Our mission was clear: Encourage dog adoption. But in order to do so, we needed to address one of the main reasons people don’t adopt dogs from a shelter: they aren’t purebred dogs. Lots of people discriminate mongrel dogs although they can be as good pets as dogs with pedigree. So, we decided to make a comparison between them to generate awareness about the importance of adopting dogs that are looking for a home.

We saw an opportunity: In Halloween month (October), people love to dress up their pets. So, we created purebred dog costumes to dress up the pets of the shelters, in order to generate consciousness about the problem of animal discrimination and demonstrate that all dogs are the same and, therefore, all dogs deserve a family.

We had a month to implement the idea. We needed to launch the campaign the last week of October, when most social media conversation is about Halloween. So we contacted a pet costume store to make the costumes that our stray dogs would use.

According to the measurements of each dog, we chose the breeds with which our “models” shared the most similarities, in order to make fitting costumes.

The activation ran from October 17 to October 20. We registered it on video and uploaded it as a branded content on October 22 in Facebook prime-time.

The space of action of our campaign was the Malecón of Miraflores, the busiest place for people to walk their pets. We took the dogs throughout the week to capture the reactions of bystanders, and made a visual collection of them to launch the action as a branded content on our official Facebook page.

Tier 1: Outcomes/awareness - change in behaviour, shifts in stakeholder decisions, brand equity

• We became the ONG with more Brand awareness in our target.

• We reduced in 48% the perception that a crossbred dog is not the same as a purebred dog.

• We generated a debate about dog adoption in Peru.

Tier 2: Knowledge/consideration - coverage depth (quality/quantity), tone and message delivery, purchase intent (survey)

• We reached more than 15 million people only on Facebook.

• We got 1.5 million organic reproductions only on Facebook.

• We got 10 million impressions in national and international media.

Tier 3: Outputs/business results – sales, donations, site traffic, content response

• We generated $1 million in free press.

• We increased 50% the followers of our Facebook page.

• We increased 300% pet adoption in our shelter.

• Without being a donation campaign, we obtained twice the income from 2015.

With zero media investment, we made a local campaign cross borders and generate thousands of impressions in the main Latin American countries and even reaching as far as Korea and Japan.

It was the first Peruvian campaign out in Buzzfeed. Without media investment, we made more than 55,000 shares in just one week.

Thanks to the PR plan, lots of celebrities joint the campaign and did that in the few days that the video became the activation with more buzz about pets in Peru, but most importantly, we started the debate about the importance of the adoption of mongrel dogs.

In Peru, there are about 6 million stray dogs, but Peruvians prefer to buy pets instead of adopting, because more than 90% of shelter dogs are crossbred. And it’s purebred dogs that give them more social status. This has placed Peru as the country with the lowest rate of dog adoption in Latin America.

With that in mind, we decided to do something creative to compare the dogs and generate awareness that all dogs are the same.

Situation:

In Peru, there are about 6 million stray dogs. Most of them manage to live on the streets, and the rest, hopefully expect to find a home while living in a shelter. Grupo Caridad is one of the most important NGOs dedicated to animal protection in the country. Currently, they have two shelters, where they take care of more than 170 rescued dogs.

Brief:

One of the toughest problems Grupo Caridad has to deal with is that the numbers of dogs they rescue is greater than the amount of dogs that people adopt. And because of that, sometimes they can’t even receive more dogs at the shelters.

Objectives:

Tending so many dogs is logistically tough. Therefore, for Grupo Caridad to continue rescuing, it is necessary that people begin to adopt more dogs.