500 million dogs worldwide are homeless. It’s Pedigree’s mission to put an end to this harrowing statistic by 2030. They’ve driven pet adoption through marketing, but inherent challenges of the traditional adoption model limits their success.

Through research with a panel of shelters, we identified that the shelter industry is broken. A lack of centralised administration meant crucial time was lost. Filtering potential adopters was time-consuming, leading to poorer quality adoptions and 1 in 5 dogs bouncing back to shelters.

Compassion fatigue was a major problem for shelters globally, leading to 1 in 6 workers contemplating suicide - the highest rate of suicide in any American workforce, alongside Police and Firefighters.

We needed to rethink pet adoption so Pedigree could live up to their mission, and reduce compassion fatigue. So we launched a new brand - MyHooman, the first end-to-end adoption system, with empathy for shelter workers at its heart.

Compassion fatigue leads to 1 in 6 shelter workers contemplating suicide. They have the highest suicide rate of American workers, alongside Police and Firefighters.

MyHooman is a pet adoption platform, designed with shelters, to combat compassion fatigue and ensure better quality adoptions for animals.

Every aspect of the platform is designed for efficiency and empathy. Friendly uplifting UI, technology that helps streamline shelter administration, an algorithm that efficiently filters and matches potential adopters, and data & personalisation used to boost shelter workers on the tough days, are just some of the features that help MyHooman live up to that promise.

The opportunities to leverage data was core to MyHooman.

To define the problem, we used a human-centred-design process, forming a shelter co-creation panel, supported by global insights supplied by Mars. By developing an end-to-end understanding of the dog adoption process we identified the audiences – shelters and adopters – and their associated ‘pains and gains’.

We then used this data to ensure we matched the right dog to the right human. By activating the previously unused data collected by shelters, we asked adopters to ‘find their match’ – presenting them with dogs that suited their lifestyle, personalising the match message to enhance the connection between the adopter and their best match.

Finally we used the information we knew about the user to personalise the platform experience with dynamic content, showcasing why a match is right for you.

To revolutionise the shelter adoption process, MyHooman puts fun and compassion at the heart of a data-driven digital experience, and the platform’s ease of use, empathetic design, and streamlined adoption process helps combat compassion-fatigue among shelter workers.

Shelter managers can further give dogs the best chance for adoption by instantly sharing their profiles across social media.

Our human-centred-design process meant we took a bespoke technical process, transforming it into a friendly, easy-to-use digital platform.

Regardless of how good our system was at finding dogs their forever homes, not every story ended happily. But, for shelters, being reminded of their successes really helps. Once again, we used that data – this time in the form of heart-warming reminders of their past adoptions; a tally of total adoptions; and daily personalised welcomes like “Stay passionate, Sandra!” and “Sandra, you’ve got snoots to boop!”. On tough days, just one smile keeps them going.

MyHooman has been tested in New Zealand, and soon rolls out globally. Since launch, an incredible 65% of the entire independent NZ dog shelter industry has signed up to MyHooman – exceeding Pedigree’s ambition of 50% by a massive 30%.

This number is even more outstanding when considering that to achieve this, MyHooman had to overcome 0% brand awareness, 0% product awareness.

MyHooman has smashed it’s onboarding target by 448.7% in just 9 quick months.

Feedback from our shelters in regards to compassion fatigue have been overwhelmingly positive. Tracey from Rottweiler Rescue says: “Really like the memories - when you see success things come through, it gets you through the days when you want to throw the towel in.”

In regards to adoptions, 37% of visitors to the site matched with potential dogs, 1 in 8 started an adoption application, with 41% of dogs uploaded to the platform being adopted.