Each year at Aimpoint Digital, the company gives all employees the time to volunteer for charities and initiatives that we care deeply about. In 2020 I started fostering with Last Hope K9 Rescue, and in 2021 I became the Database Coordinator for this organization. With my dedicated volunteer time this year, I decided I would like to dedicate additional time to help them generate a suite of Tableau dashboards that would help them make more informed, data-driven decisions.
When sharing the volunteer project with my Aimpoint Digital mentor, Mina Ozgen, it was clear this was the perfect opportunity to collaborate (and for me to learn from our resident Tableau guru).
Before we were able to dive into dashboard development, the first challenge we needed to resolve was to automate the cleaning, transformation, and enrichment of relevant data, which we did by using Alteryx. For the first time, this provided Last Hope K9 Rescue with a data source with which they could view their rescue metrics at various levels of granularity.
The dashboards that we developed from this data source focused on two different views, an external view to be shared publicly and an internal view to aid the decisions made by the different Last Hope K9 Rescue teams.
For the external view, we wanted to highlight the volume and characteristics of the dogs recused. We also wanted to make this clean and visually appealing so that Last Hope K9 Rescue could share and highlight their excellent work. Internally we wanted to develop dashboards with a critical lens, allowing teams to understand trends and highlights within the data.
In just one day, we developed three dashboards to support these different viewpoints; one example is below.
Last Hope K9 – Lives Saved Dashboard
This Lives Saved dashboard highlights time trends around adoptions, allowing Last Hope K9 Rescue to understand the impact of different characteristics (for example, is the dog good with children?) on the average time to adopt.
One insight to derive from this view is that the average time to adopt a senior dog is much longer than puppy or adult dogs. We can also see that the average time to adopt senior dogs has been increasing since 2020, something that the adoptions team might want to focus on and understand moving forward.
We presented our work to the 50+ Last Hope K9 Rescue coordinators the following week and were met with positive feedback and lots of new questions, as this level of detail hasn’t been readily available before. I am so excited to continue volunteering with Last Hope K9 Rescue, discovering new insights within our data, and leveraging our Aimpoint Digital network to continue to learn & grow!
A picture of myself with our foster dog, Ghyzmo, from Last Hope K9 Rescue!
Opportunities to help & Support LHK9:
Last Hope K9 Rescue is a New England organization dedicated to saving abandoned, neglected, and abused dogs from high-kill shelters in Central Arkansas and beyond.
- Fostering – All medical care & most supplies are included!
- Volunteering – many opportunities for all interests!
- Donating directly OR
- Item donations through Amazon and AmazonSmile donations
- Item donations through Chewy
