SPDA One Alliance Comparisons by Best Friends Animal Society

The One Alliance Comparisons dashboard was built with the purpose of peer-to-peer data sharing for animal shelters across the US without cost, barrier, or judgement. Organizations are empowered with shelter data at their fingertips to inform and increase lifesaving work. This tool provides transparency in the animal welfare world, and an opportunity for organizations to learn from where others are doing well and lean in where others may need help.

The dashboard visualizes side-by-side comparisons of intakes, outcomes, and save rate. It allows users to explore trends across metrics of their choice at an individual shelter, local, or national level. When creating a group for comparison, filters such as intake size, species, urban rural classifications, social vulnerability index, and more allow users to focus in on organizations like their own. If a user does not know what their own intake size or save rate is, there are informative tooltips built in to provide context for creating a meaningful comparison group.

When the director of an animal shelter in Texas needed to answer what they did well compared to others in Texas and nationally, it took hours of googling and preparing pie charts. The expectations are high for animal shelters to know their own data. Gathering data can feel like herding cats, and time spent on presentations for boards and city councils takes away from direct lifesaving duties. With the introduction of this dashboard, it now takes a fraction of the time for that director to find the same answer using visualizations from One Alliance Comparisons.