Users and Audience

The audience is those looking to volunteer, foster, or adopt with the animal shelter. Since volunteers are likely to be younger, the copy needs to be at middle/high school reading level.

Objectives

Thought Process

Overall, I wanted to give the documents a more unified look. Since these are sourced from the same animal shelter, I not only wanted to improve the branding, but the layout as well. Any fields with caps lock/”yelling” were edited to mixed case.

Adoption Application

The document was thorough in the screening questions, but lacked hierarchy. To break the content into manageable chunks, I created a separate sections for

• contact info: to cover the pertinent information about the prospective adopter
• living situation: to cover home type, rental limitations, and household member agreement
• applicant intent: to cover the roles the adoptee will be filling and for whom
• pet information: to cover how the pet will be cared for in its day-to-day life
• other information: to cover fields from the original document that didn’t fit into the previous four categories.

Volunteer Application/Agreement

Other than adding structure to the availability and volunteer activity sections, I also swapped the order of the Application and the Hold Harmless Agreement. While the latter is an important legal precaution, it can be a bit off-putting to discuss the potential for harm first, especially if the applicant is a minor. Going over contact information and deciding what volunteer activities one wishes to do is a good way to ease an applicant into the “tougher” paperwork.

Foster Application/Agreement

Much like the Adoption Application, I created sections that consolidated applicant information, living situation, household member information, current pet information, and veterinary care information.
The majority of the work came from editing the Foster Agreement. The Agreement switches between second and first person often, and the bulk of the information is in one large paragraph.

I converted all of the content fo first person, so that the reader/applicant can clearly acknowledge and agree to all of the terms presented. Next, I broke the content down into smaller paragraphs based on topic. Finally, I removed two sentences from the main copy. These sentences explained how the shelter is open to adoption/foster referrals and will prioritize foster parents for adoption. Since those sentences weren’t necessarily terms for fostering an animal, I made them a note below the signature lines instead.

Pit Bull Rescue List

I fixed the minor spelling of “indorse” in the original document’s disclaimer. And of course, to ensure this was still a useful resource, I checked each shelter’s website to see if they were still functioning. For the sites that no longer worked, I looked up alternative pit bull shelters’ information and added it to the document instead.

Document Comparison