Loading urgent animals from a crowded shelter on his plane, then landing a few hours later in a town where adopters were lined up to take these animals inspired Chris to create Doobert. “The overpopulation problem is one that was created by humans, and one that can be solved by humans,” says Roy. “There are creative ways to prevent euthanizing companion animals simply because there’s no more space at a shelter.”

Log onto Doobert.com and you’ll find a community of like-minded adoption advocates who understand the need to move animals from high-kill communities to no-kill communities and tens of thousands of volunteers who are passionate about assisting with transport, fostering and many other activities. The platform was originally built to automate the enlistment and scheduling of volunteers willing to transport animals, but has expanded to include foster, photographers, and even virtual volunteers. The platform supports local rides, rescue relay style transport and even high volume transport and can help get an animal across the country and into a forever home in a matter of days.

Doobert has expanded to add functionality revolutionizing fostering and it is the only platform where every organization gets a phone number unique to them so they can send and receive text messages allowing them to manage a foster program of 10 or 1,000 fosters easily. They even have a feature called RescueTUBE which allows you to have people upload videos from their phone to their Doobert dashboard. Now every person with a phone can video everything from procedures, training, surgeries, adoptions, transports, etc., and easily get the video back to your organization for use on social media and for training purposes.

Add the COVID pandemic to the mix, and the need to transport pets from over-full shelters to communities that have a shortage of animals is even more critical. Many shelters in California and Texas that saw increased demand for adoptable dogs and cats in the early days of COVID are now seeing those animals returned as adopters, fosters, and rescues experience financial challenges or even lose their incomes.  

“Tracking adoptable animals has gone from a luxury to a necessity as these animals go from shelter to rescue to foster to adopter,” says Chris. “Few shelter animals ever make a single stop. Our database and functionality facilitate tracking animals during natural disasters and even pandemics, when an animal’s journey can be complicated and fraught.”

Doobert is hosted through Amazon Web Services (AWS), and is thus cloud-based. A custom-built backend based on open source software (Apache Linux) supports iOS and Android devices, and a WordPress front end makes content and blogs easy to maintain.

“We’re continuing to enhance Doobert with the tools and workflows necessary to automate and accelerate critical transport and tracking work,” says Chris. Indeed, where shelter pets are concerned, the transformation from manual processes, online chat rooms, and telephone trees to centrally managed transport automation can’t come a moment too soon.

Doobert.com is an online platform for animal rescue that helps you help animals. Over 5,000 organizations and 30,000 volunteers are currently using Doobert. Try it out for free.