Animal Aid is a not for profit animal welfare organisation that operates three open door shelters around Victoria. Their “priorities are to rescue, rehabilitate, rehome and educate the community on companion animal matters” says Nell Thompson, General Manager of Animal Aid. Although Animal Aid is supported by paid professional staff, volunteers are essential to the organisation, particularly at its East Gippsland shelter.

Animal Aid’s connection with goodcompany was to find a volunteer skilled in multimedia and interested in coming out to the shelters and videoing the animals. goodcompany volunteer Matthew Masci, from NAB, is skilled in the online and video development areas enabling him to utilise this skill set to volunteer as a videographer at the Coldstream shelter. He says that his work as a videographer has allowed him to combine his love of animals and broaden his skills in the video production area.

Nell Thompson says “the videographers work enables us to showcase the adoption animals on our website, Facebook and YouTube”. The impact of this exposure increases the animals’ chances of adoption and has been “vitally necessary”.

Matthew gained sound insight and understanding of how Animal Aid operates and how volunteers contribute to the running of its business. He has so far put together 5 videos which have been published on the Animal Aid website. He says he will be continuing this volunteering on a "one afternoon a fortnight basis for the next 2 months”, so hopefully there will be more videos to come. Nell Thompson very much hopes that Matthew’s work with Animal Aid will be ongoing as it is most important work and “he is fantastic and we are really enjoying having him on board”.

For Animal Aid, the impact of such work increases website interaction and improves overall adoption rates, providing a positive outcome for the animals involved.