Do you know how your community is doing when it comes to lifesaving? How about your state or region?

Best Friends Animal Society revealed its informative lifesaving dashboard at this year’s national conference. Data was collected directly from shelters, state and local coalitions, government websites, and FOIA requests. It’s their (and our) hope that this data will track our progress toward the goal of a no-kill nation by 2025.

According to Best Friends, the resulting dashboard is the most comprehensive data set on animal welfare ever published.

We think you’ll be fascinated to see how different cities and states across the United States are doing. Data transparency, whether a community is no-kill or not even close, is key to a no-kill nation. If your community is currently no-kill but your neighboring community isn’t, how can you help? Or maybe your shelter is struggling and you have a shelter two cities over that is doing tremendously well and a partnership can be formed.

If your community hasn’t reported their data, find out why and suggest that they do! If you work in a shelter and don’t report your data, you should. You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Even if it’s less than stellar, your community needs to know where you stand. It’s quite possible they don’t know how your shelter is doing and they’ll want to help.

“Individual community members have the strongest and best voice when it comes to mobilizing others to support their local shelters,” said Julie Castle, CEO, Best Friends Animal Society.

So, if this dashboard represents where we currently are — how do we get to where we need to be? With your own roadmap, of course! Our newly launched Maddie’s Shelter Compass is a web-based tool that will help you increase your lifesaving. It simply takes your data, and voila — you’ll get an action plan that puts you on-track to saving more lives.

Be sure to check out the dashboard and sign up for Maddie’s Shelter Compass if you haven’t already done so!