Holiday Adoption Program Zappos & Best Friends Animal Society
There’s nothing like a squiggling, adorable kitten or puppy for the holidays, and Zappos and Best Friends Animal Society decided to kick off their holiday season with a partnership that promoted pet adoption with a goal of finding homes for 4,000 dogs and cats during the period between Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
In addition to finding families for these pets, Home for the Pawlidayz, as the program was called, aimed to drive traffic to zappos.com, an online retailer, and differentiate the business during the very busy holiday season. It also sought to establish goodwill and loyalty among Zappos customers and employees while driving media coverage and social media chatter. For Best Friends, the goals were to raise awareness that every year approximately 4 million healthy dogs and cats are killed in animal shelters and to make it easier for the estimated 23 million Americans who want to acquire a pet to get one through adoption. And of course, raising money for the cause was part of the plan.
Starting on Black Friday, Zappos offered information about local shelters within the Best Friends network, helping their customers see how simple pet adoption could be. They sweetened the deal by covering the $100 adoption fee, thereby eliminating one of the biggest deterrents in pet adoptions. In addition, for every pet adopted, Zappos pledge $150 to Best Friends (for a total commitment of $1.1 million.)
Over the weekend, Zappos created a microsite on their website that walked customers through the pet adoption process and which offered a customer support hotline.
The campaign resulted in more than 7.6 million Facebook impressions and over 3.8 million views between two video adds. On Twitter, the campaign blew up with 108 million total #pawlidayz impressions (95 percent organic) and a push from such celebrities as Cher, Paula Abdul, George Lopez and Sophia Bush (and their millions of followers).
Best Friends and Zappos saw 417 articles resulting in 317 million earned media impressions including in Huffington Post, Time.com, Country Living, Money, Financial News and more. Zappos trended on Facebook throughout the weekend. More than 1,500 employees were involved with raffles and other activities, and even several Zappos employees adopted pets.
Home for the Pawlidayz became the single biggest adoption event for Best Friends in the organization’s history. In total, 6,285 pets were adopted, $1.1 million donations were received, and for the first time in their history, the shelters were completely empty (with many having to rush in more pets before the weekend was over.)