Shelter Pet Data Champion Program
A data literacy program built for the Best Friends National Conference — giving shelter staff the foundation to understand, trust, and act on data in their day-to-day work.
The short version: Designed a no-barrier certification program at the Best Friends National Conference to increase
data literacy and SPDA adoption across the national shelter sector — using social proof and peer recognition to make
data participation something shelters are proud of, not just something they're asked to do.
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The Problem
Shelter Pet Data Alliance is only as powerful as the shelters that participate in it. We knew that barriers like time,
data literacy, and outright fear were keeping shelters from engaging — even shelters that wanted to. And we knew that
telling shelters they should be using data wasn't working. Something else was needed.
The Best Friends National Conference gave us a vehicle.
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What We Built
Historically, the conference had included targeted outreach to shelters with missing or outdated SPDA data —
individual conversations to help them understand the platform and the value of participating. We kept that, but built
something bigger around it.
Shelter Pet Data Champions is a certification program that runs entirely within the conference, with no registration
required. Shelters earn it by completing a small set of activities they'd likely attend anyway:
- Maintaining current SPDA data
- A one-on-one meeting with a member of the SPDA or data science team
- Attending the data and research poster session
- Completing four or five sessions from a list of approximately twenty qualifying data-focused conference sessions
That's it. No sign-up form. No separate track. No additional time commitment beyond showing up to the kinds of
sessions that were already available.
After the conference, our team identifies everyone who met the criteria and sends them a certificate and a social
media kit — ready-made assets to share their achievement with their networks.
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The Strategy
The design was deliberate. Every friction point we removed was intentional — because we knew that the shelters most
likely to disengage were the ones with the least bandwidth. No registration meant no drop-off before the conference
even started. Qualifying sessions were sessions they were already attending. The bar was achievable.
The social media kit is where the program scales beyond the conference. A shelter director posting that they're a
Shelter Pet Data Champion creates something a webinar never could: peer visibility. When other shelter leaders see
their colleagues being publicly proud of their data work, it shifts the signal. Data participation stops being an
obligation and starts being something worth celebrating — and something worth doing.