Kennel Club Charitable Trust: A Celebration of Dogs with Jobs

Celebrating incredible Dogs with Jobs across the UK, this campaign was shortlisted for Third Sector's Communications Campaign of the Year 2024.

The Challenge

Each year around 7,000 people in the UK rely on registered assistance dogs, with training costs reaching £36,000 per dog over its working life.

For its 2023 Christmas fundraising campaign, KCCT tasked us with celebrating these incredible canine heroes and showcasing the life-changing impact they have daily, whilst raising awareness of their vital work with partner dog charities.

The Approach

Our overarching campaign platform was ‘A Celebration of Dogs with Jobs’, an uplifting creative concept, which The Ripple Effect used for inspiration for the campaign tactics.

We needed a campaign which would connect on an emotional level, and we needed some star power, and teamed up with legendary photographer and dog-lover Rankin - the man who has photographed King Charles, Kate Moss, David Bowie and more - and put the service dogs at the heart of the campaign.

We curated a list of ten service dogs and their humans for Rankin to snap a series of very special pawtraits: from Thunder, the end-of-life support Husky; to police trauma Shiba Inus Rosie, Riot and Dennis, the dogs had huge media appeal.

We brokered a partnership with the renowned Saatchi Gallery to showcase the Rankin photos, an exhibition which ran for a week from December 10th to 18th. Normally costing £150,000, we secured the space for a charity rate of £10,000.

The Outcome

The campaign exceeded all its objectives.

Landed 179 pieces of coverage (vs an objective of 150) with highlights including:

major features in The Guardian, The Times, and CBBC Newsround; ranking in the top ten ‘Best Thing to do in Europe’ on Euronews; high reach London specific event titles such as Metro’s The Slice and Secret London; and a multi-page spread in The Big Issue.

Secured on the sofa interviews for the dogs and their humans on BBC Breakfast, Sky News and This Morning.

The opening day of the exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery, for media and influencers, reached capacity, with a long queue forming beforehand and security having to ask people to leave at the end.

Clearly they were loving the pawtraits!