Animal Welfare Professionals

Our organization is looking to make our records fully digital in 2025, which means figuring out alternate storage options for a lot of pieces of paper that currently live in an animal's file! We use PetPoint as our shelter management software and it includes options that cover a lot of those documents, but every now and then, we are finding a challenging item that doesn't seem to have an obvious fit.

For animals who are surrendered by their owner, we have a questionnaire they complete to give us some basic info about the pet's previous lifestyle. (You can see them on our website here: https://www.spcaonline.com/surrender-pet) Most folks are able to complete it digitally and email it to our Intake Desk, others fill out a paper copy. For now, we are uploading it to the "Files" section of the animal's PetPoint record. The disadvantage is that you have to download it from PP to read it, which slows things down while talking to an adopter and creates a bunch of digital clutter when staff have to keep downloading copies. 

Other spots we have considered trying to store this info would be the "Profile" or the "Behavior" module. The disadvantage of those is that a staff member would need to go through and enter every answer.  I also worry about making sure that we accurately preserve the owner's original description/answers, rather than having it become an interpretation of that. (For example, if a dog has lived with cats but the owner says that the dog chases the cats, some of our staff are inclined to label the dog "no cats" and might check "no" in answer to whether the dog does okay with cats. If someone does that, it means we lose the complexity of the actual behavior.) The built in "Profile" option also seems to have much less customizable fields, and the fields provided are generally more broad than the info we are seeking in our questionnaire.

If your organization uses PetPoint to store info from previous owners, how do you do it? What do you find the strengths and disadvantages are of putting it in that location? Have you unsuccessfully tried storing it in other places that you suggest we avoid trying?

#DataandTechnology
#OrganizationalManagement

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Emme Hones
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Our organization is looking to make our records fully digital in 2025, which means figuring out alternate storage options for a lot of pieces of paper that currently live in an animal's file! We use PetPoint as our shelter management software and it includes options that cover a lot of those documents, but every now and then, we are finding a challenging item that doesn't seem to have an obvious fit.

For animals who are surrendered by their owner, we have a questionnaire they complete to give us some basic info about the pet's previous lifestyle. (You can see them on our website here: https://www.spcaonline.com/surrender-pet) Most folks are able to complete it digitally and email it to our Intake Desk, others fill out a paper copy. For now, we are uploading it to the "Files" section of the animal's PetPoint record. The disadvantage is that you have to download it from PP to read it, which slows things down while talking to an adopter and creates a bunch of digital clutter when staff have to keep downloading copies. 

Other spots we have considered trying to store this info would be the "Profile" or the "Behavior" module. The disadvantage of those is that a staff member would need to go through and enter every answer.  I also worry about making sure that we accurately preserve the owner's original description/answers, rather than having it become an interpretation of that. (For example, if a dog has lived with cats but the owner says that the dog chases the cats, some of our staff are inclined to label the dog "no cats" and might check "no" in answer to whether the dog does okay with cats. If someone does that, it means we lose the complexity of the actual behavior.) The built in "Profile" option also seems to have much less customizable fields, and the fields provided are generally more broad than the info we are seeking in our questionnaire.

If your organization uses PetPoint to store info from previous owners, how do you do it? What do you find the strengths and disadvantages are of putting it in that location? Have you unsuccessfully tried storing it in other places that you suggest we avoid trying?