data, big dataone dog - sas institute...back on social media, ﬁnding a dog at a private rescue....

BIGdata,

ONEDOGAT A TIME.

DATA...

by Jill Dyché

“The automation of work and the digital disruption of business models place a premium on leaders who can create

a vision of change and frame it positively.”

– Leading in the Digital Age, McKinsey Quarterly, March 2016

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ...........................................................4

What You Should Know ..........................................5

What I Do ................................................................7

ONE: HOW IT IS NOW. .................................................9

TWO: WHAT IT COULD BE. ......................................... 14

THREE: THE PROBLEM WITH ANIMAL SHELTERS TODAY. ........................................ 19

Reason 1: Fear of liability .................................... 20

Reason 2: Poor or inaccurate success measurement .......................................... 21

Reason 3: Lack of visionary leadership ................ 22

FOUR: WHY TECHNOLOGY CAN SAVE THE DAY— AND SAVE LIVES! ...................................................... 24

Technology for Consumers................................... 25

Technology for Shelters ........................................ 29

FIVE: WHAT’S NEXT? ................................................. 34

SOURCES .................................................................. 36

ABOUT THE AUTHOR ................................................. 37

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION5

IT’S BETTER than it used to be. In 2015 the US shelter system euthanized an estimated 3.5 million animals, down from 30 million just a few years ago.1

But anyone who loves animals understands that’s 3.5 million too many.

This e-book intends to change that. It will offer specific improvement guidelines for animal shelters and their stake-holders to get the word out to the community, and use technology – all with the goal of emptying shelters. As a soft-ware executive and founder of a management consulting firm, I have adapted many of these practices from the busi-ness world. Though not perfect, the business world – and more specifically, the high-tech industry – have revealed some best practices for efficiencies and outreach. If the shelter system can adopt these, it can improve adoption rates, engage communities, and propel us toward a future where only very sick animals are euthanized. In other words, a future of no-kill.

What You Should KnowI have volunteered with both public shelters and private rescues, focusing most of my time on saving senior dogs

and hard-to-place breeds. While my volunteer efforts focus on videotaping and networking dogs, I understand that other species languish in shelters, boarding facilities, junkyards, backyard breeding operations, grocery store parking lots, abandoned farms and other rough places. In this e-book, I’ll talk about dogs – but those dogs also represent cats, pigs, horses, ferrets, chickens, rabbits and other animals in need of forever homes.

INTRODUCTION6

Although I base many of my experiences on the Los Angeles County Animal Care and Los Angeles Animal Services, I have visited dogs in shelters across the United States, and networked many more. The opportunities described in this e-book are universal. A few visionary shelter systems could embrace these concepts, thereby becoming examples for others to emulate. The goal of this e-book is that at least one shelter tries.

Central to the book is the theme that shelter systems can use digital technologies to modernize. Specific benefits would include:

• Using mobile technologies technologies like smartphones and tablets to offer rich, real-time information about adoptable animals to the public.

• Leveraging data and analytics to help optimize outreach to the public, local communities, rescue organizations, volunteers and adopters.

• Cultivating awareness on social media, targeting specific individuals and rescue groups for certain animals or initiatives, and creating segments of constituents to raise rescue and adoption rates.

• Using digital and networking technologies to eliminate paperwork, reduce backlogs and automate manual processes (like keeping paper-based liability waivers and maintaining outdated temperament logs). This would result in moving work out of the back office and redeploying staff more effectively.

Like businesses, shelters can use digital technologies to increase efficiency, cut costs, redeploy staff and enrich community relationships. But unlike businesses, shelters are unencumbered by competitive and shareholder pres-

INTRODUCTION7

sures that would slow them down. Shelters should begin behaving less like public-sector bureaucracies and more like nimble startup companies.

So what’s standing in the way? Read on to find out.

What I DoLike many people involved in pet rescue, I have a

day job that keeps me busy. I’m a Vice President at SAS, the world’s largest privately held software firm. We are an analytics and big data company (more on those later). I travel on business frequently, often internationally. In my spare time, I go to animal shel-ters and videotape dogs.

I visit resource-strapped shelters, mostly in southern California (where I live), and in other cities I visit, too. These shelters have too many dogs and cats and too few adopters. Many of them are in older, outdated buildings that are poorly designed or lack modern facilities (for both animals and humans).

FIGURE 1. Shelters (clockwise from top left: Downey Animal Shelter, Wake County Animal Shelter,

East Valley Animal Shelter, Carson Animal Shelter - images courtesy of Google Earth)

INTRODUCTION8

DID YOU KNOW?7.6 million animals

enter the U.S. shelter

system every year.

– ASPCA

90% of shelter dogs

visually identified as

a particular breed are

mislabeled.

– Best Friends Animal Sanctuary

10% of animals

entering shelters are

spayed or neutered.

– DoSomething.org.

Most of these shelters are underfunded. Many are mismanaged. Others are led by beleaguered shelter directors who become targets for public vitriol and get no real support from higher-ups—often appointed by career politi-cians who have never set foot in a public shelter and are thus divorced from the day-to-day realities of a broken system. (One L.A. county supervisor I know bought his two dogs from a breeder.) Most shelter workers took their jobs with good intentions, and have become disaffected and cynical (or worse, numb) over time.

Most shelter workers spend far more time on paperwork than they do with the animals in their care. They can be seen behind the counter rifling through rescue applications, liability waivers, temp test logs, volunteer lists, impound reports, and staff timesheets. They are rewarded on a “no news is good news” system of keeping litigation and negative press at bay, and making sure no one breaks any rules that could result in legal action. This is how they earn their salaries and keep their jobs. And this is why perfectly healthy companion animals end up in plastic bags.

The system has to change.

ONEhow it is now.

ONE: how it is now10

YOU’RE BROWSING the internet while you’re cooking dinner or watching TV. You stumble on an animal rescue web-site, or maybe you’re on Facebook, ShelterMe.com, or Petfinder looking at the long list of dogs in your local shelter.

One dog catches your eye. She’s a shepherd mix and looks EXACTLY like your old dog Lulu. You post a message of support in the Facebook comments and then someone else says the dog is scheduled to be put to sleep (“PTS”) tomorrow. You call the shelter; no one answers. You call again from work the next morning. After waiting on hold for 37 minutes, you’re told by a representative that the dog is first-come, first-served, and you need to go to the shelter in person to get more information.

When your lunch hour arrives you get in your car and drive to the shelter, not really knowing what you’ll do when you get there. You want to see the dog. Your husband will kill you if you bring her home, but you go anyway. You want to meet the dog, make sure she’s OK, maybe get her out of her cage and see if she’s friendly.

There aren’t enough parking spaces at the shelter, so you circle the lot three times before finding a spot. You make your way to the front office, where you take a ticket and get in line. (You’re number 64, but it’s unclear what number they’re serving.) From somewhere outside you hear the sound of barking dogs. You figure it will be a few minutes until it’s your turn. You pull out your phone and start browsing your Instagram.

Forty-eight minutes later, a woman at the desk wearing a uniform with “Officer Marsha” embroidered on the chest calls your number.

You explain to Officer Marsha that you have come to see a dog. She asks you for the animal’s ID number, and you fish the Post-It note with the dog’s number out of your wallet and hand it to her.


Officer Marsha types something on her keyboard, then stares at her screen for what seems like an eternity, making small “hmmm?” noises when she reads something that confuses her. Finally she explains that you can go back and see the dog in its kennel.

“But we can’t take it out because it hasn’t had a temp test.” You ask what a temp test is. Without making eye contact, Officer Marsha explains that the dog is a “dominant breed” and must be evaluated by a member of the shelter staff.

You ask when the temp test will take place. The information is not in the computer, Officer Marsha explains, and gets up to look for “The Log,” and for a minute you think she’s searching for a long piece of wood. The Log never material-izes.

“You wanna IP?” Officer Marsha asks without looking at you. You don’t know what that means, but you say yes and provide your phone number.

“We’ll call you,” she says. You have more questions, but Officer Marsha is yelling, “Number 65!”

You have been at the shelter for an hour and 12 minutes and have not seen a single animal.

The entire process of adopting a shelter pet can be long, bureaucratic and error-prone. Figure 2 outlines the all-too-common experience of a shelter visitor wanting to adopt.


Forms ofInteraction

\ want to adopt a dog!

Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Day 9 Day 10 Day 11 Day 12

TOUCHPOINTS

ACTIVITIES

She looks for dogs online (Facebook, Instagram, etc.).

The searchbegins.

A good match is found!

Findinginformation.

Meetingthe dog.

Following up!

ChoosingPlan B!

Too little,too late!

Bad news.

She finds a dog and tags her friend, “Hey,

look at this dog!”

She gives up and goes back on social media,

finding a dog at a private rescue.

She emails the shelter to ask about the dog

and receives no response.

She decides to go to the shelter and see the dog. The shelter explains that the dog

has not had a temp test.

She calls the shelter to inquire whether the temp test has been

done.

The original shelter calls to inform her that the dog has

passed its temp test.

She looks online to see if the dog is still at the shelter. The dog is

“No Longer Listed.”

FIGURE 2. A Customer Journey Map


The construct in Figure 2 is known as a “journey map.” Journey maps are staples of most big companies, as they illustrate how customers navigate the purchase and support process in order to conduct business with them. The adopter journey and the customer journey share many common traits.

Of course not all shelters are this difficult to interact with. But too many of them are. And the necessary changes are easy to make with a little bit of vision and ambition.

“In 1940, a young sociolo-gist named Robert K. Merton published an essay called ‘Bureaucratic Structures and Personality’ in which he coined the term displacement of goals. Bureaucracy develops because large organizations require rules and procedures, lest they fall into the administrative and financial chaos and gover-nance-by-whim of the kind that brought down William Durant. But eventually the rules and procedures devised to help the organization achieve its goals take on a life of their own, and become an ‘immediate value in the life-organization of the bureaucrat.” In other words, when people orient their lives around the rules, the purpose of the organization gets lost.”2

THE BIZ BUZZ

TWOwhat it could be.

TWO: what it could be15

NOW LET’S IMAGINE a new scenario.

You see a dog listed on the shelter’s website or Facebook page. The dog’s information is thorough, and includes breed, size and behavior characteristics, including whether the dog is dog- and child-friendly. The site offers addi-tional links to breed information as well as training references. It encourages you to come and meet the dog in person, including operating hours and a link to Google Maps for driving directions.

When you arrive at the shelter, you see a large digital notification board. The board is around five feet high and displays a photo of each dog with its ID number and cage number. You’ve seen boards like this to help you find your car in rental car lots. The dog you like is in Building 1, Kennel 152. You touch the screen and a small digital map lights up a path from where you stand to the kennel building.

Kennel 152 is easy to find. And there’s your dog, sitting in an indoor-outdoor enclosure on clean blankets on a dog hammock. A tablet computer is installed on the door of the kennel. It displays the information you read last night on the shelter’s website, with some additional details. It might look like the screen in Figure 3. FIGURE 3. A Doggie Dashboard


The tablet explains who the dog is, the fact that he was turned in by an owner (known as owner surrender), as well as a few behavior characteristics and a shelter staff member’s notes about the dog.

This dashboard tool allows you to click on links to find additional information about the dog, as in Figure 4.

It even includes a video of the dog’s behavior assessment (also known as a “temp test”), so you can see how the dog responds to a variety of situations, from guarding a toy to protecting its food to meeting other dogs, both large and small.

Finally, the interactive screen provides a “call to action.” Are you interested in meeting the dog in the play yard? Have you already visited the dog and want to adopt it? Would you like to introduce the dog to an existing pet? Maybe you want to help a rescue organization by fostering the dog or donating for its care? Pressing one of these buttons triggers a message to a shelter employee, who is automatically summoned to help you.

FIGURE 4. Information at Your Fingertips!


If you’ve used business intelligence tools in your day job, you might recognize the screens in Figures 4 and 5 as dashboards. Many companies use dashboards to help them profile their customers; report on daily, weekly or monthly sales; or track a product’s shipping status. Dashboards report on active information – often mining so-called “big data” – to inform decision making about customers, products and business performance. Dash-boards are typically intuitive and easy to use.

The Doggie Dashboard, as cute as it sounds, is a powerful tool and an example of a modern application that exemplifies the digital experience. Better information is its currency. Businesses in both the public and private sectors can exploit these technologies for better adoption – in both senses of the word!

This is how it should be. No taking a ticket. No waiting in long lines for simple information. No robotic policy expla-nations that result in potential adopters leaving empty-handed with no plan. Using digital technology – technology that is available at any big box retailer, connected and network-enabled to allow for remote communications – you can find an animal, get as much information as possible, and decide what to do next.

This process has saved both you and the shelter time. This means that shelter workers – and, not to put too fine a point on it, they are government employees – are able to spend less time on analog and paperwork-intensive tasks, and more time helping people adopt or rescue pets.

THE BIZ BUZZ


Applying technology to the adoption process helps get more dogs seen. It’s more efficient, and thus more cost-ef-fective. It not only saves more lives, it saves tax dollars. The only thing standing in the way of automating the shelter system is the lack of political will.

In other words, a lack of leadership.

THREEthe problem with

animal shelters today.

THREE: the problem with shelters today20

ANYONE WHO has been to a public animal shelter knows all too well that the experience isn’t easy for either the animals or the humans. Most shelters are overcrowded with pets that have come in for all the wrong reasons. These shelters are loud. They smell. And they’re understaffed for the work that needs to be done.

In my experience, there are three root causes for poorly run shelters.

Reason 1: Fear of liability. It’s understandable. The world has its share of crazies who will intentionally put themselves in harm’s way or be

purposely neglectful and then sue at a moment’s notice. Public shelters have seen their share of reckless behavior, and it costs taxpayer money. So they circle the wagons to prevent liability at all costs.

The effects of this are stark. Stressed-out animals being labeled “dangerous” or “sick,” thus limiting who can help them. Prohibiting certain dogs from even leaving their cages, lest they “turn on” someone. One-line email replies from shelter managers so there is no subtext that can be misinterpreted, resulting in litigation. These behaviors reflect poli-cies that cover the butts of shelter management but discourage the very adopters these shelters rely on for help.

In the meantime, well-meaning adopters are required to sign involved liability waivers. Naturally these are paper-based – many are in triplicate, and filed in overstuffed cabinets for a standard period of time only to be lost and misplaced, requiring significant human time when and if they are ever needed. The human time required to review, approve, file, monitor and reference these waivers is significant. That time could be spent by shelter workers helping animals in their care.


Reason 2: Poor or inaccurate success measurement.You would think that “success” in any shelter system would be a decrease in “intake” – animals arriving at shelters

as strays, surrendered by owners, or found wounded or dead by field officers – and an increase in “release” – animals adopted or rescued.

But it’s not that simple. Many shelters would much rather kill an animal than risk having it end up in a bad situation or biting someone.

FIGURE 5. The Formula for Success

INTAKE RELEASE

the IDEAL Success Formula IS:

SUCCESS=

[Last month’s intake > this month’s intake]

[# of lawsuits and claims + # of shelter visitors + # of adoption / rescue applications]


Some of this is understandable. No one wants to unwittingly adopt what turns out to be a vicious dog. However, the shelter system is often inundated with offers of help from professional trainers; dog-savvy volunteers; and citizens willing to commit their time photographing, exercising or cleaning up after shelter animals. Many shelter systems have neither the staff nor the processes to support such proposals.

Shelter managers are buried in paperwork and reporting duties. They lack the time (and many lack the interest) to reach out to the public. For some, it’s just a job. The public agencies that govern shelters are often uninterested in volunteer training or community engagement. They want statistics: How many dogs came in, how many made it out, and are these figures greater than or less than the prior month/year?

The trouble is that no one understands what the civic leaders who receive these statistics actually do with them. They certainly don’t use them to improve shelter operations, introduce community outreach programs, encourage volun-teering or reallocate funding.

Reason 3: Lack of visionary leadership.This gets to the heart of the matter. The civic leaders (these include city commissioners and deputies, county council

members, mayoral staff and state government boards) charged with shelter system oversight are positively opaque about the definition of “success.” They are happy to gather around a table examining paper reports showing whether intakes were up or down last month. They even enjoy doling out the occasional award for a shelter employee who was particularly helpful, or a shelter director who managed to decrease last month’s intake rate.


THE BIZ BUZZ

Many shelter directors avoid interacting with the public, hiding in their offices and avoiding direct eye contact with shelter visitors. Email responses are often one line or less, intentionally vague and noncommittal. When mistakes are made or groups put pressure on shelter management, they circle the wagons, ignoring the issue until it – hopefully – goes away.

Of course, if you’ve worked in business at all, you know that all this can be improved. It’s not that hard. If companies like GE (with a market cap of $253.5 billion), Verizon ($202.5 billion) and Samsung ($199.4 billion) can improve their businesses by introducing new business models and embracing digital technologies3, so can public shelters.

As the saying goes, the fish rots from the head. These bureaucratic, political cultures are entrenched because the leaders overseeing public shelters are not rewarded for improvements but rather for avoiding problems. Maintaining the status quo is the objective, and reducing risk (“No feeding the animals treats!”) is a sure path to promotion.

FOURwhy technology can save the day—and save lives!

FOUR: why technology can save the day—and save lives!25

“The toughest challenge in achieving digital business success…is not

defining a strategy. It’s executing a strategy.”4

YOU CAN CERTAINLY skip this section if you’re typically bored by technical explanations. For paper-intensive busi-ness processes, apathetic employees, outdated infrastructure, misguided policies, lack of constituent outreach and poor leadership, technology is the single most promising solution. In fact, technology can help remedy every one of those items and others.

(The problems aren’t exclusive to animal shelters, so extrapolate this to your own company or charity.)

Technology for ConsumersOn the following page, consider the adopter’s journey shown in Part 1 of this e-book, and what it could look like.


Forms ofInteraction

\ want to adopt a dog!

TOUCHPOINTS

ACTIVITIES

She looks for dogs online (Facebook, Instagram, etc.).

Day 1The search

begins.

Day 2A good match

is found!

Day 3 Finding

information.

Findinginformation.

She downloads a mobile app and receives real-time messages

about the dog’s status. She can even view the dog on the

shelter’s DoggieCam!

She emails the shelter and receives an email

login information and a link to the dog’s updated

dashboard.

She goes to the shelter to meet the dog. A greeter is expecting her and has taken the dog to a play yard to

meet. She has electronic forms ready to sign. The dog goes home.

She fills out an on-line adoption application and digitally signs a

Homecheck Agreement.

A successfulmatch! FIGURE 6. The Adopter’s New Journey


Of course, this could be an even shorter process if the adopter visits the dog on the same day, still the result of digital capabilities.

When we use the word “digital,” it refers to maximizing business outcomes with technologies that use the input and output of information. These technologies are easy to acquire, and reflect constantly changing business (or shelter) dynamics. Think about filing your taxes on the web, shopping for a car on your tablet, using online banking through your bank’s mobile app to pay your electricity bill, or watching streaming videos on Netflix. They all use technology to streamline the flow of dynamic information.

We could use these same technologies in the shelter system! Imagine tracking dogs with an app on your phone. You could not only view their information, as with the profile in Figure 3. You could read the shelter notes, see how many visitors the dog has had so far, and understand if anyone had expressed adoption interest. The Ventura County Animal Services (VCAS) has such an app, shown in Figure 7.

FIGURE 7. Shelter iPhone App (courtesy of VCAS)


Imagine if rescuers and potential adopters had this kind of information literally at their fingertips! It would remedy the backlog of callers waiting on hold to inquire about lost or adoptable animals – they could just tap the app. The human time saved could be reallocated to cleaning cages, feeding animals, setting up intervention or volunteer programs, or reallocating staff to a welcome kiosk like the one at VCAS (in Figure 8):

What if everyone had an animal’s complete profile and status before visiting the shelter? No more wasted trips, no more waiting in line only to discover the dog was already adopted (or euthanized). And what if the animal’s status was updated in real time? No waiting for news on a dog from someone in the know. That someone is now everyone!

And imagine that when you did visit the shelter, you could get help right away, either through one of the easy-to-use tablets situated right with the dogs in the kennel, or from a live human being –unencumbered by paperwork and ready to assist you. How many more animals could be helped? How many more could be saved?

FIGURE 8. A Shelter’s Welcome Kiosk


Technology for SheltersPotential rescues and adopters aren’t the only ones who could take advantage of modern technologies to help save

companion animals. Shelters too can benefit from digital technology to better understand their own performance, increase efficiencies, improve community outreach and, yes, even reduce liability potential.

Most public shelters are accountable to the public agencies that govern them. This means providing information, including:

• Number of animals taken in by time period (day, week, month, year).

• Number of animals leaving the facility by time period, and by means (adopted, rescued, euthanized, died at shelter).

• Profile of intakes by breed, age or condition of the animal.

These are relatively straightforward reports. But often they are cumbersome to produce and error-prone. The systems that generate these reports could be homegrown and outdated. Moreover, the reports are not easy to read or under-stand, and thus not practically useful.

Business intelligence and analytics technologies have kept pace with the rate of innovation. In addition to the basic reports listed above, shelters could use analytics and big data solutions to understand numerous other areas:


Intake clusters. Data could show intake rates by geographic region, breed and intake type (found as a stray, owner surrender, etc.).

Analysis of this data could identify geographic or demographic “clusters” that might inform concentrations of back-yard breeders, dog fighting rings, or the homes of hoarders. Such data could be used by law enforcement or goodwill organizations, resulting in deployment of mobile spay and neuter clinics to high-surrender neighborhoods, a registry of local fosters, or transfers of animals from highly populated shelters to no-kill facilities.

Banned adopters.The vast majority of the rescue community is composed of well-meaning and overworked people trying to save as

many animals as they can. However, a tiny percentage rescue dogs from shelters and subject them to boarding situa-tions, hoarding situations, or even organized crime. Fingerprints, facial recognition or other biometric scanning tech-nologies could identify such individuals, often across networks of different shelters or public agencies. These findings can help shelters identify dog slingers, enabling online cross-referencing against “do not rescue” lists in other counties or states. This could inform police monitoring of suspected abusers or dog fighting rings, and the creation of public reward programs to thwart these activities.


Rescue effectiveness. Shelter systems do their best to evaluate rescue organizations before approving them to save sick, senior or aggres-

sive dogs. However, like other shelter processes, assessing the viability and intentions of these rescues is paper-inten-sive, arduous and difficult to maintain. Some rescues never end up rescuing dogs and “stay on the books” despite little to no effort to rescue.

Robust analytics would not only allow shelters to analyze rescue histories for specific rescue groups, it would reveal rescue frequency, breed preferences, dog return rates and adoption success rates. Such analysis could lead to rescue rankings, allowing shelters to reach out to the rescue organizations most likely to rehabilitate and place a given dog or cat. This could save countless hours and countless lives.

The concept of “cross-selling,” all the rage in corporate marketing departments, can be applied to shelter animals, too. For instance, just as someone who buys a brand of shampoo is more likely to buy the companion conditioner, someone who has adopted a pit-Dalmatian mix with brown ticking is more likely to adopt a dog with similar characteristics, or network that dog to their friends and family. (This is a true story, and there are hundreds of others like it.)

THE BIZ BUZZ


Outreach campaigns. Even the most technologically advanced animal shelters need volunteers. In my experience, however, the vast

majority of shelters fail to attract and keep qualified volunteers. Shelter volunteer programs have high attrition rates. By analyzing how volunteers are attracted, characteristics of reliable volunteers, and volunteer training programs, shel-ters can tailor their outreach, improve their training and ensure that volunteers receive the gratification they’re hoping for when they sign up to help.

Data sharing.Even municipal shelters overseen by the same public agencies might operate independently, with no lens into

how their fellow shelters are doing. By not only analyzing their data but sharing it, these shelters could pinpoint loop-holes, drive new efficiencies and test out more effective community outreach. For instance, why has one shelter nearly doubled its number of private adoptions while another a mere nine miles away reports growing euthanization rates? By sharing and comparing detailed data and reports, shelters could teach and learn from one another, optimize which rescues to work with, and add services such as public meet-and-greet yards for dogs and cats, to increase save rates.

Data sharing also extends to external data. Many shelters require rescue partners to share their data with the shelter to remain in good standing.


Independent networkers, intervention services – groups that prevent animals from entering the shelter system in the first place – and members of the public who volunteer maintain their own statistics. For instance, I keep data on the dogs I video at shelters, including how long the dog was in the shelter, the length of time between being videoed and making it out, and the number of dogs that didn’t make it.

On the following page, Figures 9, 10, 11 and 12 show sample visualizations gleaned from my data.


This bar chart won’t surprise anyone who’s visited a shelter recently. The reason that pit bulls are the breed most often adopted, rescued and euthanized is simply that pit bull type dogs are by far the most common breed populating shelters across North America. Of all the dogs euthanized in shelters, an estimated 40 percent are pit bulls.5

FIGURE 9. Dogs Getting Out

5%

10%

15%

20%

FREQ

UEN

CY

LIKELY BREED

STATUS rescuedeuthanizedadopted

BEAGLE MIX

BOXER MIX

BULLDOG MIX

CHIHUAHUA MIX COLLIE MIX

CORGI MIX

DALMATIONMIX

DOGUE DEBORDEAUX

ENGLISHMASTIFF

GERMANSHEPHERD

HUSKY

JINDO MIX

LAB MIX MINIATUREPOODLE

PIT BULL

PIT BULL MIX

POINTER MIX

SHEPHERD MIX

SHEPHERDROTTWEILER MIX

TERRIER MIX

SWISS MTN.DOG

CHIHUAHUA

COCKERSPANIEL MIX

DACHSHUNDBRINDLE

MALTESE

ROTTWEILER

SHIH TZU

PARSON RUSSELTERRIER

MASTIFF MIXCHOW CHOW


The tree map in Figure 10 tells a different story. While the vast majority of the dogs in one of my shelters are, not surprisingly, pit bulls, most of the dogs that actually enter the shelter are not purebred pit bulls but rather mixed breed dogs that have been labeled “pit bull mixes.” Often this distinction is made at the whim of a harried or uneducated shelter worker, to whom any dog is a pit bull. This is a missed opportunity to accurately label an otherwise well-be-haved dog, or a breed someone searching Petfinder.com might be looking to adopt.

FIGURE 10. Intake by Breed

41.06%

0.48%FREQUENCY

AGE (adjusted)2 11

PIT BULL MIX PIT BULL

GERMANSHEPHERD

CHIHUAHUAMIX

CHIH

UAH

UA

TERRIERMIX COLLIE

MIX

SWISSMTN DOG

ROTTWEILERSHEPHERD MIX

PARSONRUSSELL TERRIER

CORGIMIX

SHIHTZU

JINDOMIX

COCKERSPANIEL

MIX

DALMATIONMIX

MALTESE

DASH

CHUN

DM

IX

BEAG

LE M

IX

MINIATUREPOODLE

MASTIFFMIX

DOG DEBORDEAUX

ENGLISHMASTIFF

HUSKY

LAB MIX SHEPHERDMIX

BULLDOGMIX

CHOW CHOWMIX

BOXER MIX

ROTTWEILER

POINTERMIX


The line graph in Figure 11 tells an interesting story. It compares dog intake rates at a Los Angeles County shelter between October 2014 and December 2015. Notice the sharp uptick in owner surrenders during the month of July. Many people who work with homeless pets brace themselves for July, when thousands of dogs spook at the sound of fireworks and escape their homes and yards. But what this graph reveals is not that these dogs are arriving at the shelter as strays, but as owner surrenders.

FIGURE 11. Dogs Arriving

5%

10%

15%

20%

FREQ

UEN

CY

MONTH AND YEAR

ARRIVAL TYPE strayowner surrenderhoarding

OCT 2014 NOV 2014 DEC 2014 JAN 2015 FEB 2015 MAR 2015 APR 2015 MAY 2015 JUN 2015 JUL 2015 AUG 2015 SEP 2015 OCT 2015 DEC 2015NOV 2015


In fact, at this particular shelter there is a sad phenomenon of dog owners dumping their dogs at the shelter before they leave on their summer vacations to avoid dog-sitting or boarding fees. On rare occasions those same families show up after their vacations and re-adopt their dogs. More often, though, the dogs remain in the shelter until they are either adopted by someone else or euthanized.

Which leads us to our final visualization:

FIGURE 12. Time between Video and ExitFREQUENCY

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

BEAGLE MIXBOXER MIX

BULLDOG MIXCHIHUAHUA MIX

CHOW CHOW MIXCOLLIE MIXCORGI MIX

DALMATION MIXDOG DE BORDEAUX

ENGLISH MASTIFFGERMAN SHEPHERD

HUSKYJINDO MIX

LAB MIXMASTIFF MIX

MINIATURE POODLEPARSON RUSSELL TERRIER

PIT BULLPIT BULL MIXPOINTER MIX

SHEPHERD MIXSHEPHERD ROTTWEILER MIX

TERRIER MIX

LIK

ELY

BR

EED

NUMBER OF DAYS FROM FILMING TO SHELTER EXIT

2 WEEKS

1.0 2.5 4.0


Figure 12 shows the number of days between the date a dog was videotaped at the shelter and the date it was adopted. There is a clear correlation between videotaping a dog and posting that video on social media and its like-lihood of being adopted or rescued. My data shows the average number of days a pit bull type dog with a video is adopted is 54 percent higher than if the dog had not been on video.

What would shelters do if they could generate these types of reports regularly? What types of decisions could they make? Although my data shows conclusively that all dog breeds have a higher percentage of making it out of the shelter alive if they are shown on video, no shelter worker has ever formally requested that I come and video an at-risk dog. If they saw my data, they just might.

Note: all visualization reports were re-created from reports generated by SAS Visual Analytics 7.3.

FIVEwhat’s next?

INTRODUCTION40

AS DISCUSSED EARLIER, the majority of the barriers we need to overcome are the product of an outdated or absent measurement system, lack of accountability and a cumbersome bureaucracy. These are cultural issues that are hard to change.

The fact is that many public shelters are internally and not externally focused. In other words, serving the public comes second to complying with internal policies.

All it will take is one shelter.

If a single shelter could serve as the test for applying digital technolo-gies and analytics to their operations, it could show what success looks like, ultimately introducing the digital shelter – connected, information-driven, animal-focused – to the rest of the country, and the rest of the world.

It requires vision. It requires leadership. It will certainly require some time.

The results could be amazing. Life-changing. Life-saving. Are you up for the transformation?

FIGURE 8: Measures Drive Priorities

SOURCES

1 As reported by the Cesar Millan Pack Project: http://millanpackproject.org/.

2 Nicholas Lemann, “When G.M. Was Google,” The New Yorker, December 1, 2014.

3 Each of these is in the top 25 companies on the Forbes Global 2000 list for 2015: http://www.forbes.com/global2000/list/#tab:overall

4 Jeanne W. Ross, Ina M. Sebastian, Cynthia M. Beath, “How to Create a Great Digital Strategy,” MIT Sloan Center for Information Systems Research: Research Briefing, Volume XVI, Number 3, March 2016.

5 Benjamin Moore, “Here’s Why You See So Many Pit Bulls in Shelters,” Barkpost.com: http://www.bark-post.com/pit-bulls-shelters-question

http://millanpackproject.org/.

http://millanpackproject.org/.

http://www.forbes.com/global2000/list/#tab:overall

http://www.forbes.com/global2000/list/#tab:overall

http://www.barkpost.com/pit-bulls-shelters-question



JILL DYCHÉ is a writer, classic rock lover, dog rescuer, and software executive. She speaks, writes, and pesters her friends about these topics. As a former management consultant, her focus is getting IT and organizations at her client companies—which have included Verizon, JP Mor-gan Chase, Microsoft, and Sony, among others—to opti-mize their processes through analytics and digital tech-nologies. A large part of her work has been to encourage collaboration between (often-dueling) organizations.

Jill has lived in London, Paris, and Sydney, but calls Los Angeles home. She cultivates an organic vegetable gar-den and friends with issues. She has written four books, the latest of which is The New IT: How Business Leaders

Are Enabling Strategy in the Digital Age (McGraw-Hill, 2015). She is currently applying much of what she has learned in the business world to the rescue world, with opti-mism. Catch her (business) blog at www.jilldyche.com, or friend her on Facebook to save a dog.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

www.jilldyche.com

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T H O U G H T P R O V O K I N G B U S I N E S S

CREDITS

Layout and design: David Accampo

Videos and images: Bree Baich

Data visualizations: Analise Polsky

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