Page last updated on September 7, 2021 at 3:00 pm
For more information, please contact
Rick Dietz, ITS Director, dietzr@bloomington.in.gov, 812-349-3485
The Challenge
Can you guess which page of the City of Bloomington’s website gets the most hits? I’ll give you a hint - it is where you can find your new best friend. That’s right - the Bloomington Animal Shelter! Since 2004, the shelter has received an average of 362 animals of all kinds every month. In addition to the website page (which stays updated), the shelter prints posters of pets available for adoption and distributes them throughout the city. While they have wide distribution, the posters can quickly become out of date; and while the website stays up-to-date, you have to do the work of getting there. In the past decade, social media has proven to be an effective tool to promote the faces of our furry friends - the information is pushed to a wide audience and the information is accurate. Keeping up with the posts to social media along with all the other tasks associated with managing a shelter can be a bit much, however. How can we effectively market the availability of animals for adoption without creating more work?
The Idea
The Bloomington Animal Shelter partnered with the Bloomington Civic Code group, BMG Hack, to create a Twitter Bot to automatically update the Shelter’s twitter feed with new, adoptable pets. The feature pulls animal profiles including pictures from the shelter’s database and posts them to Twitter. Staff have to enter profiles into the database anyway, so no additional staff time is required.
The Costs
The costs of the project included the time of City ITS staff working in conjunction with members of BMG Hack.
The Benefits
Mayor John Hamilton stated, “This is a great example of easy-to-implement innovation that can have a direct and immediate impact for the betterment of our community. The sooner the public knows a particular pet is available for adoption, the faster and healthier it will likely leave the shelter, bound for its forever home.”
By the end of 2018 - when this technology was introduced - the adoption rate of the shelter had increased by 7% over the 2013 levels (when the shelter’s Facebook page was established).
Metadata
City Department(s): ITS
City Point of Contact: Rick Dietz
Partner(s): BMG Hack
Partner(s) Point(s) of Contact: Jessika Griffin
Type of Innovation: Technical/Software
Date Implemented: March 2018