Rebuilding the digital home of one of America’s largest animal shelters
The Animal Foundation’s 50-page rebuild reconnected adoptions, donations, and lost-pet reunification into one modern site its own team can finally run.
The story
The Challenge
When the Foundation lost its only technical staffer, the website effectively froze. Built on a CMS nobody remaining could operate, it drifted for over a year. New pages piled up disorganized while critical systems sat stranded: adoption and foster search running through the shelter-industry Chameleon database, donations through Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge that the old platform couldn’t integrate, and no way for the marketing team to fix any of it. A major grant created the opportunity to finally rebuild — with one requirement: the new site had to carry a lost-pet reunification widget helping owners find their missing animals.
Our Approach
We migrated the full 50-page site (plus blog) to WordPress and rebuilt it around the shelter’s real workflows. Adoption and foster search connect to the Chameleon database the shelter runs on; donations flow through an embedded Raiser’s Edge form; the lost-pet reunification widget lives where worried owners can find it. A custom template system covers the pages that matter most (Ways to Give, the Low-Cost Vet Clinic, and event listings), and we paired the events calendar with an appointment-booking integration so the site doesn’t just announce services, it schedules them. Five purpose-built forms and a document archive round out a platform chosen deliberately so future integrations stay possible.
Why It Worked
Shelters run on systems: animal databases, donor CRMs, booking calendars. A website that ignores them becomes a dead end. Building around those systems, on a platform the team can own, turned the Foundation’s site back into what it should be: the busiest front door in Las Vegas animal welfare.
The Results
One coherent, modern site replacing a year of unmanaged sprawl
Adoption, fostering, giving, and lost-pet reunification all working from one platform
A back end the marketing team controls, no specialist required
A foundation ready for the deeper integrations the shelter plans next
A rebuild with one requirement.
The grant that made the rebuild possible came with a mandate the team embraced: a lost-pet reunification widget, placed where worried owners can find it — so the site serves families at their most stressful moment, not just their happiest.
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