You can have two equally wonderful cats where one goes home in a week and the other waits four months. Sometimes that is luck, or coat color, or age. Often enough it is the write-up.

Lead with who the cat is, not what happened to it

Rescue stories matter to us because we lived them. Adopters are trying to picture a cat in their living room. A hard backstory up front reads as a warning about future problems, even when it is not one. Open with personality, and let history come later or not at all.

Specifics beat adjectives, every time

“Sweet and loving” describes ten thousand cats. “Sits on the keyboard the moment you open a laptop” describes one. Concrete detail is what makes someone feel like they already know an animal, and it costs nothing but noticing.

Trade up wherever you can: not “playful” but “will chase a bottle cap across the kitchen until you take it away.” Not “shy at first” but “spends the first day under the bed, then decides you are furniture and climbs on you.”

Be honest about the hard parts

This feels like it costs you adoptions. It saves you returns, which cost far more, and it filters for the person who was going to be right anyway. Say it plainly: does not like other cats, needs a home without small children, hates being picked up, on prescription food for life.

Someone reads “needs to be your only cat” and thinks, that is me, I have no cats. You have just found the right home instead of a placement that comes apart in three weeks.

One good photo does more than five bad ones

• Natural light, near a window. No flash, which produces the alien-eye effect.
• Get down to eye level rather than shooting from standing.
• Eyes visible and in focus. That is the whole photo.
• Clean, uncluttered background. A cage backdrop reads as sad even when the cat is happy.
• Take fifty and keep one.

Say what home you are looking for

Ending with the ideal situation, quiet adult household, experienced cat person, someone home during the day, helps the right reader self-identify and gently steers the wrong one away without a rejection.

Write from notes, not from memory

The details that make a profile good are small and they are exactly what you forget after eleven weeks and thirty other cats. Purralytics keeps photos and running notes on each cat as you go, so the write-up assembles from what the foster actually observed. See how it works, free.