Person centric application processing

[Raccroc]

We are a breed specific rescue (Border Collies) and what we have found over the years is that many of our applicants don't really know what they are looking for (even though they might specific a dog during the application process) and we get a lot of applicants who want to get pre-approved for adoption and then wait for the "right dog" to come into rescue (we do a lot of sport, SARS, and working adoptions). As such, we process applications without attaching or reserving specific dogs to the applicant.

The forum's suggestions for application processing seems to all revolve around using Reservation and Movements for processing new applications; however, since we don't want to attach specific animals to our applicants, I don't see a way to get that to work.

What we need to do:

• Online Form for application to create a new person in our system - good so far (reserve animal is used, but as an optional field just to give us a hint of what kind of dog's they are interested in).
• Assign to volunteer screeners - so far, we are thinking of using the Adoption Coordinator type and having a main coordinator get the new application emails and then go in to "assign" applicant's profile to one of the screeners using Adoption Coordinator.
• Vet the applicant by ref check, home check, call screening, etc. to ready them for adopting by using a series of flags (similar to the "homechecked" flag) for each stage of the process.

Before I paint myself in a corner to much, thought I'd reach out to see if this is a good way to go about this, or see if there is another avenue that might be better.

[bobintetley]

Hi, while what you've said will work, there is an option you can enable that might be what you're after:

Settings->Options->Movements->Allow reservations to be created that are not linked to an animal

With that option on, when processing a form, if the system finds a reserveanimalname field but it's blank (the default for an adoptable animal type dropdown), you will still get a reservation but it won't be linked to any animal. It means you can still use the reservation book to manage the application process then.

[Raccroc]

Thank you very kindly. I must have gone up, down and throughout all of the System Options a dozen times or more looking for something like that, but without ever finding it. That makes things much cleaner. Much appreciation!