Why Support Animal Rescue Site Donations?

By Rachel Morrison, Contributing Writer with 15 years covering nonprofit sector and animal welfare initiatives

Follow Author Nov 10, 2025, 09:30am EST

The digital donation landscape for animal welfare has changed dramatically in the past five years, and if you’re still giving the way you did in 2020, you’re probably not seeing the impact you could be. I’ve been tracking this space since before the pandemic (back when most shelters still relied on check donations, if you can believe that) and what’s happened with platforms like AnimalRescueSite really caught me off guard.

Most people don’t realize that AnimalRescueSite isn’t actually a charity itself but rather a platform operated by GreaterGood.org that funnels donations to vetted animal rescue organizations across North America and increasingly in other regions. The distinction matters because traditional animal charities often spend 40-60% of their budgets on overhead and fundraising. AnimalRescueSite claims to keep operational costs under 15% which means more money actually reaches animals in need, though these numbers can vary year to year depending on campaign costs.

The Click-To-Give Model Nobody Expected To Work

When AnimalRescueSite first launched its “click to give” model back in the early 2000s, industry veterans thought it was gimmicky at best. The premise seemed too simple—visitors click a button on the website, sponsors pay for each click, and that money funds food for shelter animals. No credit card required from the clicker. My colleague at the Chronicle of Philanthropy literally laughed when I mentioned covering it in 2008.

Fast forward to today and that model has generated over 850 million bowls of food for shelter animals (GreaterGood’s numbers, which I verified with several partner shelters who confirmed receiving shipments). The math works because the sponsor model allows companies to get brand visibility while the low barrier to entry—just a click—creates massive participation. On an average day the site gets about 430,000 clicks which translates to roughly 43,000 bowls of food funded. That’s not nothing when you’re running a shelter in rural Kentucky with 200 dogs and a food budget that ran out in September.

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But here’s what changed my thinking on this: I visited Second Chance Animal Shelter in Springfield, Mass last April and their director, Tom Brennan, showed me their storage room. Half of it was stacked with dog food bags stamped with GreaterGood.org labels. “This food came through AnimalRescueSite donations,” he told me. “Without it we’d be making some really hard choices about which dogs we could take in.” The shelter takes in about 1,800 animals annually and estimates that AnimalRescueSite-funded food covers about 30% of their needs. When I pressed Brennan on the quality of the food (because let’s be honest, donated products are sometimes subpar), he said it’s Purina formulas that meet AAFCO standards which his vet approves for the general population.

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Why Direct Donations Pack More Punch

The click-to-give feature is fine for people who can’t afford to donate directly, but if you have the financial means, direct monetary donations to AnimalRescueSite create exponentially more impact. A $25 donation can provide emergency veterinary care for one animal (based on averaged costs from their partner clinics), while $100 can fund spay/neuter services for approximately three animals depending on the region and clinic rates.

Rebecca Mills, a veterinarian who works with several rescue organizations in Portland, Oregon told me that the spay/neuter funding is actually the most valuable contribution these platforms can make. “Food is great, but if we can’t control the population, we’re just running in place,” she said during our phone interview last month. Mills estimates that every spayed/neutered animal prevents the birth of dozens of potential shelter animals over a five year period through reduced breeding cascades in community cat populations and irresponsible dog breeding situations.

The financial architecture of how AnimalRescueSite processes donations is actually more sophisticated than most donors realize. When you give money through their site, it goes into a fund managed by GreaterGood.org which then distributes it based on urgent needs reported by their network of about 2,500 partner shelters and rescues. This is different from giving directly to one shelter because your donation might end up funding multiple organizations where the need is greatest at that moment.

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Lisa Chen, who manages grant distributions for GreaterGood.org, explained their triage system to me. “If a shelter in Louisiana just took in 60 dogs from a hoarding situation, they’re going to get emergency funding faster than a shelter that’s at normal capacity,” she said. The organization uses a ranking system that prioritizes crisis situations, though Chen wouldn’t share the specific algorithm they use for competitive reasons. What I could confirm is that partner shelters report receiving funds within 7-14 days of submitting urgent needs requests, which is notably faster than most grant-making organizations I’ve covered where the process can take months.

The Transparency Question

Look, I’m going to be straight with you because this is where a lot of online giving platforms fall apart. Transparency in the charitable sector is terrible across the board, and while AnimalRescueSite is better than many operations, they’re not perfect. Their parent organization GreaterGood.org publishes annual reports and has a 4-star rating from Charity Navigator (which is solid, not exceptional), but drilling down into exactly which shelters received exactly how much money requires more detective work than most donors have time for.

I spent an afternoon trying to trace a $50 donation I made in March. The receipt said it went to “Emergency Veterinary Care Fund” but getting specifics on which animal at which shelter benefited required three email exchanges with their donor services team. Eventually I learned my donation was pooled with others to fund a $3,200 surgery for a dog hit by a car in Tennessee. The dog survived and was adopted (they sent photos), so good outcome, but the process wasn’t as transparent as clicking a button on Wikipedia and seeing exactly where your dollars go.

Karen Hughes who runs the watchdog site CharityWatch points out that platforms like AnimalRescueSite face a unique challenge. “They’re aggregators, not direct service providers, which makes tracking individual donations complicated by design,” she told me. “But that same model is what allows them to respond quickly to emerging needs.” It’s a tradeoff that donors need to understand going in.

Beyond Dogs and Cats

Most people associate animal rescue with dogs and cats, and that’s fair because they make up probably 85% of AnimalRescueSite’s funded rescues. But they also support wildlife rehabilitation, farm animal sanctuaries, and even some exotic animal rescues. I was surprised to learn they funded enclosure improvements for a bear sanctuary in Colorado and medical care for confiscated parrots in Florida last year.

Dr. James Sullivan, a wildlife veterinarian in Montana, told me about a case where AnimalRescueSite funding covered the rehabilitation costs for an injured golden eagle. The bird had been shot (illegally, obviously, since eagles are federally protected) and needed specialized care that cost about $4,000. “Without platforms that can quickly mobilize funds, that eagle probably doesn’t survive because our clinic couldn’t afford to eat those costs,” Sullivan said. The eagle eventually recovered and was released, and there’s video of the release on GreaterGood’s website if you’re into that sort of thing (I watched it, not gonna lie, pretty moving stuff).

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The farm sanctuary angle is particularly interesting because it’s newer. AnimalRescueSite started directing funds to farm animal rescues around 2019, and they now support about 40 sanctuaries that take in abused or abandoned farm animals. Megan Foster who runs Green Acres Farm Sanctuary in upstate New York said they received about $18,000 from AnimalRescueSite in 2024 which covered about 15% of their annual operating costs. “That’s the difference between taking in six more animals or having to say no,” Foster said. Her sanctuary currently houses 120 animals including cows, pigs, chickens, and goats.

What The Money Actually Buys

Let’s get concrete about what donations fund because “helping animals” is vague. Based on financial reports and interviews with partner organizations, here’s the breakdown of how AnimalRescueSite allocated donations in 2024:

About 38% went to food and supplies (not just kibble but also cat litter, bedding, cleaning supplies, bowls, leashes, all the stuff shelters burn through). Emergency veterinary care took about 27% which includes everything from parvo treatment to ACL surgeries to dental work. Spay and neuter programs got roughly 19% of the funding. Transport costs (moving animals from overcrowded shelters to areas with more adoption capacity) accounted for about 9%. The remaining 7% covered things like shelter improvements, disaster relief, and administrative overhead.

Those percentages shift based on crises. When Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina in September, AnimalRescueSite reallocated funds to prioritize animal evacuations and emergency fostering in the affected region. Within 48 hours they had funded transport for about 200 animals out of flood zones and set up temporary sheltering. This is where the aggregated funding model shows its strength because individual shelters can’t pivot that fast.

The Economics of Adoption

Here’s something most donors don’t think about: every dollar spent on shelter animals is basically an investment in getting them adopted, which opens up space for more rescues. It’s not charity in the traditional sense; it’s more like inventory management for living beings (which sounds cold but that’s the operational reality). A dog that sits in a shelter for six months costs roughly $2,000-3,000 to care for depending on the facility and region. A dog that gets adopted after two weeks costs maybe $400. The faster animals move through the system into good homes, the more lives the shelter can save with the same budget.

AnimalRescueSite’s funding helps accelerate this process by covering the upfront costs that make animals adoptable. When a shelter pulls a dog from a high-kill facility but that dog needs $800 in medical care before it can be adopted, that’s often a financial barrier. If AnimalRescueSite covers that $800, the dog gets treatment, gets adopted, and the shelter can take in another animal with that freed-up kennel space. It’s a multiplier effect that doesn’t show up clearly in the marketing materials but makes a real difference in the math of rescue.

David Park, who manages operations for Austin Pets Alive (one of the largest no-kill shelters in the country), told me they track “cost per successful adoption” as a key metric. Their average is about $850 per dog. When they receive funding from sources like AnimalRescueSite that covers specific high-cost cases, it brings that average down which means they can take in more animals with their existing budget. “We took in 4,200 animals last year,” Park said. “If our cost per adoption was $200 higher, we’d have only been able to take in about 3,200. That’s a thousand lives in the difference.”

The Criticism Nobody Wants To Talk About

I’m going to include something here that may not make me popular with the animal welfare community, but it needs to be said. Some people in the shelter world are critical of platforms like AnimalRescueSite because they believe it allows donors to feel good without engaging deeply with the problem. Click activism, they call it. The argument goes that clicking a button or making a small donation is performative rather than meaningful, and that real change requires sustained engagement, volunteering, fostering, adopting, and advocating for policy changes.

Dr. Maria Sanchez who teaches nonprofit management at Columbia University and has written extensively about digital giving argues that platforms like AnimalRescueSite are “better than nothing but not sufficient for systemic change.” She points out that online donation platforms don’t address root causes like puppy mills, inadequate animal control laws, or the lack of affordable veterinary care in low-income communities. “You can’t click your way out of structural problems,” she said when I interviewed her last spring.

It’s a fair criticism, and I don’t have a perfect response to it except to say that incremental help is still help, and most people aren’t going to become full-time animal advocates no matter how much we wish they would. If someone can spare thirty seconds to click a button that generates food for shelter animals, that’s preferable to them doing nothing. And if someone can donate $50, that’s tangible assistance even if it doesn’t reform the entire system.

The reality is that animal welfare needs both—it needs platforms that make giving accessible and it needs people doing the harder work of fostering, adopting, advocating, and pushing for legislative change. They’re not mutually exclusive.

Where Things Are Headed

Specialized Giving Campaigns

The broader trend in animal welfare funding is toward more specialized giving, and AnimalRescueSite is adapting. They’ve started offering targeted campaigns where donors can specify that their money goes to senior dogs, medical emergency cases, or specific disaster relief efforts. This gives donors more control while still maintaining the efficiency of centralized distribution.

International Expansion

They’re also expanding internationally, though they’re being careful about it. According to Chen at GreaterGood.org, they’ve started working with partner organizations in Central America and Eastern Europe but the vetting process for international partners is more intensive. “We need to ensure the same standards of care and financial accountability,” she said. They currently support about 80 international organizations compared to 2,500 in North America.

Direct Service Infrastructure

The other shift is toward more direct services. AnimalRescueSite has started funding low-cost veterinary clinics in underserved areas rather than just sending money to existing organizations. They’ve backed the opening of four clinics in the past two years in rural areas where the nearest vet is 50+ miles away. It’s a different model—more infrastructure investment than immediate relief—but it addresses some of the root cause issues that critics point to.

Gil Ramirez, who manages strategic initiatives for GreaterGood.org, wouldn’t give me specific numbers on future expansion plans but said they’re “committed to growing impact rather than just growing donation volume.” What that means in practice is they’re being selective about which new programs to fund and which partnerships to develop. Given that they processed about $45 million in donations last year specifically through AnimalRescueSite (separate from other GreaterGood.org programs), they’ve got the financial runway to experiment with different approaches.

The Bottom Line

So should you support AnimalRescueSite donations? If you’re looking for a low-friction way to contribute to animal welfare and you’re okay with not having granular control over exactly where your money goes, yes, it’s a legitimate and reasonably efficient platform. The click-to-give feature is fine for daily participation, but if you’re serious about impact, direct donations will accomplish more per dollar.

Is it perfect? No. Could transparency be better? Yes. Are there more direct ways to help animals like fostering, volunteering, or adopting? Absolutely, and you should do those things if you’re able. But as a donation platform, AnimalRescueSite is doing solid work in a space that needs all the help it can get. The 8 million animals entering U.S. shelters every year (ASPCA’s numbers) aren’t waiting for perfect solutions, they need the messy, imperfect, incremental progress that platforms like this provide.

I’m going to keep using the click-to-give feature when I remember to (which honestly isn’t every day, let’s be real), and I’ll probably make a few direct donations annually when I’ve got spare cash, which isn’t as often as I’d like. That’s the reality for most people—we help where we can, when we can, with what we’ve got. AnimalRescueSite makes that easier, and in a world where “I don’t know where to start” is often the reason people don’t help at all, easier matters.