From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2007:
Donations to U.S. animal welfare charities have cumulatively
increased 28% over the past three years, according to data released
by the Boston direct marketing consulting firm Target Analysis Group.
In the 12 months from April 2006 through March 2007, animal welfare
charities achieved an 8.5% increase in revenue, a 10% increase in
number of donors, and an 8% increase in the number of new donors.
Animal welfare charities were 5.6 times more successful than
environmental charities. Reported by Holly Hall in the July 26,
2007 edition of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, the findings came
from an analysis of 68 million donations made by 38 million
individuals, who cumulatively gave more than $1.7 billion in
2006-2007.

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2007:
Because of a drastic increase in U.S. nonprofit postage rates
in May 2007, the cost of mailing our June edition instantly rose
almost $1,000. We will have to dig deeper into general operating
funds to cover the postal rate hike, but have made a decision to try
to reduce costs by scaling back our production schedule to nine
issues of ANIMAL PEOPLE per year instead of ten.
This way we hope to avoid increasing our subscription price,
and to avoid raising our advertising rates substantially.
Subscribers who have paid for ten editions will receive them, but
all new subscriptions and renewals will be for nine editions a year.
At inception, ANIMAL PEOPLE determined that if we were going
to make a real difference in how effectively the humane community
responds to problems, we would have to reach the entire humane
community with every edition-and we knew that the people and
organizations most in need of our information tend to have the least
resources with which to buy a subscription. Many organizations
abroad–especially in the underdeveloped nations of Africa, Asia,
and Latin America–simply could not buy a subscription, no matter
what.

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This belated July/August 2007 edition of ANIMAL PEOPLE appears soon after publication of the ninth annual ANIMAL PEOPLE Watchdog Report on Animal Charities a 52-page handbook that took nearly three times as long as an edition of ANIMAL PEOPLE to complete.

Now evaluating 150 of the most prominent animal charities worldwide, The Watchdog Report was conceived as a supplementary reference for serious donors that could be assembled between editions of the ANIMAL PEOPLE newspaper, sold separately, at $25 per copy.
But The Watchdog Report long since outgrew that idea. Researching and updating The Watchdog Report has become a year-round project in itself, punctuated by the production phase, when we distill the information into the most compact format possible.
The Watchdog Report evolved out of Who gets the money? , the annual financial page on major animal charities that the ANIMAL PEOPLE team began publishing in early 1991, about 18 months before ANIMAL PEOPLE itself existed.

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