Shelter Pet Data Alliance

We built a data company inside a nonprofit — product, marketing, contributor support, user training, partnerships, governance, and ongoing development — all operating at industry scale across 3,300+ organizations.

The short version

 Built the data infrastructure, team, and operational process behind what is now the most comprehensive shelter data platform in the U.S. — covering 77.6% of the nation's brick-and-mortar shelters, and reaching that milestone at 128% of the collection goal in the first 25% of the allotted timeline.                                                     

The Context

For years, the national animal welfare sector relied on a single voluntary data collection effort — one that Best Friends Animal Society had helped build, fund, and sustain. When that platform became unreliable and the data increasingly inaccessible, Best Friends made the decision to build its own product. The goal: a platform that didn't just collect data, but made it useful.                    

The project was already underway when I got involved — but without a defined MVP, a product team, or a roadmap. I came in to help stabilize it, and ended up leading it.                                                                    

What I Did

I made the case for real structure: dedicated headcount, a product team, and a formal development process. We implemented Scrum, defined the MVP, and built the first roadmap the project had ever had. Then we coordinated across departments — marketing, technology, field programs — to get the platform launched and shelters on board.

The data collection infrastructure we built is what sets SPDA apart. We file 800+ FOIA requests annually. We accept data in any format — emails, spreadsheets, photos of handwritten records. We deployed 43 iPads loaded with custom Airtable forms to rural and under-resourced shelters — bringing data retention from roughly 30% to 85%. We mobilized 45+ trained volunteers who contact, support, and follow up with shelters across the country. We award over $200,000 in annual grants to incentivize participation. We don't wait for data to come to us.

We also built three API integrations with major shelter management software platforms, bringing in animal-level data — age, size, length of stay, outcome subtype — that no sector-wide dataset had ever captured before.

The Result

Today, 3,300 organizations participate in Shelter Pet Data Alliance. 1,700 provide data directly into the platform; 3,200 are represented in the current dataset thanks to our team's supplemental collection efforts. Our flagship product, One Alliance, lets any shelter benchmark its performance against a custom peer group — filtered by size, save rate, species served, social vulnerability index, and more.                                                          

For the first time, shelters can see not just how they're doing, but how they're doing compared to organizations that actually look like them.

SPDA data powers first-to-market national releases that have reached 176M+ impressions across 18 media outlets — and has become infrastructure the sector depends on. Maddie's Fund now requires SPDA participation as a condition of grantee status. Petfinder, Adopt-a-Pet, and PetSmart Charities have each built working partnerships around access to BFAS data and the insights only this team can produce.    

When wildfires broke out in Los Angeles in January 2025, the infrastructure SPDA had built enabled real-time tracking of 2,037 displaced animals within hours — a response that wouldn't have been possible without the data foundation already in place.