For animal welfare charities
Software for animal welfare charities
Charities without premises of their own work differently from an organisation with a building — more distributed, more voluntary, across greater distances.
Tell us what you needA large part of organised animal welfare in Germany has no building at all. Charities work with foster homes in private flats, rehome animals from abroad, coordinate transports, keep a membership list and finance everything through donations — almost entirely with volunteers, often spread across several federal states. So software for animal welfare charities has to start somewhere other than building-based administration: there is no place where all the information comes together anyway, because there is no shared place.
Foster homes as the centre they actually are
In a charity without premises, the foster home is what the kennel is in a building — except that it belongs to a private individual, sits thirty kilometres away and comes with a life of its own. A lot follows from that. Which foster home has space right now? Who does not take cats? Who has dogs of their own? Who cannot manage animals on medication? When those details are kept up to date, the question of the next place is a query and not a round of phone calls through the board.
Animals that are never in one place
An animal in a charity travels: partner organisation abroad, transport, quarantine, foster home, maybe a second foster home, then the rehoming. Every one of those steps has its own paperwork and its own deadlines. An animal record that maps that path answers the question charities get stuck on most often: where is the animal right now, who is looking after it, and what is due next. Without that answer the question lands with the board, and the board is usually one person with a full-time job.
Members and volunteers are not the same thing
A charity has members who pay subscriptions and vote at the general meeting. And it has volunteers who drive, foster, do home checks and staff stalls. The overlap is large, the groups are not. Today they sit in two separate lists that both have to be maintained and drift apart anyway. Holding both roles on one person does not only save work — it stops someone dropping off the membership list because they were removed from the volunteer one.
Rescues from abroad, with their extra steps
Rehoming from abroad brings steps that do not exist domestically: the partner organisation's paperwork, EU pet passports, rabies vaccination with a waiting period, titre testing for some countries, transport arrangements, registration on arrival. The problem with that is rarely the complexity, it is the distribution: those steps sit with different people in different countries. When they hang on the animal and not in an email thread, everyone involved sees the same status — including the person who only joined last week.
No IT department, because there is not one
A charity has no IT. It has one person who knows a bit about it, and they do that on top of everything else. So the barrier to entry is not a side issue for us: no installation, no server maintenance, no week of training. If a new volunteer cannot work with it within half an hour, it is the wrong tool for this group — however good it may otherwise be.
What charities need that a building-based rescue does not
Foster homes with capacity, suitability and travel distance instead of fixed places.
Animals whose location changes without the history breaking.
Members and volunteers as roles of the same person.
Transport and entry steps with deadlines instead of an email thread.
Donations and sponsorships as core income, not a side topic.
Access without installation, because nobody looks after a server.
Taildesk is not in use anywhere yet, and our starting point was the organisation with a building. Charities without premises of their own bring requirements we are only now fully understanding — foster home logistics and rescues from abroad among them. If you work that way, your feedback is worth more to us than most.
Common questions from charities
Does Taildesk work without premises of our own?
That is the case we designed foster homes for: an animal has a location and a person caring for it, and both can change. Whether there is a building behind it is not the decisive difference for the software — the distributed care is.
Can we manage membership subscriptions through it?
Subscriptions and donations are related but not the same: a subscription is recurring, set by the statutes and tied to a membership. We are building the membership side; how far it reaches into subscription billing depends on what charities tell us about it.
We rehome from abroad. Is that provided for?
Yes, as its own case and not as a variation on a domestic rehoming. The extra steps — paperwork, deadlines, transport, partner organisation — belong on the animal. Which of them actually hurt in practice is what we are asking about right now.
How is your charity set up?
Foster homes, rescues from abroad, membership administration — the more concretely you describe your structure, the less we build past you.
Tell us what you need