Frequently Asked Questions

Simply visit Sponsor a Puppy and choose one or more of the adorable hearing dog puppies available to sponsor. Complete your details online, including whether this is for yourself or as a gift. Every journey is unique, and your support will help change a deaf person’s life.

All sponsors receive a fantastic welcome pack, which includes a certificate, car sticker and postcards of their puppy. You'll also receive a cuddly puppy toy, notepad and pen.

From then on, we send regular updates on how your puppy is doing, either printed or, if requested, by email. We publish training updates roughly every five to six months, depending on how quickly the puppy goes through training. On average, across the 18-24 months of a puppy’s training, this means four updates.

The updates show, through beautiful photos, how your puppy is getting on, with comments from the people involved with his or her training. The full set of updates goes right the way through training and then introduces you to the deaf person your puppy is helping on a daily basis (if they have given us permission to do so).

In between full updates, we also publish ‘Pupdates’ (see what we did there?) in the online Puppy Pen every two months, showing what a fun life your puppy is having as he or she learns about the world. When we do this, we also email our sponsors to tell them there’s a new Pupdate.

So, you'll see the progress you have made possible. You can also celebrate the outcome, when your puppy is partnered with a deaf person and helps them to live well with hearing loss.

Yes! Sponsorship makes a great gift for both children and adults.

To do this, go to the sponsor page and choose ‘it’s a gift’ under ‘Who is this sponsorship for?’. You can also choose whether to have the welcome pack sent to you, or directly to the gift receiver.

It generally takes around 10 working days for welcome packs to be despatched. If you don’t manage to order in time but you want to be sure you have something on that special day, you can download our print-at-home certificate in one of two ways:

If you sponsored online, you will be emailed a link to download your sponsorship certificate as soon as your sponsorship is set up. If your email doesn’t arrive, then please check your junk/spam folder.

If you have sponsored via a manual form, then please phone us on 01844 340734 or email us at sponsorapuppy@hearingdogs.org.uk and we will email a certificate through.

When the puppy’s training journey ends and he or she is matched with a deaf person, we transfer the sponsorship automatically to a new puppy if you paid by Direct Debit or a monthly PayPal donation. You can of course choose not to follow your new puppy and cancel your regular donation if you wish by contacting us. If you paid as a one-off, we ask if you’d like to sponsor another puppy.

We do this with a letter or email at the same time as your final update, in which you get to see the result of your support. We also show you lovely photos of the new puppy. It’s a very exciting time, as one journey ends and another begins!

As a well-run charity we try to be as efficient and effective as possible in everything we do. However, there are certain limits below which we would simply lose money on each sponsorship. The amounts we ask for mean that, after costs are considered, sufficient money goes towards helping a sponsor puppy through its training and helping a deaf person live well with hearing loss.