[JUDGING] Dogs Trust Ireland
Section: Social Media Strategy: NGO
Organisation Name: Dogs Trust Ireland
General Strategy Questions
Name Of Brand Client
Dogs Trust Ireland
Personpeople Who Led This Campaign
Kim Murphy / Melanie Kevelighan / Paulina Padlo / Claire Carr
Do You Use Alt Text In Your Images And Caption Your Videos
We use the auto-generated Alt text on Instagram and caption our videos if there is a voiceover.
What Objective For Campaign
Our strategy is to use social media to turn people’s love of dogs into action that helps improve dog welfare across Ireland. It focuses on several key objectives: raising brand awareness, helping dogs find homes, empowering owners with practical advice, finding new audiences, and turning engaged followers into supporters of our mission.
By showcasing our work, highlighting the dogs in our care, and advocating for better welfare through our social channels, we are able to establish Dogs Trust as the leading authority on dog welfare.
We use our social media to educate and empower owners to meet their dogs’ needs by sharing practical and helpful information. Our channels are also a two-way relationship where people can reach us to ask questions or seek advice, we don’t simply use them as broadcasting channels.
Social media is vital to our organisational strategy to 'help more dogs'. It's scalable, measurable and capable of turning relatively small investments into meaningful action. It allows us to reach more people, beyond our existing supporter base.
We are using social media to build a community of supporters who will actively engage with us and advocate for better dog welfare by sharing our content. By building trust with this community, they become supporters and often donors, allowing us to continue our life-saving work.
Outline Your Strategy For This Campaign
While we have appealing content of cute dogs to share on our channels, we need to be strategic about how we share it. To do this, we utilise a lot of short-from video content to better showcase dogs and tell their stories, as well as reach new audiences.
As a small team managing multiple channels, we focus on creating strong, versatile content that can be adapted and distributed across platforms. We constantly analyse our metrics to identify top-performers.
This content varies between adoption appeals, success stories, behind-the-scenes content, educational and campaign content, joining trends, or even creating our own.
As our strategy takes an audience-led approach, we’ve moved away from creating highly polished content towards more real-life videos and imagery. We want what we share to feel authentic, and we’ve found this is also what our audience prefers.
We take advantage of the cost-effective paid features on our channels. We use Meta for lead-generation, driving sales, advertising dogs, and boosting organic content to reach more people. TikTok has proved successful in driving one-off donations.
Across our channels we are continually testing formats, trends and working with social media influencers and celebrities. We then analyse this data to determine the best approaches and identify where we should scale.
What Were The Outcomes For This Campaign Metrics Next Question
Through our strategy, we've been able to build (and continuously grow) an engaged and loyal audience, with some of our posts achieving hundreds of comments and shares. We also see our followers getting to know our dogs through the content, and we receive excited comments and messages every time their favourites appear.
Through our channels, we’ve been able to drive measurable action that goes beyond post engagement. Campaigns such as Ireland’s Dog Census was mainly promoted through social media and enabled us to create meaningful change in the dog welfare space by allowing us to better understand the problems facing dogs and their owners. This led us to create various advocacy campaigns, including our Renters Rights campaign, calling for fairer terms for pet owners who rent.
Social media also plays a huge role in getting the dogs in our care adopted. We use a mixture of paid and organic content to drive people to complete adoption applications.
This is particularly important for our Underdogs (dogs who have been in our care for more than six months), who get little interest from potential adopters. Through targeted paid social media, we can each more people who may have the means to take them on.
Ultimately, social media is helping us to achieve our mission by finding homes for dogs, supporting dog owners, and promoting our advocacy campaigns to bring positive change
What Are Your Metrics For This Campaign Real Metrics Please
Since the beginning of the year, our strategy has helped us achieve a huge boost in website traffic. From FB alone, we’ve driven 54K people (this includes ads across Meta), while IG has driven 28.5K people, and TikTok a further 11K. Of particular importance to us, is driving more traffic to the pages of dogs looking for homes. From January to August 2026, we’ve driven a 61% increase in traffic from social media to our rehoming pages, versus the same time period in 2025. This is largely due to the new paid strategy we’re operating to rehome our Underdogs.
As mentioned, these dogs rarely receive any interest. Since the paid rehoming social strategy launched, we’ve achieved 76 new adoption applications being completed directly through these Meta ads, which have led to nine dogs being booked and four successful adoptions. By constantly evaluating and tweaking this strategy, we’ve also managed to reduce the cost per application by 25%.
Our strategy has also helped us to grow our following across Facebook, Instagram and TikTok by 5% (an increase of 15,713 followers). In 2026 alone, we've reached over 11.5 million people, which is a 1% increase compared to the same time period in 2025. Our content has also been engaged with 2.9 million times, and achieved 6.7 million views so far this year. We are delighted with these numbers as an Irish NGO with very limited paid budget.
Is There Anything Else You Want To Add Be Brief
Social media isn’t just a communications channel for Dogs Trust; it’s an important part of how we achieve our mission. We don’t measure success simply by how many people see a post, we’re measuring whether our social channels can turn an online connection with dogs into meaningful action that actually improves dogs’ lives and dog welfare across Ireland.
As a charity, it is a vital way for us to reach more people outside our existing supporter base, not only to raise funds, but to mobilise them to take action and support dogs in need. We’ve also created a loyal and engaged community on our channels, with supporters who follow the dogs' journeys and get genuinely excited when a dog gets adopted.
As social media is an ever-changing landscape, our strategy continually evolves and grows based on the data available to us, our audience’s behaviour, and experimentation with new content, campaigns and paid advertising tactics.