Data Contribution Terms (draft)

Draft, version 0.1 (October 21, 2026). These terms are a plain-language draft under review and have not yet been reviewed by a lawyer. They may change before final; members will be told about material changes.

1. What you contribute

Members contribute animal-level shelter records: intake date, outcome date, species, age group, size, intake type, condition at intake and outcome type, and optionally sex, spay/neuter status, breed group (a broad group such as "Hound" or "Domestic shorthair", converted from the breed in your browser) and color group (such as "Black" or "Tabby"). Contributions must not include names, ID numbers, addresses, phone numbers, emails, microchip numbers, or any details about owners, adopters, finders or staff. Our upload page removes every other column in your browser before sending and shows you exactly what will be sent.

2. You keep ownership

Your organization keeps all ownership of its data. Contributing does not transfer ownership to Shelter Insights.

3. What you let us do

You give Shelter Insights a non-exclusive, royalty-free license to store your de-identified records and use them, combined with other shelters' records and public open data, to build and improve models and simulations of shelter outcomes and capacity across all outcome types, to support shelter decision-making. This includes training the long-stay scoring model, calibrating simulations, and publishing pooled statistics.

4. What we will never do

• We will never sell your data or share your records with another organization.
• Other members never see your shelter's records or shelter-level results. Shared statistics from member data are shown only for groups with at least 5 contributing shelters and at least 100 records.
• We won't publicly name your shelter as a contributor without your permission.

5. Deletion and leaving

You can delete any contribution from your dashboard, or email hello@shelterinsights.org to delete all of your data and close your membership. We delete stored records promptly. Models already trained may keep learned patterns until their next retraining, after which your records are no longer included.

6. Your responsibilities

You confirm you're authorized to share the data, that sharing it is allowed under any agreements or public-records rules that apply to your organization, and that it contains no personal information.

7. Staying active

Member tools unlock after your first contribution and stay unlocked for 12 months from your most recent contribution.

8. How results should be used

Scores and simulations are decision support to help shelters maximize lives saved and placements. They inform, but do not replace, staff judgment and the shelter's own policies. Tools are provided as-is, without warranties.

9. Security

Contributions are stored with our hosting provider, Cloudflare, in a private database that only Shelter Insights administrators can access.