How WeRateDogs’ community-building strategy — and color-coded database — unlocks 13/10 performance 

For nearly a decade, WeRateDogs has served as a haven of wholesome social media distraction, pairing charming photos with even more charming captions and somehow making “12/10 would pet” a legitimate part of our online vocabulary. 

Last week at PR Daily’s 2025 Social Media Conference at Disney World, Matt Nelson, founder of WeRateDogs and its nonprofit arm the 15/10 Foundation, took the stage as a keynote speaker to reveal how it all works, and how has managed to keep it working when algorithms shift faster than a corgi in a bubble bath. 

It’s a little chaotic, but surprisingly tactical, and very, very dog-forward. 

When it works, double down 

Nelson opened his keynote with a story about early success. 

“My first lesson is ‘when it works, double down,’” he said.  

He pointed to the peak of WeRateDogs’ early popularity in 2017, when words such as “doggo” and “pupper” became the basis of an online dialect (“doggospeak”) in which pet owners described the heckin’ cute antics of their furry friends. 

“There was a time in 2017 where if a post didn’t refer to a dog as one of those two things, it didn’t really do well for us,” Nelson said. “And we knew that and we knew that those terms were working, so we doubled down on them and we included them as often as we could.” 

But they also knew when to stop. “We just noticed that it was no longer as valued as it once was,” he said. Users grew weary of the meme-style language. “So I’m very proud to say that our last post that used the word doggo or pupper was in 2017.” 

Stay tuned into the language and communication style of your followers to ensure you’re matching their energy. “That listening aspect, it really helps build community. It allows your audience to feel heard.” 

Be transparent 

Nelson’s second lesson: Radical transparency. 

“This is pretty much synonymous with trust for the sake of this conversation,” he explained. “An example of transparency that I think shows how this trust can be built has to do with our ‘Top 5 Dogs of the Week’ series.” 

He shared a story about a post that, at first, seemed lighthearted: A dad is swinging his toddler into view, while a pit bull nibbles gently at the toddler’s feet. However, the audience found this image more frightening than wholesome. 

“And at first, our community managers were like, we’re not sure, this might just be some people having a bias potentially towards pit bulls and be uncomfortable with the visual of it, but not that anything actually harmful was occurring in the video,” he said.  

But later that day, a dog behaviorist chimed in to flag subtle signs of anxiety and stress in the dog’s body language that could create a bad situation for the family in the video. Nelson and his team acted quickly. 

“As soon as that was brought to light, we deleted the video, and within an hour, I had posted an apology, basically taking accountability for amplifying a video that might not have been the best example to set.” 

The audience’s response was overwhelmingly positive. “Everyone was very pleased that we addressed it as we did,” Nelson said. “I ended up directing everyone to that behaviorist, and we ultimately hoped that that feedback reached the family.” 

Inside the dog database 

Yes, WeRateDogs has a database. No, it’s not just an Excel sheet of good dogs.  

Nelson showed the PR and social media pros in the audience screenshots of the database in Airtable and explained how it works. 

In his walkthrough, Nelson showed how the team filters more than 50,000 dog submissions through various editorial views: a content calendar, a caption queue, a color-coded performance grader, and even a “confidence review” system where staffers predict how each post will perform. 

“We grade all of the posts. We have a color scale that goes from dark red to purple, rainbow, so dark red, orange, yellow, all the way back down to purple. Purple are the highest performing posts.” 

And yes, they’re grading themselves —not the dogs— based on the post’s packaging and the story behind the photo. “This is grading our packaging and storytelling of the dogs. The dogs are still very good. Don’t worry about this.” 

One especially fun (and wildly accurate) step is the “confidence review,” where staffers predict a post’s performance before it goes live. Basically, this process helps them determine which dogs are correctly rated—again, on that over-10/10 scale—and which stories will earn the most attention. Will the hopping husky or the cleverly disguised great Dane draw in more love from fans? “They guess how it’s going to do, and they get surprisingly good at this.” 

Identify who your community is and who are they not 

In the final stretch of his keynote, Nelson hammered home the importance of protecting the people who make your brand what it is. 

“That way, you can best support them and then moderate the heck out of that community so that they feel supported and they feel protected,” he said. 

WeRateDogs’ audience, he explained, is “a group of people that are empathetic, that are kind, and are shockingly optimistic.” 

“And when I think about all those qualities, who comes to mind? Myself,” he said. “I am a part of this community by design. I think that the amount that I’ve obsessed over it as I’ve built it, it’d be hard not to be.” 

And of course, it’s all about the dogs. 

“Our audience really is inspired by dogs, and they’ve seemingly embodied a lot of their favorite characteristics, which I think is just a beautiful connection that this community has.” 

Ultimately, Nelson makes one thing clear: Internet joy is a skill, and WeRateDogs has it down to a science. 

Just don’t call them puppers anymore. That era is over.