My first dog was a St. Bernard named “Muttley”, we rescued her from a concrete plant. My second dog, also a St. Bernard, was adopted from the Humane Society. It turns out that every dog I’ve ever owned was rescued from a shelter, a friend or some crazy situation. Dog adoption is awesome but in my experience there are two barriers to adoption. First is finding the right dog and the second is proving to the shelter that you’d be a fit owner.
What we need is some technology to help us (and our furry friends) out — I’m thinking we need an app. Yes, I know, every shelter has a website but that’s part of the problem. Who wants to hunt down and then scroll through a dozen different websites (with a dozen different formats) looking for Fido? If we had a single app we could adopt a lot more dogs.
The solution: doggr
Imagine an app that listed all the adoptable dogs in your area. Filter them by distance, by breed, by age, anything you like. You look at their pictures, swipe right if you like them. Swipe left if you don’t. If you’ve ever used a dating site or an app like Tinder you know what I mean. If you don’t, here are a few screens I mocked up:
Naturally you have the option of adopting the dog from the app but that’s not all. You can also setup a doggie play date or even become a foster parent. When my daughter was younger I used to take her to the humane society about once a month to visit the dogs (and cats) there. Our humane society would sell two milk bones for a buck. We’d spend $5 on treats and go hang out with the dogs. We had a dog at home, we weren’t really looking to adopt, we just liked to play with dogs. I’d like to think the dogs were grateful. The notion of play dates is almost unheard of at shelters. The idea seems to confuse some shelter volunteers much more than it confuses the dogs. I think shelters are missing out on a valuable tool.
Doggie playdates are critically important for adoptions. Playdates give the option to have a ‘test drive’. Sitting in a room at the shelter doesn’t really teach you much about Fido. You learn how Fido acts in that room (which smells like a hundred other dogs) but how will he act at your house? This is especially important if you have kids or other pets. By having a playdate, you can get a sense of what the obstacles might be before you adopt. I believe that people making informed adoption decisions have a much higher success rate than those who don’t. It’s common sense.
Playdates can also serve simpler purposes too. I know I would pay money to play with a dog for an afternoon. I don’t think I’m alone in this.
See the button to book a doggie playdate? $20. I believe it’s an offering that can make the shelters some money (they set the price). Potential adopters would totally jump at the chance. You know who else? Dog people who don’t have dogs; they would love this. So would people who want to socialize a new puppy. Why not let them take Fido out for a few hours? It’s good for everyone. Fido gets some love and fresh air, people get to love on Fido and the shelter makes a little money. What if someone doesn’t return Fido, you ask? Great I say! Everyone using doggr has a doggie credit score (more details on this below) and only those with good scores can take Fido for a play date. If they decide to keep him, that’s a win. Tail wag! The app can bill them for the adoption. The apps terms of service would cover all this, create liability wavers and the other lawyerly essentials.
Rehoming dogs and fostering
Shelter dogs are not the only dogs that need to find homes. There are lots of dogs that haven’t reached shelters (yet) and don’t need to. What if your friend who bought that Weimaraner (I know, I know, we warned them) could easily find a qualified home for that rambunctious rascal, one who will give him the training he needs? How about that sweet Dachshund that your family inherited when Aunt Hortense went to heaven? Doggr can help here too. You don’t need to be a shelter to post a dog on doggr. You just need to be someone who wants them to have a good home.
There’s also an option for long term fostering, all based on the same principles. If its an option you are interested in and you qualify, the button will light up. Let’s get all the dogs in one place, so we can give them the best opportunities possible.
If you’re curious as to how this would work in more detail (and the challenges it faces) keep reading. If you’re not that interested in the details you can stop now but please share this with anyone you know who loves dogs. What doggr needs is momentum, fans, maybe a Kickstarter (lickstarter?). I don’t have the time to create this myself but I am sharing the idea in the hopes someone will make this happen. I can’t wait to use the app!
The Barrier — disparate systems, disparate standards
Listen, what we want here is an omelet and that means we are going to have to break some eggs. Thousands of disparate shelters are using as many web pages. Its grossly inefficient. The reasons we ended up this way is completely understandable but now is the time to fix it. Parochial concerns have to be set aside for the greater good. Shelters need to standardize and they need a compelling reason to do that. Doggr is that compelling reason. Look, if Uber can enter markets with a product that’s basically unlawful and get their user base to change the laws, then dog lovers can certainly convince shelters to standardize on a platform.
Shelters will have to give up some control to make this work. Doggie data will live in the cloud, not at the shelter. This trend is everywhere now. Companies don’t want to host their own data or apps when they can take advantage of the scale, power and efficiency of the cloud. Shelters can still use their websites if they wish but it should become clear very quickly that they don’t need to. Imagine a Poodle comes in and the volunteer adds them to the doggr system from the app on their phone. A moment later everyone using doggr can see that new Poodle and she’s already found someone willing to foster her and a couple of playdates scheduled. Doggr needs the same information that the shelter needs: breed, color, age, weight, sex, exercise needs, house broken and so on. That data doesn’t change — where we save it does. Frankly, dog information is probably not the big challenge here. I don’t except a lot of resistance on that topic. The big blocker will be the human information and vetting.
Your doggie credit score
Right now if you want to adopt a dog from a given shelter you need to fill out an application with them (a lot of times that is still on paper!). Then the shelter will go through whatever their particular process is to decide if you can have a dog — and maybe how big of a dog. I’m suggesting that shelters can save countless hours and resources by adopting (no pun intended) a standard system of eligibility. A credit score for dogs. Let prospective adopters apply through doggr and let it create a verified score for them. A score that most shelters would be willing to use as a basis for eligibility. If shelters want to take it a step further, I’m all for that, but why not agree on the basics? Having a reliable system to assess owners is a tough problem to solve, even with technology, but it is possible. If we can get a 30 year home loan online or rent your apartment for the weekend with a mouse-click, we can sort this out too.
Doggr takes your doggie credit score and then runs that through the list of available dogs to show your percentage of match. Dogs below a certain match threshold it simply won’t appear. If you have a studio apartment and no yard that Great Dane doesn’t even show up (fewer broken hearts).
Money matters
We are all adults here, right? Doggr should be a not-for-profit, yes, but implementing doggr is going to cost money — so will keeping it running. Doggr needs to be done professionally so people love the app and use it to adopt lots of dogs. I imagine that the costs to get doggr running in the cloud and to produce the apps (please don’t leave out Windows Phone guys!) can easily be covered by a Kickstarter campaign. Once it’s running there will be operational costs. These could be covered by charitable donations but I’d prefer to see it covered by taking a fee off the transactions. That notion might bristle shelters, I know, but they will be saving the costs of not having to maintain and update their own webpages and systems. Also it probably isn’t a very big cost per transaction and it’s paid by the consumers. The big picture is that shelters will save money and more dogs will find their ‘forever home’.
The biggest picture
Individuals and small shelters would probably be the first to use doggr as they have the most to gain. The larger shelters or groups of shelters might have a harder time (for reasons that don’t have anything to do with adopting dogs). Some will hate doggr and refuse to try it. That’s normal and it’s okay. Doggr is a disruptive technology and that is what happens in these situations. People become entrenched in an established way of operating, regardless of how inefficient it might be. Imagine if doggr partnered with other disrupters like Uber or Lyft and Fido could just show up at your house with the click of a button (fur removal fees are extra!).
What if shelters refuse?
Ok, so what happens if shelters don’t get on board? Two possibilities. If doggr is popular enough, the number of dogs entering the shelters will decline dramatically. If people can find homes for dogs without having to bring them to the shelter then we need shelters less (and less shelters). The other possibility is that free market will take over (and overtake). The sharing economy will eventually give people an app where they can rent out their dogs for the afternoon and make money in the process — this isn’t something doggr would offer, as it doesn’t help dogs or get them adopted. But the point is that the need will be filled by the market and it won’t benefit homeless dogs. You can also expect related apps that provide some sort of AirBnB (AirDoG?) so you can find a well-reviewed dog sitter for your vacation. The new economy is coming to dogs. Let’s make sure it helps homeless dogs.
There are also some secondary effects that we can expect from having a system like doggr. Want to know how much you donated to shelters? Your accountant will be glad to know that. How much did everyone donate? How many dogs are homeless in the US? in California? in Palo Alto? How’s that different from last year? How many are Pit Bulls or Pekinese? There’s a lot of data that can be mined from this. It can help community leaders and governments understand and implement programs more effectively. These are data points that no single shelter can provide. Doggr would provide this doggie data free to anyone interested via APIs.
Well, there you have it. The power of an app: doggr. I encourage everyone to share this, especially if they love dogs or know people who do. We need this app. I might not have the idea 100% right but I think it’s enough to get people inspired and see the vision. I’m not the guy to create it, but maybe I can get the ball rolling. I hope a few likeminded folks will get a Kickstarter going and work with some of the more progressive shelters to design a backend that provides the resources and information we all need. Best of luck to you, I’m glad to donate to that project.
P.S. All of this applies to cats too, more or less. Swap ‘exercise’ for ‘declawed’, maybe a few other changes. But really how much more help do cats need? After all, they get to crap in our houses. :)
Post title photo by Liana Aghajanian
Originally published at www.linkedin.com.
