Award-winner
Greenville county Animal Care
A lifesaving app connects pets to their forever homes
As a volunteer-run organization, Greenville County Animal Care struggles to give the influx of dogs the time and detail they need. Updating files and personality charts can fall behind the more urgent tasks of the day. When potential adopters come to find their new family member, there often isn’t much information to go off of. How can both sides make more successful matches?
Adopters and staff have different needs when it comes to the use of the app. I created a staff-only experience that highlighted the features most important to shelter employees. This would be controlled by having certain permissions tiers.
I designed the app to allow potential adopters browsing capabilities of all the available animals
in the shelter.
We also pitched the idea of QR codes on the collars of each dogs. This way, adopters could also use the app to scan the code of the dog they were interested in.
Each animal would start off with a profile and their base traits. As staff, volunteers and adopters interact with the dog (and log new data) the traits on their profile would update. That way, when a potential adopter views the dog’s profile, they can instantly see if this pet may be right for them.
Logging data is what powers the app - each activity, each milestone - it all comes together to provide the information for the profile. Why not get adopters involved? The app encouraged adopters to get to know a pet by participating in a selection of pre-defined activities. The adopters would then log their experience into the app.
This data would then be collected and used to influence an animal’s traits. It also helped staff determine who might need more training etc.
As winners of the wildcard round, Greenville County Animal Care was awarded $95,000 from Petco Foundation to put towards the development of this app.
