please email rehoming@rspca-cambridge.org.uk

Volunteer opportunity: Phone Rota

We need helpers with answering our emergency contact number on a rota basis.

This would involve having calls forwarded to your own telephone for an agreed period - e.g. every Wednesday between 9 am and 1 pm.

The most important reason for maintaining the rota is to make it possible for clinic clients to phone in for an emergency out of hours appointment if their pet has a problem that can't safely be left until the next normal clinic session. This is why we try to make sure that someone is available to pick up an incoming call within ten minutes.

Other calls are mainly from members of the public needing help with animal-related problems and many can be solved by putting them in contact with the main RSPCA control centre, dog warden service etc. 

The rest can usually be divided into ones asking for information about using the animal clinic (e.g. opening times, charges, what proof of benefit is required) and requests for help with out of hours veterinary emergencies where the owner is not able to pay for a private vet to treat their animal.

Full training will be given.