B12 is giving free websites to 25 NYC animal rescues

by Nitesh Banta, Co-Founder and CEO

Starting Tuesday, September 15, animal rescues in New York City can apply for a free website from B12. Twenty-five are accepted in the first batch. The site is free, it stays free, and there's no credit card.

We're running it with Bodega Cats of New York.

Why we're doing this

B12 is a New York company, and we've always looked for ways to back the small organizations around us. Usually that means small businesses. This time it's nonprofits, and specifically the rescues quietly holding up animal welfare in this city with almost no infrastructure behind them.

A rescue's website is its intake desk, its adoption line and its donation page all at once. It's also the thing that never gets built, because there's always something more urgent, usually with a heartbeat. We'd rather hand these groups working software than watch them spend another year improvising around a Facebook page. Our AI does the building so the people running rescues can stay focused on animals.

We're doing it with Bodega Cats of New York because they can reach these groups and we can't. BCNY documents the cats living in the city's bodegas, and has a photography book coming this fall. Its audience is the exact crowd that already volunteers, fosters, and drives cats to Jersey at midnight. We can build the software. We can't get it into the hands of a six-person rescue in Sunset Park that has never heard of us. They can.

It's the first program we've run like this. If it works here, we'll do it in other cities.

What these sites can do

To show what's possible, we built sixteen example sites. The rescues in them are invented and every site says so, but the software underneath is real, and anyone can start from one of them.

• Adoption that begins with an application routed to a person, not a shared inbox nobody owns, with a staff view to move each one through review. See Windowlight Cat Rescue and Little Borough Companions.
• Foster signups that ask the right questions up front. Other pets in the home, kids, whether you can do bottle babies at 2am. The answers arrive sorted instead of as forty identical emails. See Apartment Cat Network and Bottle & Blanket Kitten Project.
• TNR help and trap loans that stop living in somebody's text messages: who has which trap, when it goes out, when it comes back. See Bronx Block Cat Project.
• Volunteer shifts on a board people can actually sign up for, sorted by borough and by what the shift involves. See Rescue Shift NYC.
• Transport coordination, so a leg from Queens to a foster in Yonkers has the driver, the animal and the handoff time in one place. See Five Borough Animal Relay.
• Lost and found, where people report a missing pet and send in sightings, and the sightings attach to the report instead of scattering across three Facebook groups. See Homeward NYC Pet Network.
• Owner-surrender prevention, for the rescues doing the hardest and least visible work, which is helping people keep the animal they already have. See Keep Them Home NYC.

There's also a resource hub in eight languages built for Jackson Heights and Sunset Park, a senior and medical-needs placement site, an adoption-event site, an emergency foster board for big dogs, and one for a rescue that runs a community clinic and needs the two kept separate.

You build it by typing

You don't write code or wait on a developer. You describe what you need the way you'd text someone:

"Add a page for cats available for adoption, with a photo and a few lines about each one."

"Make a foster application that asks whether there are other pets in the home."

"Set up a trap loan request with pickup and return dates."

"Let people report a lost cat and send in sightings."

From there you keep going. Ask it to add a donation page, pull your adoptable animals into a filterable list, write the copy for your about page in your own voice, or build the form you've been meaning to make for a year. Every answer you give it makes the next version more yours. Your volunteers get their own logins too, so whoever handles fostering sees the foster forms and nobody else has to.

Free to start. Free to keep. No credit card, now or later.

How to apply

Applications open the morning of Tuesday, September 15 at www.b12.io/nyc-animal-rescues. The form is short: your name, what your rescue does, where you work, and the best email to reach you. It takes a couple of minutes on a phone.

A person reads every application. We're taking 25 in this batch, and if you don't make this one there will be another.

Accepted rescues get an email with a link to their new site and to the sixteen examples.

If you want a head start, jot down the three things people contact you about most. That's your first three pages, and it's enough for B12 to hand you back something useful on the first try.

You can sign up now to hear from us the morning applications open. Questions before then go to Nitesh Banta at nitesh@b12.io.