Feel free to contact me offline at:
datasystems@animal-friends.org

Hi Ray -

Nice to see another animal shelter represented on the message boards.I see that you have a cat named 'Hines' on your website pet database, which also happens to be the name of my cat. They even look alike...

If I am reading your post correctly - you are asking if you should require a unique email to register online vs general guest log in. Is that assumption correct?

I can certainly give pros and cons of each scenerio, as both have been tried on our website (www.hsppr.org). It depends a lot on how the information captured would be used. Are you building a user database to use for e-blasts or other forms of solicitation? If so, it would be necessary to require unique emails and registration information. I can tell you that when we began with this form of registration as a REQUIREMENT to log on to our animal database - we received thousands and thousands of registrations! Some of these were not valid addresses, so a lot of time was spent "validating" addresses prior to being added to the database. If you go this route, be sure you have the means to do this - especially if anything is being mailed out using this information.

If you aren't planning to use log in information for solicitation purposes - it is much simpler to just have a general guest log in.

We have gone the route now of just having open access to the animal adoption database, but we give users the option to create a log in if they wish to have access to e-blasts and other forms of solicitation. They can opt out at any time if they wish. Consequently, the number of registrations has dramatically decreased, but less time is spent on cleaning up the database and validating information.

 Hopefully this information helps?