CASE STUDY

Visionary

Bert Troughton, Senior Vice President, Shelter & Veterinary Services

Challenge

Bert oversees an extensive network of operations across the country, including community veterinary clinics, spay neuter clinics and the Animal Poison Control Center, in addition to shelter and animal care facilities in New York City. Her team also leads shelter outreach and training to independent shelters nationwide.

Bert’s direct reports travel extensively to visit ASPCA locations, work with shelters and participate in field events. Because most of the team is remote, they also gather at headquarters in New York City once or twice a year. While valuable, the travel is a drain, reducing productivity and employee morale. Sometimes staff get sick. Plus there’s the expense.

That’s why Bert was eager to try a virtual retreat instead of an in-person session in New York for an early March meeting to discuss and act on two important areas – veterinary staffing strategy and leadership culture. The team had used Zoom fairly regularly but had never attempted anything of this scale.

Approach 

Bert and I collaborated to design, develop and deliver the retreat. We identified outcomes, determined activities, created materials, chose virtual tools and co-facilitated sessions. We also conducted a pre-meeting survey to get input from her team to shape the agenda. To ensure that staffing strategies were practical and would be implemented, part of the meeting included personnel from the ASPCA’s Performance Team (human resources).

With Bert as the content expert, my work focused on providing the online environment and processes to support success. We employed techniques including breakout groups, chat input and shared files to keep the time effective and lively. I graphic recorded several of the discussions, sharing visual notes after day one for use on day two.

Results

The retreat met its objectives to achieve substantial progress on veterinary staffing strategy and leadership culture. The virtual meeting format was successful and well-received. While the team missed being together to go out to dinner and catch up on breaks, everyone appreciated one less trip.

Because the Shelter & Veterinary Services personnel conduct so many virtual meetings, the retreat had impact even beyond immediate objectives. Participants have applied some of the approaches in their own sessions to get better results. Little did we know at the time that online meetings would soon become an even more vital part of the division’s important work to save animals’ lives.

This online meeting was my most recent project with the ASPCA. I’ve had the privilege of working on different initiatives starting more than fifteen years ago. The biggest project was a multi-year effort to develop and implement a measurement dashboard and tracking for the organization’s community partners. The work contributed to nearly half a million dogs and cats saved and helped advance the use of data to guide operations in the sheltering and animal services field. Other efforts included presenting market research about perceptions of the animal protection field, facilitating a meeting of leaders in the field on veterinary services for low-income communities and assisting with marketing strategy for the national Animal Poison Control Center.