How it works

Thank you for your interest in GiveADog from Pets Alive Animal Sanctuary. Your gift is truly a life saving one. Saving a dog's life is a wonderful gift for the holiday season.

When you GiveADog, you choose your lucky recipient, providing a name, address, email and personal message for the card including your name.

The recipient gets a greeting card in the mail explaining that for this holiday season you have given them a dog, and they will have a part in the saving of the dog's life.

They then go to our website and enter their email address and special password we sent them. That brings them to the GiveADog control center, which is pictured to the right.

They then get to pick their dog. They select from small, medium, or large dogs and are presented with the pictures of dogs that are currently in the program and where they currently are in the process.

Once they select their dog the dog's picture appears in the control center along with all of the updates that have been sent up to that point. They can click on any of the updates to review them. They also have access to the dog's picture gallery, video gallery and a special email service that allows them to contact the dog's caretaker at Pets Alive directly to ask any questions or make comments.

Under their dog's picture is the dog's status, which may be anything from Waiting for Transport to Adopted. This is real time. There is a also a statistics box which shows the dog's height, weight, breed(s), original location and the number of people interested in the dog.

Once they pick their dog they will get a beautiful personalized certificate suitable for framing acknowledging that they are part of the Pets Alive team that saved their dog and thanking them. It will be signed by a Pets Alive official and stamped with their dog's paw print. It will name the dog by name and include a picture.

Your recipient will receive regular updates on their dog via email. Each update will be written by the Pets Alive staff or volunteer person who has interacted with the dog, and could be anything from details on a play session to their personal opinion about the dog to an informative treatise on spaying and neutering and how that helps lower the euthanization rate for animals. To the right is a sample email.

GiveADog is a wonderful, unique gift for any animal lover, and your generosity helps us continue with our mission to save animals.