The Man Who Became a Dog
For 48 hours, Rob Morlino lived in a kennel, ate out of a dog bowl and walked on a leash — all to raise awareness for shelter animals
The development team at the Santa Fe Humane Society, where Rob Morlino works, was brainstorming ideas for an upcoming online fundraising challenge on CrowdRise. Out of their numerous ideas, they came up with a particularly far-fetched one in which Rob would live in a kennel for a weekend — and stream it all on Facebook Live.
“It was one of those long shot ideas. It was an unusual one, and we bounced it around for a while. Finally, someone proposed that I do it and I said, ‘Yeah, sure I’ll do it.’ I never thought it would actually come to fruition.” — Rob Morlino
But a few weeks later, the chickens came home to roost, as people remembered about the far-fetched idea and asked him if he’d really do it. An animal lover tasked with raising funds to continue helping animals at their most vulnerable, Rob couldn’t say no. He knew that to make a splash they had to take some big chances.
“Animal welfare is a pretty big sector in the United States generally, and in order to get people’s attention, you have to rise above the noise. This called for some pretty provocative marketing and fundraising tactics.”
And that’s how #AdoptRob was started, and also how Rob Morlino found himself living in a dog kennel for a weekend — with the world watching — to raise money for rescued animals.
As the 48-hour stint started, Rob definitely had some worries, like were they going to hit their fundraising goal of $10,000, and would people even care that he was doing this? Luckily for Rob and the rest of the team, those fears were short-lived. And his eating of dog bowls, walking on leashes, wearing of a cone and getting head scratches from volunteers wasn’t all in vain.
Because Rob had a laptop inside the kennel with him to manage the livestream, he could see the amount of people watching at any given time, and read the comments and reactions in real time. He saw that many of the people tuning in were at other shelters across the country who were then tagging their friends and coworkers. People in the industry were clearly watching — and they were on to something.
But then the media got ahold of it. Rob was soon doing interviews from the kennel with Headline News and was featured on the Huffington Post. All in all, according to Facebook, the #AdoptRob campaign reached over 4.5 million people, without any paid promotion. They’d clearly tapped into something that resonated with people.
As the campaign wound down, Rob and the team were thrilled with they’d accomplished. For quite some time, like many organizations, they had been trying to crack the social media fundraising code (which boils down to: social media is amazing for awareness and but much more difficult to raise money with), and with #AdoptRob they made some major headway. And while the $10,000 raised won’t make a huge dent in their operating budget, this was a huge success in helping understand the new online fundraising space — and will help them better serve the animal population in Santa Fe.
Not a bad result for a guy acting like a dog for the weekend.
If you’re inspired by Rob’s story, please Recommend this story so others may find this and follow the Decent Humans publication on Medium for more.
Decent Humans is a series of stories spotlighting the incredible community we witness on CrowdRise doing amazing things for good. By sharing their stories of aid, altruism, and passion we hope others will be inspired to live a charitable life.
