Describe the creative idea

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.

Describe the execution

We used an empathetic human-centred-design process, forming a shelter co-creation panel, supported by global insights supplied by Mars and trusted secondary sources. Through months of research and analysis, we were able to form a complete end-to-end understanding of the dog adoption process from the shelters and adopters perspective. We found that the emotional toll of being a shelter worker manifests as compassion fatigue, often leading to burn out. In fact, animal rescue workers have a suicide rate of 5.3 in 1 million workers — the highest suicide rate among American workers, and a rate shared only by firefighters and police offices, according to a recent study by the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. So to revolutionise the shelter adoption process, we put fun and compassion at the heart of a data-driven digital experience, and MyHooman’s ease of use, empathetic design, and the streamlined adoption process helps combat compassion-fatigue among shelter workers. Shelter managers can further give their 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 and transformed it into a friendly, easy-to-use digital platform. Taking inspiration from the innocence of dogs we dubbed our design-system ‘Cuddly Tech’. We knew that no matter how good our system was at finding dogs their forever homes, not every story ended happily. On those bad days, for shelters, being reminded of their successes is what helps. So once again, we used all that good 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 pawssionate, Sandra!” and “Sandra, you’ve got snoots to boop!”. It seems small, but on tough days, just one smile keeps them going.