Home for Hope: using IKEA fur­ni­ture dis­plays to adver­tise home­less dogs

Exhibited by
SOFII
Added
March 01, 2016
Medium of Communication
Store displays
Target Audience
Individuals
Type of Charity
Animals
Country of Origin
Singapore
Date of first appearance
May 2014

SOFII’s view

This is a clever campaign designed to convince shoppers looking for home furnishings that a homeless dog might be just what they need to tie a room together and complete a home. A perfect demonstration of a mutually beneficial partnership between an animal shelter charity and a company demonstrating their corporate social responsibility.

Click on the image to see the video.

Summary / objectives

A Singapore-based IKEA partnered with two animal shelters to form ‘Home For Hope’ a charitable initiative that places life-size cardboard cut-outs of dogs in various IKEA display rooms. The idea behind it was to get customers to imagine what their room could look like with a dog in it and then adopt that dog.

Background

Home for Hope was born out of a pressing issue. With a limited budget animal shelters like Animal Lovers League and Save our Street Dogs can only afford to voice their messages via social media. Problem is, their followers are pet lovers and most already own pets. Hence, adoption rates are low.

Kua Yiwen from Save Our Street Dogs says in the video that even though they have around 30,000 fans on Facebook, many already have dogs and the number of potential adopters they’re reaching on social media is nowhere near that number. The project was designed to help animal rescuers reach a new audience of people who were either already considering adopting a dog, or who may simply fall in love with one of the featured dogs and decide to welcome them into their family.

To connect with audiences who don’t yet have a furry friend, IKEA takes fetching photographs of homeless dogs and uses the images to create life-size cardboard cut-outs. The still-life images are then set around the IKEA showroom in places you’d expect to see a dog: sitting on the carpet, stretched out on the sofa and, of course, begging at the dinner table. The cut-outs provide a clever, if not cheesy, idea of what it would look like to really live in the room; they give the dogs a moment in the spotlight among potential families.

Shoppers can become potential adopters by scanning the QR codes on each of the cardboard dogs’ collars. The link takes them to the Home for Hope website and a bio and video of each individual dog.

Influence / impact

Since the project started, other furniture stores have also joined in with the idea of showing off adoptable dogs, including Foundry, Grafunkt, Commune, Journey East and Noden Collective. An IKEA store in Tempe, Arizona is now the first location in the USA to join this project and has already signed off adoptions through the Arizona Humane Society for all six of the dogs displayed in the store.

Life-sized cardboard cutouts of real dogs that are available for adoption are carefully placed in store displays.
Each cutout features a QR code to access information about that specific animal.