For 75 years, the Ad Council has been harnessing the power of media and the marketing sector to make an impact on a wide array of social issues. Its long list of iconic campaigns includes Smokey Bear's "Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires"; the "Keep America Beautiful" anti-pollution effort; and last year's viral "Love Has No Labels" campaign. With consumer habits shifting away from traditional channels toward social media, the nonprofit sought to leverage new strategies and technologies aimed at inspiring incoming generations of advocates to act.
The Ad Council's newest challenge was to bring attention to the fact that there are 2.4 million healthy and treatable pets that still need our help in finding a home each year. Bringing that number all the way to zero is the ongoing goal of "The Shelter Pet Project" campaign.
The legacy nonprofit partnered with Crowdtap to achieve word-of-mouth and awareness on social media for the Shelter Pet Project's mission. Together they moved advocates across the spectrum of influence by activating Crowdtap's network of expert content creators and everyday peer influencers to create and share messages about their positive experiences with pet adoption in social.
The campaign was driven by the hashtag #StartAStoryAdopt, and in total, moved three expert content creators and 18,000 peer influencers.
30M Potential Impressions
375K Engagements
20K Social Shares Engagements
28K Content Created
Along with these 28,000 pieces of user-generated content, the Ad Council was able to inspire authentic stories from pet adopters around the country. In addition to this, many of the comments within the posts evoked a sense of shared community and prompted folks to organically @mention their friends.
The campaign ultimately sparked a community-led movement across social, rallying together thousands of advocates and ultimately driving awareness and action around shelter pet adoption.
