Humane America Animal Foundation’s vision is a world that is more humane, and our mission is to create, implement, and promote innovative and effective programs that have significant and measurable benefits for animals and people. This means less animal suffering and abuse, and more people who know the joy of having animals as part of their lives.

The first place most people directly contact animals is their own companion animals (mainly dogs and cats) in their homes and in our society in general. Millions of companion animals enter animal shelters each year and an estimated 1. 5 million healthy dogs and cats are killed for lack of homes. We believe that solving this problem is a precursor to a more humane society. We created Adopt-a-Pet. com which is now the world’s largest non-profit homeless pet adoption website, serving 18,000 animals shelter, SPCAs, humane societies and animal rescue groups across North America. Adopt-a-Pet. com is a searchable database of pets in shelters, which makes it easy for anyone in North America to put in their zip code and the type of pet they are seeking, and find that pet to adopt. We also send out over 20 million “New Pet Alert” emails each month to people who asked us to inform them when a particular type of pet enters a shelter near them. This greatly increases homeless pet adoptions and we believe that we are part of the reason that the killing of companion animals has been decreasing over the 19 years we have been in existence.

We employ website designers, web developers, user researchers, and all the staff and tools any technology company would use to maintain and grow a useful website. Additionally, we successfully fund the bulk of our operations from corporate sponsors who support our mission, which means we free up individual donations to go to the actual shelters.

We have detailed analytics about the usage of our website, and have systems set up in coordination with animal shelters and the software they use to understand our effectiveness in terms of actual adoptions.

We have grown to helping over 18,000 organizations who use Adopt-a-Pet. com because it increases their adoptions. We are the largest non-profit pet adoption website, and are ranked by SImilarweb as the #2 website in terms of traffic on the internet in the category of “Pets and Animals > Pets”. We have become a leader in the animal welfare movement, deploying technologies not only for pet adoption and data collection but also for assisting pet rescue efforts in times of disaster. Our next steps are to learn more and iterate on our ability to make sure people are seeing the right pets and able to adopt them. We built an email relay system that allows us to be a part of the communications between potential adoptions and animal shelters, and we learned that a significant number of people who are interested in animals they see on Adopt-a-Pet. com do not end up adopting for a variety of reasons. Armed with this knowledge, we can now alter our algorithms and experiment with various other systems to ensure the right people are seeing the right pets they can actually adopt.