Teach With Kindness

#ChooseForceFree

Teach With Kindness #ChooseForceFree, aims to stamp out abusive practices used in training, raise the standards within the animal training industry, and provide support to pet guardians on animal training and behaviour. Alongside promoting humane methods of training and handling animals, the initiative also served as a way to renew SPCA Singapore’s call for the government to ban the electric shock collar.

As a non-governmental organisation with limited resources, the team worked within a wee budget to bring the campaign to life.

We became the talk of the town!

The campaign pages reached over 117,489 users and the videos garnered 72,516 views. This earned the SPCA a 6% follower growth over the course of its campaign, with its highest engagement rates reaching upwards of 6%.

Outreach to news outlet was high, including:

Growing conversations on the use of Shock Collars with Today Online.

Shopee Singapore’s support on SPCA’s call for ban of shock collar by Must Share News.

We shocked people for views.

To generate buzz for the campaign launch, a video was premiered to share the harsh truth of inhumane dog training methods (including choking, punching, and kicking the animals)—pet owners coming forward to expose the unseen abuse behind the pet training industry became a rude awakening to the pet community.

A second film was launched soon after, in collaboration with Forsman & Bodenfors Singapore, demonstrating the impact electric shock collars have by having Singapore’s “strongest” humans wear them on a 4,500-voltage. The shocks left them all wincing in pain, ouch.

With the support garnered from the masses, the campaign received over 1,150 pledges by pet caregivers in Singapore to choose humane animal training methods. 15 signatures were also collected from key organisations including Wildlife Reserves Singapore, Singapore Veterinary Association, and other animal shelters.

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Starting conversations, creating debates.

The fastest way to gain traction on social media? Influencers/KOLs.

The team sought strategic partnerships with key animal-lover/pet owner/pet influencers to share an interactive instagram stories kit. This alone created over 4 days of hype and engagement. Best part? All pro-bono.

Teach With Kindness was shared by Joanna Lim on her stories, leveraging her 253K Instagram following.

More influencers including:
Bobblejot, 286k following
Christabel Chua, 263k following,
Chloe Choo, 79k following
Grace Lim, 73k following
Paul Foster, 39k following
Oscar the Corgi, 38k following

Giving the community a part to play.

What better way to educate the public than getting professionals in the industry to host free webinars? In line with the campaign, pet care and training webinars were organised for World Animal Day 2020 which ran over the span of two weeks. The webinars garnered over 2,383 live viewers.

Refusing to stop at just digital platforms (an inevitable situation due to the pandemic), we ran an offline Harness-Exchange event that allowed pet caregivers to give up their aversive training tools for a harness. The lucky pets had the opportunity to be individually fitted by experts, and owners had short training sessions where their queries were addressed.

A total of 54 pet caregivers received a harness, which was endorsed and co-sponsored by Shopee, Singapore’s top visited e-commerce site.