Building better bridges between pets and their forever families
Creating the optimal pet adoption experience
Animal Humane Society (AHS) is one of the nation’s leading animal welfare organizations, providing direct care and services to nearly 100,000 animals in need across Minnesota and the upper Midwest each year. Guided by a mission to engage the hearts, hands, and minds of their community to help animals, AHS is transforming the way shelters care for animals and connect with the people who love them, working toward a more humane world for animals everywhere.
AHS wanted to improve the pet adoption experience and deepen the relationship between people and their pets, so Vervint brought human, canine, and feline-centered design to the challenge, helping AHS make immediate improvements to the adoption experience while shaping a long-term strategy for engaging pet owners and animal lovers.
Get the experience right before scaling it
Validate facility and process changes at the flagship Golden Valley location before rolling them out across the AHS network.
Design for people and pets together
Create an adoption experience that serves adoptive families and the animals’ needs side by side, not just one or the other.
Build a strategy beyond adoption day
Determine how AHS’s mission and services could evolve over the next 5–10 years as attitudes toward pets and rescue animal availability shift.
Getting it right before going wide
AHS had already begun reimagining its flagship Golden Valley, Minnesota adoption center, updating the facility and its processes, and was preparing to roll those changes out across its network. But before scaling any further, AHS wanted certainty that they were making the right changes for the people and animals coming through their doors.
Vervint went straight to the source, conducting ethnographic research, interviews, and group discussions with stakeholders, volunteers, and the families visiting and adopting from AHS. By observing the physical space, watching how staff and volunteers interacted with prospective adopters, and following the everyday moments of the adoption journey, from the layout of the lobby to the signage on each kennel, Vervint uncovered opportunities to design an experience that worked for adoptive families and the eager animals waiting to meet their new favorite humans.
Mapping meaningful change
With those insights in hand, Vervint journey-mapped the entire adoption experience, benchmarking it against customer expectations to find both the friction points and the moments already working well enough to build on. AHS moved quickly to put the resulting recommendations into action:
A better first meeting. Reshaping the physical space to enhance the visitation experience between pets and prospective adopters, giving that first meeting room to feel less like a transaction and more like the start of a relationship.
Signage that tells the whole story. Optimizing signage so potential pet parents could quickly understand each animal’s background and health information, right where they’re already standing.
Paperwork that gets out of the way. Digitizing the adoption paperwork to streamline the process, so families could spend less time filling out forms and more time getting to know their new best friend.
A relationship that doesn’t end at pickup. Updating post-adoption communications to build and sustain the relationship between AHS and adoptive families long after they walked out the door.
Planning for a future called “pets everywhere”
Beyond the adoption center itself, AHS wanted to make sure its mission stayed relevant for years to come, especially as attitudes toward pets kept shifting and fewer rescue animals might be available for adoption down the road. AHS asked Vervint to help figure out how its mission to engage the hearts, hands, and minds of the community to help animals could keep evolving alongside the people it serves.
Vervint explored two themes at the heart of that question: pets everywhere, and pets as family. The team combined ethnographic observation and interviews with pet owners, industry leaders, and other service providers with social media and trend research, then mapped the touchpoints and triggers that shape a pet owner’s life to uncover where AHS could offer new kinds of support.
The findings pointed in some unexpected directions: a real desire for more pet-friendly social spaces and activities, room for AHS to advocate for pet-friendly rental housing and homeless shelters, and a need for a trusted rating system for pet service providers like groomers and boarding facilities. Together, these insights gave AHS the direction for a 5–10 year strategic plan built around a simple idea: pets everywhere.
With a reshaped adoption experience and a clear vision for what’s next, AHS is set up to keep engaging the hearts, hands, and minds of its community, helping even more pets in need find their forever homes, and helping even more people find the love of a new furry friend.
