Battersea Dogs & Cats Home teams up with Kickstarter campaign to transform tube station
Melanie May | 14 June 2016 | News
A Kickstarter campaign aiming to raise enough funds to replace every single advert in a London tube station with pictures of cats has reached its target.
The Citizens Advertising Takeover Service (C.A.T.S) has so far raised £23,131, just over its £23,000 target, on Kickstarter, and has teamed up with Battersea Dogs & Cats Home with the final posters to feature real cats from the charity’s cattery that need homes. The project, from Glimpse, was dubbed #CatsNotAds, and attracted global media attention and over 300 backers in its first two weeks.
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The station takeover is expected to take place in September. Pledgers were offered a variety of incentives for donating, with C.A.T.S offering to stroke a cat for those who donated £1, those who pledged £15 receiving a sticker for their own ‘mini takeover’, and those who pledged £2,500 or more offered an entire poster on the tube of their own cat.
The final posters will be unbranded with a single poster in the station referring to Battersea Dogs & Cats Home and giving commuters a way to get in touch with the charity. The charity hopes that the posters will have a promotional benefit as well as potentially a rehoming benefit by encouraging commuters to visit the Battersea website or its centres to rehome a cat.
Lindsey Quinlan, Battersea’s head of catteries, said:
“We care for over 3,000 cats a year with one in three of them arriving as strays, so hopefully this campaign will encourage lots more people to consider rehoming our fantastic felines. Hopefully having a station full of cats will provide a purrfect moment of calm for thousands of busy Londoners.”
About Melanie May
Melanie May is a journalist and copywriter specialising in writing both for and about the charity and marketing services sectors since 2001. She can be reached via thepurplepim.com.