Every holiday season, millions of pets enter shelters operating at a breaking point. For Chewy, giving back to these animals is not a seasonal gesture, it’s an ongoing commitment. Chewy Claus, the brand’s annual holiday program, has granted thousands of wishes from pets and the people who love them, while supporting pets in need through shelter donations.
In 2025, we saw an opportunity to make that impact more participatory. Younger audiences increasingly expect brands to give them a role in the causes they care about, yet digital charity can easily become passive: a like, a view, a moment of sympathy, then a scroll.
Our ambition was to turn that behavior on its head.
For Year 4 of Chewy Claus, we transformed the traditional holiday telethon into the Chewy Claus Wish-A-Thon, a live, social-first experience where audience participation directly fueled support for shelter animals.
Our goals were to expand participation beyond traditional wish submissions, mobilize a new generation of pet parents around a shared cause, and turn every interaction into tangible impact.
The idea was simple: make doing good impossible to scroll past, and make every person in the audience part of what happened next.
We re-engineered the classic telethon for the social era, turning Chewy Claus from something people watched into something they actively shaped.
For 45 minutes, the Chewy Claus Wish-A-Thon streamed simultaneously across TikTok, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Instead of simply asking viewers to donate or watch, we gave them a direct role: submit holiday wishes for pets and participate in a live experience where their actions helped unlock donations to shelters.
The result was a real-time giving engine built around three principles: participation, visibility and momentum.
Participation: We designed the experience around the behavior of social audiences. Viewers could submit wishes, comment, share and interact in real time, making the community an active participant rather than a passive audience.
Visibility: The Wish-O-Meter showed the collective impact building second by second. Audiences could immediately see that their participation mattered, creating a transparent connection between what they did on-screen and the support being generated for pets in need.
Momentum: Live hosts and moderators responded to the community in real time, turning the stream into a dynamic conversation. As participation increased, the experience evolved with it. The audience wasn't just reacting to the broadcast; its behavior was helping drive what happened next.
The biggest challenge was creating meaningful action in an environment designed for distraction. We had no guarantee that audiences would stay, participate or care beyond a fleeting moment.
So we built the experience around the action. Every interaction had a purpose. Every new wish added momentum. Every milestone made the collective impact more visible. And the more the community participated, the more the experience, and its impact, grew.
That approach transformed a familiar holiday program into something fundamentally different: a social-first community event where entertainment and giving were not separate experiences.
Most importantly, the community’s response had real-world consequences. As participation surged during the livestream, Chewy responded by doubling its donation commitment, ultimately unlocking $5 million in supplies for shelters.
We didn't ask people to simply care about a cause. We gave them a way to actively move it forward.
In just 45 minutes, the Chewy Claus Wish-A-Thon turned social participation into measurable support for pets in need.
But the most important result wasn't a view, engagement or benchmark. It was the behavioral shift behind them.
People didn't just watch a brand do good. They actively participated in making it happen.
The Wish-A-Thon demonstrated that social can be more than a channel for awareness or fundraising. When audiences are given agency and can see their collective impact unfold in real time, participation can become a force for tangible change.
In under an hour, thousands of individual actions became a collective movement for shelter animals.
Chewy Claus turned the internet's attention into $5 million in real-world support, and proved that doing good can be as participatory, immediate and contagious as anything else on social.
