Over 3 million cats are in shelters in this country—and the longer they stay in shelters, the less likely they are to be adopted. Roughly 40% of adult cats up for adoption never find a home.

Adopt-a-Stray gives these cats a day in the spotlight, featuring cats that are older or have special needs. We needed to increase awareness and consideration of these often-overlooked cats, so we did so by letting people engage with them to build empathy. And that’s where Stray comes in.

If you interact with a real cat, a bond develops. And bonds lead to adoptions.

Adopt-a-Stray was an in-game adoption event that took the game, Stray, and used it to drive cat adoptions in real-time on Twitch. We know that 40% of adult cats in shelters never get adopted. With 47% of videogame streamers already owning a cat and 46% of them considering adoption, the gaming space was the perfect place for Fresh Step to extend its reach outside the litter box.

In Stray, gamers experience a futuristic world through the eyes of a cat—but you can only play as a ginger Tabby. We saw an opportunity to bring more cats into the game for a good cause.

Leveraging our partnership with Best Friends Animal Society, we put real, adoptable cats into Stray and had animal loving streamers play as them. Our adoption event was live-streamed on Twitch to raise awareness of homeless pets in need and put viewers in touch with adorable cats.

Gaming live stream audiences who already love cats and have a high interest in animal welfare. Close to half of them own cats and they are more likely to be interested in adopting a new pet in the next year. We selected gaming influencers who had audiences showing high interest in pets in their social media habits and conversations surrounding cat ownership in streaming discussions, which we analyzed over 30K+ comments using linguistic analysis.

Stray is a new, popular game built on the Unreal engine, where the protagonist is a 'stray' cat that provides the world with hope. Instead of the expected “heartstrings" approach that tugs at viewers' emotions by showing cats needing homes or highlighting the many benefits of cat ownership, we hacked Stray turning real cats – available for adoption via Best Friends Animal Society – into heroes in the game through the development of exact replica avatars.

In Stray, gamers experience a futuristic world through the eyes of a cat—but you can only play as a ginger Tabby. We saw an opportunity to bring more cats into the game for a good cause.

Our 3D designers reverse-engineered models from the game and rebuilt them into exact replicas of 40 adoptable cats. They captured every characteristic of these cats, from their fur pattern to their eye color down to the exact movement of their tails. Once our cats were built, they were exported to a gaming engine and converted to mod packs that could be played in the game, which was built using the Unreal Engine.

We desaturated colors and dialed up textures to strike a balance between our cats looking lifelike but still fitting the aesthetic of the game. Then, we found a way to fit branding in seamlessly, adding our logo to the backpack worn by the original cat in the game so that Fresh Step was always present.

Once our mods were ready, we partnered with animal-loving Twitch streamers to play as these adoptable cats and tell their followers more about them. Each viewer could type the name of the cat they’re interested in into the Twitch chat to find out more about the cat and see real photos, then link to an application from the chat to start the adoption process.

Influencer streams were viewed by close to 500K unique users across Twitch and YouTube for over 2MM hours of streaming, helping us reach a large audience of gamers and cat lovers with authentic and engaging messaging. And viewers engaged back, with 13,675 unique chats and messages during the stream—and a 124% increase in adoption applications.

Adopt-a-Stray drove a 124% increase in adoption applications by serving applications within the Twitch platform in real-time through the chat function. Twitch even collaborated with us to support the event, donating media space to feature one of our streamers on the homepage—a coveted spot for gamers.

Influencer streams were viewed by close to 500K unique users for over 2MM hours of streaming in the first 48hrs, helping us reach a large audience of gamers and cat lovers with authentic and engaging messaging. And viewers engaged back, with 13,675 unique chats during the stream.

The campaign achieved our primary KPI of elevating visibility for Fresh Step as a purpose-driven brand by driving awareness of the brand’s longstanding commitment to supporting cat shelters. We saw overwhelmingly positive sentiment in the streams from consumers, including positive mentions of Fresh Step, culminating in over 11 million earned PR impressions.