In 2013, the New Zealand Government passed a new law to curb the sale of synthetic recreational drugs, ‘party pills’, by pushing the producers to safety test them on dogs.

Animal-rights activist group, Paw Justice, was desperate to pressure the Government to review the law, but couldn’t fund an extensive above-the-line campaign. They had to rely on PR and social media to rally Kiwis together and make the government take notice.

How do we grab the public’s attention? We staged a world-first Animal Strike and let our furry friends protest on behalf of New Zealand dogs.

For one day, we blocked the animal content people love.

We collaborated with YouTube, Google, local TV stations and websites to block everything from singing cats to skateboarding dogs. We then encouraged the public to sign the petition and download the strike toolkit to block their own animal content. No selfies with your poodle Paul, or pics of your new kitten Cathy – they were all on strike.

And news media couldn’t get enough, sharing our story through the country’s biggest news organisations, pushing our key messages about the inhumane practice of lab testing on dogs.

For an investment of less than $5,000, this campaign not only reached a potential audience of over 22 million people, it generated enough groundswell to influence the people who matter.

Because of this campaign, the New Zealand Government is now reviewing this law. Woof!

The goal was simple – get the government to amend the new law. Getting them to do it was not so simple.

Of those surveyed, 72.3%, didn’t support it the new law. We needed to grab these peoples attention, then drive then to our website to sign the petition.

Then PR was used to generate enough news coverage to make the Government take notice.

Our target audience was New Zealanders. But to raise more awareness we also targeted animal loving celebrities and the media as well as famous internet animals like Boo..

We achieved our goal. Through public pressure the government was forced to review the law and are looking at an amendment right now.

We received support through tweets retweets, facebook and instagram posts from some of the most famous animal lovers and animals in the world.

Despite being on the same day as New Zealand’s biggest sporting event of 2013, the Americas cup, we still gained earned media in New Zealand’s most popular morning news show, newspaper and radio station.

And #animalstrike trended on twitter above #americascup.

Over 220,000 took part online either by uploading a strike message or participating on our facebook page.

We received over 350% more petition signatures then we aimed for.

98% of all those visited the website went on to sign the petition.

78% visited the website through social media channels.

We spent less than $5000 yet received a potential reach of over 22million.

When we submitted our entry for the Paw Justice Animal Strike held on September 26th 2013 that, we were able to demonstrate New Zealanders and their pets standing united and voicing their outrage to ban party pill testing on animals in Zealand. Paw Justice collected over 58,000 signatures in one day, which was then presented to Parliament. Since then the New Zealand Government has been in the spotlight and put under immense pressure to amend the bill allowing testing. It was announced today by the New Zealand Prime Minister John Key that due to this overwhelming response that this law has now been changed.

This is a phenomenal result.

1. We engaged with New Zealand’s biggest media outlets to cover the story a few days before the strike.

2. Used Paw Justice spokesperson for media interviews. Exclusive content to the country’s largest breakfast news channel to create impact

3. We collaborated with Google, YouTube, TV stations to block animal content for the day.

4. We created a website so the public could get involved in the strike by downloading a strike toolkit they could easily use to block their own animal content.

5. We identified the key influencers to share the campaign on our behalf Proactive social media engagement to rally support internationally and drive the hashtag

When the New Zealand Government passed a law pushing for synthetic drug producers to safety test them on dogs, it immediately got the hackles up on animal activist group, Paw Justice.

With only a few weeks to get a petition into parliament and no funds for an extensive advertising campaign, we needed a PR and social campaign to generate significant media coverage about the issue and rally Kiwis together to put so much pressure on the government that they would have no choice but to pay attention.

Cat playing piano has nearly 9million views. Dog skateboarding has over 3million views. We all know people love being entertained by animals so we utilised that passion and turned it into action.

We spend hundreds of hours a year being entertained by animals but when it comes to watching hard-hitting animal-rights ads most people just turn away. So instead of showing the public something they didn’t want to see, we got their attention by taking away what they love.

We needed the media to cover the story, but we had to generate a groundswell first. We needed partners on board to leverage their audiences and flex their muscles.