Angie Embree, CIO of Best Friends Animal Society talks with Jeff Frick at AWS Imagine Nonprofit 2019 from Seattle, WA. https://siliconangle.com/2019/08/19/technology-save-animal-welfare-charity-uses-big-data-promote-no-kill-shelters-imagineabetterworld-womenintech/ Technology to save them all: Animal welfare charity uses big data to promote no-kill shelters Back in the ’80s, an average of 17 million dogs and cats were killed per year in U.S. shelters. Today, that number has dropped to just over 700,000. This huge decline is thanks mostly to animal welfare non-profit the Best Friends Animal Society, which has set a goal to make all U.S. shelters no-kill by 2025. “The Best Friends founders started the no-kill movement,” said Angela Embree (pictured), chief information officer of the Best Friends Animal Society. “We have the largest no-kill companion animal sanctuary in the country where we hold about 1,700 animals every day.” Embree spoke with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS Imagine in Seattle Washington. They discussed how, as Best Friends’ first chief information officer, she is using the power of data to help save animal lives (see the full interview with transcript here). This week, theCUBE spotlights Angie Embree in our Women in Tech feature. High tech in the high desert When Embree walked onto the job as CIO of Best Friends, she was truly starting from scratch. The organization’s headquarters are located in the small town of Kanab, Utah, which is “very infrastructure challenged,” Embree said. At the time, Best Friends relied on the town’s only internet service provider, which meant there was no network redundancy. “Kanab goes down, you know the whole organization is down,” Embree said. “So one of the first decisions I made was that we were going to the cloud.” Moving Best Friends to the AWS Cloud solved the network reliability issue. It also gave the opportunity for Best Friends to use technology to promote its goal of stopping unnecessary euthanasia. “In animal welfare, there’s never been a national picture of what the problem really is regarding killing animals in shelters,” Embree said. “This is because animal extermination makes for bad press, and so is a topic that shelters prefer to avoid. The American public doesn’t believe in [killing animals].” Exposing the public to statistics showing the kill total for their community would bring support to Best Friends’ “Save Them All” crusade. The Community Lifesaving Dashboard went live in July 2019, making national and local shelter statistics available to anyone. “The idea behind the dashboard is to … get communities behind helping their shelters. Because, [reaching the no-kill goal] is going to take us all,” Embree said. “The public … can look at it, and they can see where we’re at from a national level. They can see where they’re at from a state level. They can drill down into their community, and they can drill down to an individual shelter.” From volunteer to animal welfare professional As a girl, Embree was “that little kid always bringing home animals,” she said. But she never thought her love of living creatures could translate into a career. Instead, she followed her interest in science and math, getting a degree in management information systems and going to work in big tech. Embree learned about animals being euthanized in shelters while she was living in Texas, a state known for high kill numbers. She immediately became active in the no-kill community. “I started … doing more to support the movement,” she said. This included donating, adopting from shelters, and fostering stray animals. But, although she spent hours volunteering for animal welfare, Embree’s career focus was in traditional technology. “If you would have told me I would be the CIO at Best Friends Animal Society … I would have said you’re kidding,” she said. “I didn’t realize that there were professional positions in organizations like Best Friends.” That changed when she saw the open position for Best Friends CIO. The job combined her knowledge from 25 years working in information systems with her love of animals, so she decided to apply. “I’m going for it,” she said. Fixing a broken system “Animal welfare is sort of broken from a technology perspective and a data perspective,” Embree stated. The culture of data secrecy means shelters conceal kill numbers. But, they also don’t keep history on the strays in their care. Meaning no health records or foster information is available to people considering adoption. @Amazon Web Services #AWS @Best Friends Animal Society #theCUBE #AWSImagine @SiliconANGLE theCUBE @theCUBE #ImagineABetterWorld #BestFriendAnimalSociety