Streamlining Stray Rescue: Building a Centralized Case Management System for PAWS Bangkok

The Problem

I’m a deeply committed cat person (I have 11 at home!), and while I wanted to help the stray animal population in Thailand, I simply didn't have the capacity to adopt any more myself. I turned to PAWS Bangkok, a prominent cat shelter focused on rescue, rehabilitation, and rehoming, to see where I could add value beyond fostering.

In speaking with their team, I uncovered a massive operational bottleneck. They were receiving upwards of 10 rescue requests a day in their inbox. With limited resources and strict intake criteria, they could only accept a fraction of these cases. Worse, the process of verifying a rescue—gathering photos, determining the cat's condition, and pinpointing the location—required days of back-and-forth messaging. By the time they had enough information to act, the injured or at-risk cat was often already gone.

My Approach

I realized this wasn't just an administrative headache; it was a critical failure point in their rescue pipeline. The goal was to eliminate the conversational friction and get actionable data to the rescue team immediately. My framework:

1. •Process mapping — Auditing the exact steps and information required for PAWS to approve a rescue mission.
2. •Asynchronous intake design — Moving the initial data collection from an unstructured chat format into a structured, mandatory intake form.
3. •Ecosystem expansion — Identifying that the bottleneck wasn't just PAWS's capacity, but the uneven distribution of requests across the broader rescue network in Bangkok.

What I Did

Centralized Back-Office Platform: I developed a custom case management platform for the PAWS team. Instead of managing a chaotic inbox, the team now had a structured dashboard to review, approve, or decline incoming cases based on standardized criteria.

Standardized Reporter Intake: I built and integrated a public-facing form. When someone contacted PAWS about a stray, they were immediately directed to provide exact location data, photos, and specific condition details in one go, completely eliminating the multi-day, back-and-forth triage process.

The "Rescue Network" Feature: During discovery, I learned that while PAWS was overwhelmed, smaller, less-famous shelters often had spare capacity but lacked visibility. To solve this, I designed a feature within the platform that allowed PAWS to easily share fully vetted, documented rescue requests with these partner shelters, ensuring more cats received care even when PAWS was full.

Results

What I Learned

The biggest realization: sometimes the most impactful products don't add features; they remove friction. By simply structuring the intake process, we bought the rescue team the one resource they couldn't fundraise for: time.

I also learned the importance of looking past the immediate user to the broader ecosystem. Solving PAWS's inbox problem was step one, but realizing we could use that centralized data to feed smaller shelters was the true force multiplier for the mission. It proved that good product design can quite literally save lives.