With more than 50 million users and 30 billion matches reported on Tinder, there’s no doubt that the social app works. Famous for helping people meet others in the hopes of either simply hooking up, finding someone to date, or possibly even discovering true love, any match is simply made by swiping right if someone interests you, or swiping left if they don’t.
For one German-based animal shelter, they decided that if Tinder is so popular for humans, why not try to use the app to get humans interested in their shelter dogs? A report by Reuters shared how the Munich Animal Welfare Association (MAWA) decided to hire an advertising agency to take professional photos of at least 15 of their inhouse animals at their shelter to post online. They wrote “tinder profiles” for the animals, explaining to customers that they were hoping to help their pets find “a purrfect match.”
Not only was the idea incredibly cute, but it was quite the marketing strategy. According to the Reuters report, MAWA’s Jillian Moss shared with them, “The response is insane. It’s exploding everywhere.”
Apparently, one photograph of “Captain Kirk,” who happens to be a handsome black-and-white cat, was quite popular. Moss claimed that there were “several people” that swiped right for the beautiful kitty cat.
Even more notable, the shelter opted to take photos of their older cats and dogs rather than the younger ones that tend to get more attention already. They were hopeful that in this way, these older pets would find forever homes just as quickly as the younger, more sought after baby animals.
Since their campaign took off, the people working for the shelter explained that they have been processing a number of requests, while doing a bunch of interviews with hopeful new owners, all in the hopes of finding these pets new homes by pairing them with the right human.
When coronavirus forced the entire world into various lockdowns, there was a very high rate of pet adoption across the globe. But sadly once the restrictions began to lift, animal welfare groups also shared that many of these pet owners could no longer care for their pets, forcing them to put their pets back up for adoption.
According to one of Tinder’s communication team members, Benjamin Beilke, by placing these pets on Tinder and upping the chances of connecting them with potential owners, “we hope that these animals really find a new partner, a ‘purrfect match’ in the long term and not just for a few weeks.”
“There aren’t only lonely souls among humans, but there are also a lot of lonely souls among animals,” he added.
Hopefully this is one method that other countries dealing with an overflow of shelter animals as a result of the pandemic can put into practice too.
If you’d like to see more, watch the YouTube video below.
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