FAQ's

This lifesaving effort depends on all of us – your data has the power to help not just the animals in your care, but animals everywhere! In addition to helping you better understand the ins and outs of your sheltering operations, the national database provides the opportunity to view data from similar organizations with similar community demographics, climate, geography, and other variables that impact the work we do.

Shelter Animals Count provides you with a wealth of information on national trends that may affect your organization, improves visibility and reporting options for grant applications, fundraising and coalition-building efforts, and opens the door to a world where we’re all working better – and smarter – together. But we can’t do it without you!

Click here to see the Participant Agreement.

Yes! In 2021 we released our Community Services Matrix (CSM), which collects service-based data. Animals counted in the CSM are owned by the community, or have owners in the community. Animals recorded in the CSM are not shelter intakes.

The national database is intended to be a tool for you and your community at the local level to understand the trends, opportunities, and challenges you face, and to help create a picture of how those evolve to the regional and national levels.

Shelter Animals Count is comprised of animal welfare professionals like you, many of whom have lengthy backgrounds or active relationships with major animal welfare organizations across the country. We’ve come together to promote an open, fact-based, and respectful national data collection effort.

By providing comprehensive, collaboratively-sourced data, we enable a greater understanding of the state of animal welfare and how we can all increase our positive impact for the animals we are privileged to serve.

The national database will have the capability to share public data through its website, ShelterAnimalsCount.org and may also release the data in a file export upon request. While we strongly encourage participating shelters to be transparent in agreeing to make their data public, we will enable those contributing data to opt out from their data being identifiable, if requested.

In addition, many of the organizations that currently collect data from shelters, rescues, and other institutions for grant and community reporting purposes (such as PetSmart Charities, Best Friends Animal Society, the ASPCA, and more) may elect, in the future, to use Shelter Animals Count as a means for submitting data, potentially reducing your reporting burden dramatically.

As data and reporting efforts have evolved in the field, many of the national groups involved with data collection understood that it was time to reconvene and reach a broad agreement on what kind of data is most useful to collect and how we can best capture the lifesaving data resident in our communities.

Based on existing data reporting structures, such as those that came out of the Asilomar Accords, and incorporating what we’ve learned through the reporting efforts of animal welfare organizations and funders, Shelter Animals Count has gained consensus and commitment to a standard set of statistics that could be captured in every community with relative speed and ease. We know you’re busy, and we’re here to help make meaningful data collection easier so you can get back to the business of saving lives!

Whether or not your data is already shared publicly, you’ve likely considered the pros and cons of doing so. With transparency comes the reality that your stakeholders may ask questions to gain a better understanding of the challenges and decisions your organization faces, or worse, make assumptions that may not be based in fact – and this can and does happen, whether or not your data is currently being published.

And while sharing data may lead to a few potentially difficult conversations or misunderstandings about why your organization makes certain decisions or operates in a certain way, it also gives you open access to clear, concrete data that you can use help dispel myths or rumors, and pave the way for honest dialogue, enabling you to build trust within your community and rally supporters to your cause.

Fostering organizations, animal care and control agencies, and any organization that is involved in activities such as animal adoptions, transfers, etc. and have intake and outcome data to contribute.

Shelter Animals Count’s data reporting frequency is monthly. The Data Dashboards are updated monthly.

You can find your location ID when you export your data from your portal. Your location ID is under column A on the export.