How we Helped RSPCA to Streamline Animal Welfare with Salesforce

The RSPCA, a cornerstone of animal welfare in the UK for nearly two centuries, continually seeks innovative ways to enhance their compassionate care.  With a network of centres across the UK, the RSPCA provides vital services, including rescuing and rehabilitating animals, investigating cruelty cases, and finding loving homes for those in their care.  Driven by an unwavering dedication to animal well-being, the RSPCA identified an opportunity to revolutionise their operations and further empower their staff to deliver the best possible care.

Recognising the limitations of their existing animal tracking system, the RSPCA saw a chance to streamline processes, improve efficiency, and ultimately provide a more seamless experience for both animals and caregivers. Their legacy system was essential to daily operations in tracking animals from intake to transfers, health monitoring, and adoption. However, RSPCA saw several areas for improvement:

• Outdated Technology: The software had reached its end-of-life, hindering progress to efficiency gains and limiting access to modern advancements in Salesforce. 
• Cumbersome Processes: The software was outdated, slow and wasn’t user-friendly. Manual data entry and paper-based assessments for monitoring animal progress created unnecessary administrative burdens, diverting valuable time from animal care. Each assessment had to be filled out by hand, typed up, saved, and filed, creating inefficiency.
• Limited Visibility: A lack of easily accessible reporting tools made it difficult to gain a comprehensive overview of the animals under their care. For example, staff couldn't quickly see a summary of the animals at their specific centres.

To address these challenges, the RSPCA partnered with Solution Junkies. Salesforce, with its flexible platform and focus on non-profit solutions, was a natural fit for the RSPCA, who were already leveraging Salesforce for other business processes. Solution Junkies collaborated with Salesforce to implement the Animal Shelter app on the RSPCA's existing Salesforce org. This purpose-built solution was designed to streamline animal care and adoption processes, providing the RSPCA with the tools and insights needed to enhance their impact.

Custom Development for Tailored Care

Solution Junkies went beyond standard implementation by developing custom Apex components to address the RSPCA's unique challenges. This included secure data transfer between internal systems, enhanced animal movement tracking, and real-time occupancy monitoring for RSPCA locations. 

By redesigning the system for tracking occupancy at each location, Solution Junkies ensured accurate, real-time availability of animal spaces across all RSPCA centres. This innovative solution proved so valuable that it was shared with Salesforce to adopt for future versions of their app, benefiting animal welfare organisations worldwide.

A New Era of Agility with Gearset

Solution Junkies helped the RSPCA to implement their first Agile programme. This transformed traditional project delivery by introducing Agile principles supported by a robust DevOps framework - powered by Gearset. 

Combining iterative development, collaborative planning, and adaptive workflows with Gearset’s project pipeline capabilities ensured regular, streamlined deployments and reduced bottlenecks in the delivery pipeline. 

Regular sprint cycles, retrospectives and well-governed branching strategy reinforced continuous feedback and improvement, enabling the RSPCA to quickly adapt to changing priorities. 
 

The adoption of Agile enhanced transparency, efficiency and collaboration, empowering the RSPCA to deliver impactful solutions faster and more efficiently in support of their mission to modernise and improve the pathway of animals in their care.
 

Connecting Animals with Loving Homes: Website Integration

To maximise the RSPCA's reach and connect animals with loving homes, Solution Junkies integrated the new Salesforce app with the organisation's public-facing website. This seamless integration ensures that with just a few clicks within the app, they can publish profiles of animals ready for fostering or adoption and remove profiles when animals are no longer available. This streamlined process ensures that the website always displays the most up-to-date information, making it easier than ever for potential adopters and fosterers to find their perfect match.
 

By implementing a tailored Animal Shelter app, the RSPCA has established a modern and agile platform to further their unwavering commitment to animal welfare. The organisation is now better equipped to streamline vital processes, gain deeper insights into animal care, enhance collaboration across their network, and ultimately maximise their impact on rescuing, rehabilitating, and rehoming animals in need. Some of the outcomes RSPCA are seeing include:

• Improved animal care
• Greater visibility on animal health
  Improved animal occupancy reporting
• Data-driven decision making
• Streamlined workflows and reduced manual tasks
• Improved data management
• Greater accuracy, accessibility, and reporting 
• User-friendly tools and intuitive dashboards 
• Empowered staff
• Faster deployments