Work the Applicant Inbox
The Inbox gathers every kind of inbound contact — adoption, foster, and volunteer applications, surrender requests, donor submissions, and email replies — and organizes all of it around the person. One card is one person, identified by their email address. However many forms they fill in, everything lands in the same conversation.
Find People
The left panel lists people by most recent activity across three tabs:
- All — everyone who is not archived
- Unread — people with activity you have not seen
- Archived — people you have archived
Live counts appear next to each tab. Search reaches names, emails, and message content — and it searches every tab, so an archived person is never lost. Filter by submission type or by the Approved and Rejected decision chips; filters combine, and Clear all appears once more than one is active.
Unread cards show a highlighted border, a bold name, and a dot. Use a card's ⋯ menu to mark it unread or archive it. Archiving is the only way to remove a card — nothing in the Inbox is deleted, and a new application from an archived person reopens their card automatically.
Read the Conversation
The middle panel is the person's conversation. Their messages sit on the left; your team's replies sit on the right with the sender's name. Events that happened to the person — an application submitted, a decision, a pet becoming unavailable, an adoption starting — appear as quiet centered lines with the date. When an event involves a specific pet, it shows the pet's photo and name as a link to the public profile, frozen as the pet was at that moment, so history still reads correctly if the pet is later renamed, adopted, or removed.
Replies are sent by email in the background, so the applicant answers from their own mail app while your team reads one continuous thread. Attachments on either side appear as file cards, and a reply that could not be delivered is flagged.
Decide an Application
The right panel shows the person's most recent application — its type, the pet it names (with a No longer available tag if that pet has since left the listings), the submitted date, and the answers grouped the way the applicant entered them.
When a person has submitted more than one form, choose the application in the selector first. Approve and Reject apply only to that selected application. The decision:
- Leaves the person's other adoption, foster, volunteer, surrender, or donor submissions unchanged
- Updates the selected application's underlying person record (Approved makes it Active, Rejected makes it Denied) without overriding a blocked profile
- Opens a review dialog with wording that fits the submission. Foster and volunteer approvals use their existing approval-confirmation templates; adoption copy accounts for whether a requested pet is still available.
Normally, the review dialog lets you edit the subject or message and choose Send email & apply, or choose Apply without email. If Send automatically is enabled on a foster or volunteer approval template, selecting Approve instead sends that saved template and records the decision together immediately. Rejections and adoption decisions always keep the review step. The Inbox card, pet suggestions, and adoption actions update as soon as the decision is applied; no page refresh is needed.
Blocked People
Blocking belongs to the person's profile, not the Inbox. A blocked person's card shows a Blocked badge, their conversation is read-only, and email to them is refused. Unblocking (from the same profile) returns them to pending so the team decides fresh.
Suggest Pets
For an approved applicant, Suggest pets in the compose area fetches three matches based on their application. Review them in the banner, then Send to applicant to deliver the three pets as one message, or Dismiss. Reopening the banner shows the same three pets. The pets link to their public profiles only — the applicant names their choice back in chat, and your team starts the adoption deliberately.
Templates and Attachments
Templates shows enabled, compatible email templates and inserts the selected copy into the reply as editable text. Turning a template off removes it from composers and prevents its matching decision email. Personalization fields fill in when the message is sent, so templates that need information a conversation cannot supply are not offered. Template email is plain text: line breaks and simple list markers are preserved, while Markdown decoration is not rendered. Templates are managed on the Email Templates page. The paperclip attaches documents from the applied-for pet's record — completed forms, medical records, and shared documents the applicant is allowed to receive.
Start and Track Adoptions
When an approved adopter has no adoption under way, Start adoption process opens the adoption sheet with the applied-for pet preselected. Once an adoption exists, the panel shows an Adoption in progress card with the current pet and start date — alongside the application, since what someone applied for and what they are adopting are both worth seeing — and View adoption opens the record. If the adoption's pet changes, the conversation keeps both moments in order.
Notes and Activity
Internal notes are team-only context — handoffs, review findings, next steps. They never reach the applicant and never disturb the card's preview or position. The Activity log below is a collapsed chronological reference — submissions, decisions, notes, emails, and pet or adoption events — and each row jumps to that moment in the conversation.
Configure Automatic Routing
Select Routing in the Inbox header to configure each submission type separately:
- Choose a channel to notify, or no channel notification
Automatic acknowledgements are controlled in one place: open the matching applicant template under Inbox > Email Templates, turn it on, and enable Send automatically.