Overview:

For the last 130 years, as a private, non-profit organization without any government funding, the Wisconsin Humane Society (WHS) has managed to shelter and match thousands of homeless animals with new families. Not just that, but also providing lifesaving medical care for nearly 20,000 animals, including more than 5,000 wild animals – every year. This is, in part, why the WHS is also home to one of the largest wildlife rehab hospitals in the nation.

Without the backing of government support, they must instead rely upon funding from generous donations in order to accomplish all of this. Therefore, it’s imperative that the WHS get their message and offerings out to as many eyes and ears as possible, despite a tight budgetary strain in doing so.

Objectives:

To create an iPhone application that not only promotes the animals available for adoption, but generates donations and assists individuals in planning their visit.

Implementation and Challenges:

User experience is paramount when planning for and creating an app. The way a person accesses a desktop site is completely different than how they’re navigating a mobile device. Therefore, Roll’s strategy was to accomplish the objectives at hand while still making it as quick and easy as possible to explore. To accomplish this, it was important for the Roll team to fully understand why and how the mobile user would be using this app, before actually architecting it.

Once the blueprint was created, the programming began. Budgetary constraints aren’t the only parameters that one faces.

There are challenges anytime you are working within a pre-established database. In particular, if that database is through a third-party. Your hands tend to be somewhat tied with what you can or can’t do, because you are limited to the capabilities of that third party’s current database structure.

The Wisconsin Humane Society uses an online database (provided by PetPoint) to maintain and manage all of their animals, which then funnels down to appear on the WHS website. Roll’s Technical Architect (Dustin) worked with WHS and PetPoint to determine that the best way to consume the animal information for the iPhone app, was to use PetPoint’s API. And after all is said and done, the app’s animal information is actually more current than the desktop site – real time, as compared to the half-hour.

Donations provided another challenge in building the app. Apple changed their policy mid-build causing us not to be able to use PayPal’s SDK in the app, after all. Ideally, all donations would have been done right within the app – resulting in the fewest number of steps to completion and keeping it as simple as possible for people to act on impulse. But because of this policy change, we had to modify our original plan for the Donations page.

Instead, by visiting the Donations page and selecting a donation amount, clicking the “Donate with PayPal” button takes you to your browser instead, which loads the PayPal site. The app is able to pre-load the dollar amount and the Wisconsin Humane Society as the recipient, so all the user has to do is fill in their log-in or payment information.

Results:

The Wisconsin Humane Society app saw nearly 1,000 downloads from Dec 1st, 2010 to February 1st, 2011. While people often keep an eye on their app’s downloads, that isn’t the only metric that should be important. How many people continue to use an app after downloading it, rather than abandoning it because they lose interest or it doesn’t do what they hoped it would do? That continued use is another useful judge of success.

In that time, there were nearly 8,000 visits to the app, with over 106,000 page views. This means people average more than 13 pages in the app per visit – that’s a very active user!

We learned that the majority of people are downloading the app and then viewing the available dogs. Over the aforementioned period of time, 22.3% of the page views were for the Dogs – more than doubling any other section of the app. From there, nearly 9% of the page views are for the Cats, while 2.4% visit the Wildlife section and 1.7% to the Small Animals.

In that time, nearly 4% of the page views were people taking advantage of the Companion filters to customize their search. Of the filtering options, Location-based filtering was the most popular (.73%), followed by Breed (.65%) and then Sex (.52%).

Finally, around 3% of the page views were attributed to the Donations section (.8%) and people using the Bookmarks (1%) and Location Info page (1.2%).

By monitoring these results and knowing how people are navigating your app, it helps to give you a more-informed approach for future updates and phases to your app. Thus, giving your users exactly what they want and how they need it.

Download the FREE Wisconsin Humane Society App today, for your iPhone or iPod Touch!

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Want to learn more about creating an app for your Humane Society? Contact us to set up a call!