Dog fostering is when people take a dog into their home and care for it temporarily whilst the dog is looking to find a permanent adoption home. Fostering provides a great relief for shelters at capacity and provides the dogs with a more comfortable homely environment. But as popular as dog fostering has become, there are still many people who cannot foster a dog for reasons out of their own control - like space, building rules, or even allergies. In their mission to end pet homelessness, Pedigree wanted to give more people the chance to foster dogs and educate more people about adoption.

Pedigree let people foster real dogs virtually via Decentraland. Landowners in Decentraland could pick any rescue dog on Adoptapet.com (the largest rescue animal search site) and turn it into a 3D avatar to host on their land, creating a virtual shop window for the dog to help it find a new owner. Passersby could talk to the dog and adopt it directly from a link out to adoptapet.com. At the core of the campaign was the Pedigree Fosterverse hub in Decentraland where people could learn about the campaign, enter a portal to meet more fostered dogs, or donate to shelters with crypto. A quest incentivised people to learn more by rewarding them with branded NFT wearables. The first people to foster a dog got an ultra rare wearable.

For Pedigree, joining a Web3 social platform like Decentraland offered a great opportunity to engage an untapped audience of potential adopters and customers. But they didn't want to make the same mistake as other brands who had rushed to join the metaverse hype train without offering any real purpose to the web 3 community. To fully engage with the community, Pedigree wanted to offer them something that a lot of people couldn’t have in the real world - dogs. By allowing people to virtually foster a real rescue dog, Pedigree entered the metaverse with a real purpose. They gave real benefit to this expansive new audience, whilst staying true to their brand mission of ending pet homelessness.

Unlike a lot of branded metaverse activations, the Fosterverse bridged the virtual world with the real world. To do this we created a Fosterverse website where people could search for any real rescue dog on adoptapet.com and instantly generate and download a 3D avatar of that dog. The dog could then be deployed on any land in Decentraland to be virtually fostered by the landowner. Each dog was coded with a chatbot, so that it could introduce itself to passersby, with its name, age, breed etc, and even charm the person into adopting them in real life - by linking to the dog’s profile on adoptapet.com.

To make Fosterverse truly engaging for the web3 community, we took advantage of all the unique Decentraland features; NTF wearables as incentives, wallet based donations, a quest and a portal that allowed you to teleport to different plots where dogs were being fostered.

Pedigree Fosterverse stood out against other brands in the metaverse by having a legitimate reason to be there. Virtual fostering offered a real life benefit to Decentraland users and to rescue dogs and shelters. The Fosterverse has exceeded 100,000 visitors and has outperformed the benchmark for branded Decentraland activations by 400%. It was widely talked about by the metaverse community in press articles, podcasts, and social videos, creating 788 million earned media impressions. But most importantly of all, it increased the adoption inquiries on adoptapet.com by 17% and 88% of the virtually fostered dogs found new homes in the real world.