Organization name
Smiley Animal Welfare Center
How animals enter the shelter
We take in about 2,500 animals a year, roughly 1,150 dogs and 1,350 cats. Around 40% come from animal control under our municipal sheltering contract, about 30% are owner surrenders booked by appointment, about 20% are transfers in from rural partner shelters that are over capacity, and the rest are litters born in our care.
Stray hold is five days without identification and seven with. Owner surrender appointments are booked by phone and email, and the intake coordinator confirms them by hand; if somebody arrives without an appointment we take the animal anyway and sort the paperwork afterwards.
Cat intake roughly doubles between May and September. We know it is coming every year and we still end up rearranging the building in June.
Intake paperwork is completed on paper at the desk and typed into the shelter system afterwards, usually the same day. Two people run that desk on different shifts and they do not always record surrender reasons the same way, which we have known about for a while.
How animal status is tracked
The shelter management system holds the animal record — location, medical history, vaccination, spay/neuter status, holds, and outcome. That part works.
Behavior observations do not fit. The free-text field in the system is too small for a real observation, so the behavior team keeps a shared spreadsheet instead, one row per observation. Kennel staff write observations on the paper kennel card during rounds twice a day and someone types the important ones in later, when there is time.
Medical holds and behavior holds are set in the system and they do control whether an animal shows as available, so that much is reliable.
What is not reliable is the picture. To know where an animal actually stands today you look at the system record, then the behavior spreadsheet, then the kennel card, then you ask whoever worked the last shift. New staff and weekend relief staff get this wrong, and it is the single most common reason an adopter is told something that is out of date.
How adoption inquiries are handled
Inquiries arrive four ways: the website application form, which emails a PDF to the adoptions mailbox; direct email to that same mailbox; phone; and people walking onto the adoption floor. We get somewhere between 180 and 220 a week across all four, more after a social media post does well.
The mailbox has no owner. Whoever opens it first answers it, which means some get answered twice and some sit. A good number are the same handful of questions — is this animal still available, what is the fee, do you adopt out of state, what is your policy on dogs with young children, can I meet an animal today.
A real inquiry becomes an application, then a counselling conversation, then a meet-and-greet, then approval and go-home. The counsellor reads the animal's notes, checks holds and restricted placement conditions, and talks the household through it. That conversation is the job and it should stay that way.
The retyping is the part that grates. Applicant details come in on a PDF and get typed into the shelter system by hand at approval. We are slower to reply than we want to be, and adopters do go elsewhere while they wait.
How volunteers are trained
We have about 200 active volunteers, counting anyone who has taken a shift in the last 90 days. New volunteers attend a two-hour orientation, then do role training with the coordinator or an experienced volunteer, then shadow two shifts before working alone.
The materials are a mess. There is a volunteer handbook as a PDF, role sheets in a SharePoint folder, some older documents on the shared drive that people still send because they have the link, and printed sheets in the volunteer room that nobody is certain match the PDF. When a procedure changes, we update one of those and usually not the others.
Scheduling runs in a separate volunteer tool with its own login. It works, but the roles and shift types in it were never standardized, so pulling hours by role at month end takes the coordinator a couple of hours of cleanup.
Ongoing guidance is mostly a group email and word of mouth on shift.
How fosters are supported
We have around 120 active foster homes. They are the reason we get through kitten season and we lose some of them every year because we are slow to answer.
Fosters reach us by text to the coordinator's work phone, by email to the foster mailbox, and in a group chat that grew organically and that we do not officially support. Questions are mostly the same set: feeding amounts, weaning, whether a symptom needs a vet today or can wait, when the next vaccine is due, how to get more supplies, how to book a spay appointment, and what happens when their foster animal is adopted.
Capacity lives in a spreadsheet the coordinator keeps. It reflects what she remembers and is updated after the fact, so on a Monday in June it is genuinely out of date.
The medical questions are the ones that worry me. A foster asking whether a kitten that has stopped eating needs to be seen is asking a clinical question, and that has to reach a technician or a vet, quickly. It cannot be answered by anything else.
Repeated staff questions
The ones I hear most: is this animal available, and if not, why not. What are the current restricted placement conditions on this dog. What is our policy on adopting to households with children under 12. What is the fee this month, and does the senior discount still apply. Where is the current version of the intake procedure. Who approves a transfer out. What do I tell a foster whose animal has diarrhea at 9pm on a Sunday. Which vaccine is due and when. How do I book a community clinic appointment for a member of the public. What counts as an animal served for the county report and does it match what the family foundation means by it.
Most of these have a written answer somewhere. The problem is that the answer is in a binder, a PDF, an email from the Director eighteen months ago, or in somebody's head, and the four versions do not always agree.
Documents used today
Standard operating procedures for intake, stray hold, cleaning and disease control, and euthanasia. Adoption application and adoption contract. Foster agreement, foster manual, and a set of one-page foster care sheets by age and species. Volunteer handbook and role sheets. Kennel cards. Behavior observation forms and the behavior review notes. Medical protocols and vaccination schedules. Transfer agreements with partner shelters. Community clinic consent forms. Pet food pantry intake sheet. Grant reporting templates, one per funder. Board reporting pack template. Incident report form.
They live in SharePoint, on an older shared drive, in printed binders at the intake desk and in the volunteer room, and as PDFs attached to old emails. There is no index. Version control is the file name and the file name is not always right.
Software used today
A commercial shelter management system, hosted, which is our system of record for animals. Microsoft 365 for email, Teams, documents and spreadsheets, with SharePoint and an older shared drive that we never finished migrating. Four shared Outlook mailboxes for adoptions, foster, volunteers and general inquiries. A separate volunteer scheduling tool with its own login. A donor and fundraising platform. An accounting package. A website CMS with an online adoption application form that emails a PDF. A clinic scheduling workbook in Excel. A lot of other spreadsheets — foster capacity, transport runs, behavior observations, pantry visits, and a grant reporting workbook.
None of these talk to each other. The only integration we have is a monthly export from the donor platform into accounting, and a person does that.
We are about 40 staff. IT is a half-time operations coordinator and an outside IT company for laptops and email. We have no developers, no test environment, and no data or analytics staff. Wi-Fi in the kennels is unreliable, which is why the kennel card is still paper.
Manual or repetitive tasks
Typing intake paperwork from the paper form into the shelter system. Typing adopter details from the application PDF into the shelter system at approval. Typing kennel card observations in after rounds. Answering the same adoption and foster questions by hand, several times a day. Confirming surrender appointments one at a time. Rebuilding the foster capacity spreadsheet. Cleaning up volunteer hours by role every month because the roles were never standardized. Reconciling donation records against adoption fee records when development needs a household view.
Reporting is the worst of it. We produce a board pack monthly, a contract report to the county quarterly, and eleven grant reports a year across six funders. Every one is assembled by hand from the shelter system's reporting module into a spreadsheet and then into a document, and every funder counts things slightly differently, so the numbers have to be rebuilt rather than reused. Two of them define an animal served differently and we have never settled which one we agree with.
Sensitive data handled in workflows
Describing categories only, not entering any of it here.
Adopter and applicant contact details and the contents of adoption applications, including household composition and references. Foster carer contact details and home information. Volunteer records, including any incident reports. Donor identity and giving history. Owner details on surrender and stray records, including surrender reasons that are frequently personal — illness, eviction, bereavement, domestic circumstances. Animal medical records. Bite and behavior incident records, which can end up in an insurance or legal context. Staff notes and internal decisions, including euthanasia records. Some records relate to minors, and some surrender conversations involve people in crisis.
Anything that leaves our control needs to be a deliberate decision, not a default.
Decisions that must stay human-owned
Euthanasia. That decision is the veterinarian's, with the Executive Director where the grounds are not purely medical, and it is not something any system should have an opinion about — not a score, not a ranking, not a suggested list.
Medical diagnosis and treatment, including whether a foster animal needs to be seen today. That is a clinician's call.
Behavior risk. Bite history, restricted placement conditions, and whether a dog is safe in a particular household are decided at behavior review by people who have watched the animal.
Cruelty and neglect. We house animals and we report what we see; the investigation and any determination belong to the municipal officers, not to us and not to a system.
Final adoption approval, and the match between animal and household. A counsellor makes that call in conversation. We are not scoring applicants and we are not letting anything decline an application automatically.
Foster placement of medically fragile or behaviorally complex animals. Volunteer eligibility and anything following an incident. Anything with a safety consequence for a person or an animal. And anything we say to a funder, the county, the press, or the board goes out over a named person's signature.
We are open to help with the paperwork around all of these. The decisions themselves stay with people.