Best Friends Animal Society and TrueCar partnership

Who would have thought that taking a cute picture of your dog enjoying a car ride could help save a life? When the mobile car buying platform TrueCar got involved this spring and agreed to donate money to Best Friends for every photo posted on Instagram with the tag #DogsInCars, those photos helped homeless dogs get the most important ride of their lives. “As we started to look at our love of cars,” says Lucas Donat, TrueCar's CMO, “we started to realize that there's only one other creature on the planet that loves cars as much as we do — and that's dogs.”

TrueCar helping save animals with Best Friends

Every day, Best Friends staff and volunteers head to shelters in our program cities to pick up homeless dogs and bring them to safety at one of our adoption centers. That fateful ride away from the shelter — a true joy ride — brings hundreds of pets each month one step closer to a home, and when TrueCar came forward to help Best Friends save animals, it was easy to see where they fit in.

“It makes sense that a company centered around transportation would want to help pets get those all-important joy rides out of shelters,” says Trish Conklin, development manager at Best Friends. “We're grateful for corporate partners like TrueCar who not only help fund but also spread the word about our lifesaving work.”

Joy rides with dogs

TrueCar rallied people who love loading up their own dogs for a joy ride, asking them to post photos online. In exchange, for each photo posted, TrueCar would donate a dollar to Best Friends to help fund the costs of transporting dogs out of shelters.

Soon photos with the hashtag #DogsInCars began flooding Instagram, sharing a glimpse of so many dogs living the good life. People’s canine copilots had the wind blowing through their fur; some sat in the front seat, some in the back, some curled up for a nap, others poked their heads out the window to take it all in. At the end of the campaign, TrueCar donated $50,000 to Best Friends — enough to fund joy rides out of the shelter for more than 3,200 homeless dogs. Watch the video and see how dogs’ lives were changed forever.

Interested in adopting your own canine co-pilot? Click here.

Looking for a creative way to donate to help animals? What about donating your old vehicle?

Photos courtesy of TrueCar