Drupal Web Site for a Non-Profit

Whiskers Animal Benevolent League is an all-volunteer organization whose mission is to provide abandoned, abused, and stray animals with a place of comfort, safety, and health and ultimately find them loving, responsible, permanent homes. In the Fall of 2009, with the donated time of a professional graphic designer, Softer Ingenuity, and volunteers with website development experience, Whiskers launched a new website that was built using the Drupal content management system. The redesigned website has been a great success and the Drupal system provides a robust platform for content management as well as utilities to create and maintain the organization's calendar and news letters, and support for a shopping cart and credit card processing.

Since the rollout of the new website, Softer Ingenuity has donated its services to leverage Drupal (and modules such as, CCK, Views, ImageAPI, Ubercart, Rules) to make vast improvements in two of Whiskers most important program areas: fostering and adoption. The new Drupal-based Foster Program application employs role-based access to foster program administrators, foster parents, and adoption counselors - each of whom perform different tasks. The system provides self-service access to foster parents to track detailed information about each of their foster cats, and provides various views of the information for adoption counselors looking for information about adoptable cats. In the past, this information was partly tracked on paper and partly tracked in an MS Access database. Often, it was difficult to determine if a cat had its vaccinations because the foster parent lost the paperwork. The MS Access database tracked limited information about cats and fosters, and maintaining it was a burden on a single person. With the new Drupal-based system, the responsibility for data entry for each cat is delegated to the foster parents. They enter the age, sex, description, background, vaccination and medical history, personality information, and even photographs of each cat in their care.

Whiskers advertises cats available for adoption on its website and has regularly scheduled adoption clinics at PetSmart. When a person comes to a Whiskers adoption clinic, they are asked to fill out an adoption application. Typical outcomes are: 1) the application is denied; 2) the application is approved, but the cat they want is not at the adoption clinic; or, 3) the application is approved and a cat is adopted. The online adoption application offers more opportunity for vetting applicants and better solutions for the first two outcomes: 1) application denial does not have to take place in the pet store where people sometimes get upset; 2) an adoption counselor can discuss available cats with the applicant ahead of time and make arrangements for all to meet.