PawPal-DogsCBR

PawPal: Zero-Touch Onboarding for Dogs Canberra

Inspiration

Dogs Canberra’s Community Walking Program connects volunteers with rescue dogs who need exercise, enrichment and positive human interaction. However, before a volunteer can join their first walk, the Community Manager must manually review applications, send induction documents and quiz links, check quiz results, collect identification and signed forms, update the member register and send confirmation emails.

For an organisation supported by a small team, this creates a large amount of repetitive administration. It also means applicants may need to move between forms, documents and email threads before they are ready to help.

By reducing onboarding friction and teaching safe dog-walking practices, PawPal helps more volunteers participate in regular physical activity while protecting both volunteers and rescue dogs.

That idea became PawPal: a friendly, self-service onboarding experience that handles the paperwork while preserving the supervised first walk.

What PawPal does

PawPal brings the Community Member onboarding journey into one responsive website.

Applicants can:

Enter their personal and contact details.
Review and accept the Community Induction agreement.
Learn the OHS guidelines through short, interactive cards.
Complete a visual, scenario-based safety quiz with immediate feedback.
Upload their photo ID for later staff verification.
Add a handwritten digital signature.
Receive their Community Member number and next-step instructions.

The quiz requires every safety question to be answered correctly before the applicant can continue. Instead of reproducing a conventional Google Form, we used tap-based interactions, illustrated walking scenarios and instant feedback to make the safety material easier to understand and remember.

After submission, PawPal records the application in Google Sheets, stores the uploaded ID and signature in private Google Drive folders, and sends confirmation emails to both the applicant and Dogs Canberra staff.

Staff still meet the applicant during their supervised first walk. PawPal automates routine administration, not the real-world assessment of whether a person and dog are a safe match.

How we built it

The frontend is a responsive React and Vite application styled with Tailwind CSS to complement Dogs Canberra’s navy, amber and cream visual identity. Framer Motion provides lightweight transitions and feedback, and signature_pad supports handwritten signatures on both desktop and mobile.

We converted Dogs Canberra’s existing induction and OHS material into:

A step-by-step onboarding journey
Swipeable safety guideline cards
An 11-question interactive quiz
First-person and neutral illustrated scenarios
Accessible tap and keyboard interactions
Responsive desktop and mobile layouts

The backend runs in Google Apps Script because Dogs Canberra already uses Google Workspace. This allows PawPal to work with the organisation’s existing Sheets, Drive and Gmail workflow instead of requiring a new database or paid server.

The React frontend sends one structured application to the Apps Script web app. The script creates the member record, saves uploaded files, generates the Community Member number and sends the required emails.

The frontend is deployed on Cloudflare Pages through GitHub integration. New commits to the production branch are built automatically, while the Apps Script deployment remains separately versioned. The solution is designed to operate within the free tiers of the services used at the organisation’s current scale.

Challenges we faced

Turning policy into interaction

The biggest design challenge was making the OHS material engaging without changing its meaning. Every visual and interaction still needed to teach the exact safety requirement. We repeatedly adjusted the questions so the correct answer came from understanding the guideline rather than from an obvious icon or visual clue.

Designing for different devices

Native form controls do not behave identically across browsers. The date of birth field, for example, fitted correctly in desktop mobile simulation but overflowed on a physical mobile device. We replaced the inconsistent native date control with a responsive day, month and year selection interface and tested the layout at multiple breakpoints.

We also reduced quiz illustrations and removed unnecessary drag behaviour so applicants could see the scenario and answer choices without excessive scrolling.

Connecting several deployment environments

The frontend, GitHub repository, Cloudflare Pages project and Apps Script web app each have their own deployment lifecycle. A frontend commit does not automatically update Apps Script, and changing a Cloudflare environment variable only affects the next build. Learning to manage these boundaries was essential to making the complete workflow reliable.

Responsible use of AI

We prototyped a Gemini-powered helper that was limited to answering questions from the OHS material and was never allowed to decide whether an applicant passed. During testing, we found that its request routing needed stronger safeguards before public use. We therefore disabled the helper in the final public interface instead of presenting an unreliable feature.

That decision reinforced an important lesson: responsible AI development also means knowing when a feature is not ready to ship.

What we learned

We learned that useful automation is not simply about replacing manual steps. It is about identifying which steps are repetitive and rule-based, while preserving human judgement where it has the greatest value.

We also learned that adoption is easier when technology fits the tools an organisation already uses. Building around Google Workspace makes PawPal more practical for a volunteer organisation than introducing an unfamiliar database and administration platform.

Most importantly, close stakeholder feedback improved the product. The digital signature feature was added after Dogs Canberra reviewed our prototype and asked whether applicants could sign directly in the platform. That feedback turned PawPal from a technical demonstration into a more complete operational workflow.

What we are proud of

PawPal transforms a multi-step email exchange into a journey an applicant can complete in one sitting. It gives volunteers clearer safety training, provides immediate feedback and reduces routine administrative handoffs.

At the same time, it keeps the supervised first walk exactly where it belongs: with Dogs Canberra staff, the applicant and the dog together.

What's next

The next steps would be to run a supervised pilot with Dogs Canberra, conduct accessibility testing with real users and connect the workflow to the organisation’s production member register.

We would also add stronger duplicate detection, configurable member-number rules, an internal status view for staff and clearer data-retention controls for uploaded identification. The scoped AI helper could be reintroduced only after its routing, privacy boundaries and fallback behaviour have been fully tested.