The Problem
Beaver County Humane Society (BCHS) brings in over 4,000 homeless animals every year. However, their facilities can only accommodate 250 dogs, cats, and other animals at a time. Because of this, they turn away many animals which likely get sent to other shelters that may euthanize them.
To help alleviate this problem, BCHS has an animal fostering program where volunteers will take cats and dogs into their home temporarily.
Unfortunately, their system for handling the program was inefficient and painful for both staff and volunteers. This led to overusing some volunteers, never contacting others, and receiving few new applicants.
The Foster Portal
A web app for BCHS to speed up and automate fostering, better utilize available volunteers, and engage volunteers sooner.
The data and tech stack for this project are all private, so I can’t share any code or host a demo project.
Online Application
New foster volunteers can now apply to foster cats, dogs, and other small animals without the hassle of traveling to or trying to call the shelter. Volunteers are notified by email if they’ve been accepted.
Manage Fosters Digitally
The BCHS staff now have a full list of every foster volunteer at their fingertips, no more jumbled mess of papers. They can better utilize every volunteer and match them with the animals that best fit their experience.
View Foster Animals Online
Foster volunteers gain access to an up to date list of all the animals that need a temporary home without having to travel to the shelter. This information is automatically pulled from BCHS’s systems without any maintenance from the staff.
Project Overview
Role
Research, Full Stack Web Dev
Client
Beaver County Humane Society
Project Duration
3 Months
Faculty Adviser
Prof H
Team Members
Gus Henry, Shijie Rao, Prof H (adviser)
We partnered with Beaver County Humane Society, a Pittsburgh no-kill animal shelter, to help them better run their organization with technology.
While this does not have the best visual or interaction design due to the nature of the project, it demonstrates research, process, and development. It’s work that has had an impact and that I’m very proud of.
To learn more about the process behind creating the BCHS Foster Portal, continue reading.
Research
Expert Interviews
User Interviews
Technology Audit
Design
Development
Continued Work
Research
We started off pretty broadly when first meeting with BHCS staff. How could we better help them run their organization using technology?
Expert Interviews
We spoke with seven of the staff members at BCHS, all with different responsibilities and pain points. For example, organizing volunteers to walk the animals or creating better educational materials for adopters.
The problem we uncovered that resonated the most with the team was animal fostering. They were running into trouble getting animals into temporary housing every year. With a better fostering system, we could potentially save the lives of hundreds of animals every year.
User Interviews
With a defined problem to tackle, we interviewed the four employees most involved in the fostering program. We learned how the entire process of fostering animals worked. We also learned that everything was run with disorganized papers, that staff relied heavily on memory, and that they heavily relied on the same few volunteers.
We also interviewed four new and experienced volunteers. The new ones told us about how difficult it was to apply and the hassle of having to drive to the shelter multiple times. The more experienced volunteers told us how difficult it was to get information about foster animals from BCHS, even when they go in person.
Technology Audit
We also considered the shelter’s technology infrastructure and how it aligned with their organizational structure.
None of the staff considered themselves technologically savvy, and they only had one tech support contractor who was rarely on site. Additionally, they had little to budget to invest in new technology.
What they did have was a Windows application used to manage animals and people who adopted. The database for this is hosted onsite. The software was unfortunately not very usable.
Design
Given the straightforward requirements of this project and the tight timeline to deploy, we chose to keep our design phase short. We created and tested a few wireframes to make sure we hit all the key use cases such as handling sign up.
Wireframe of list of animals that need fostering
Wireframe of an animal’s detail page
Development
It was important for us to build a system that could integrate with BCHS’s existing technology and could be hosted on site for no additional cost.
We chose Ruby on Rails as our framework of choice. The team all had experience with Rails, and the framework supported integrating with the existing Microsoft SQL Server database. This would be hosted on a Windows machine that they already owned.
We designed our system such that we could read relevant data, write fostering related data, and never update anything their system relies on.
The app was deployed to BCHS’s servers and is still in production.
Zoomed out excerpt of the existing database schema
Gus Henry (left), Shijie Rao (right)
Continued Work
This project was in collaboration with the CMU Information System department. We knew that the project was going to be continued by new developers from CMU after us. What we built was a simple groundwork that future teams can build on top of and improve.
I am hopeful that we’ve had a positive impact on BCHS and that future teams will continue to support BCHS.