See how American Service Pets used Walls.io to create an interactive memorial where pet parents can honor the animals who changed their lives, share their grief, and find connection through remembrance.
American Service Pets helps connect individuals with licensed healthcare professionals who evaluate whether an emotional support animal may be appropriate for their needs. Through this work, the company regularly hears stories that reveal how profoundly animals shape and support people’s lives.
Those relationships do not end when an animal passes away. For many pet parents, the loss means saying goodbye to a family member, a constant companion, and an important source of emotional support.
To recognize those bonds and create a meaningful resource for grieving pet parents, American Service Pets launched the Rainbow Bridge ESA Memorial Community using Walls.io.
The interactive memorial wall gives people a dedicated place to share a photograph, write a tribute, and celebrate the life of an animal they have lost. Since launching in late July 2026, the wall has collected nearly 200 tributes, each telling a different story of companionship, comfort, and unconditional love.
“We wanted to create more than a one-day campaign. We wanted to give people a lasting place where their animals could be remembered and where pet parents could see that they were not alone in their grief.”
Overview
Here’s the TL;DR:
Challenge: American Service Pets saw that grieving pet parents had no lasting place to honor the animals who supported them. The team was looking for more than a one-day campaign and wanted to build an ongoing space for remembrance and connection.
Solution: American Service Pets launched the Rainbow Bridge ESA Memorial Community, an interactive memorial wall built with Walls.io and embedded on its website. Pet parents submit a photo and personal tribute and submissions are moderated before displaying on the wall. Using the Walls.io QR code, Zapier, and Klaviyo they’ve created a unique solution that also handles follow-up communication with each contributor.
Main Walls.io features used: QR code direct posts, website embed, moderation, reactions
Results: Walls.io helped collect nearly 200 tributes in under two months, with submissions continuing after the launch campaign. Attributable revenue covered the annual Walls.io subscription within the first weeks.
Creating a Place for Remembrance
The Rainbow Bridge ESA Memorial Community was inspired by the stories American Service Pets receives from people whose animals have helped them through anxiety, PTSD, trauma, bereavement, illness, and other difficult periods of life.
Some contributors describe their animals as emotional support animals, while others simply recall how their pets instinctively comforted them when they were struggling. Across the tributes, the same themes appear repeatedly: enduring grief, gratitude, mutual healing, and the belief that these animals were not “just pets,” but family members, best friends, and sources of strength. You can see this sentiment mapped out in the word cloud of the most frequently captured words on the wall:
American Service Pets wanted to create a digital experience that could hold those individual stories while allowing visitors to experience them as part of a larger community.
Walls.io provided the visual and technical foundation for that experience.
Analytics
- 191 direct posts collected to the wall
- 882 reactions, proving high engagement among viewers
- 2.7k visits to the wall
The Interview
What inspired American Service Pets to create the Rainbow Bridge ESA Memorial Community?
The idea grew from a deeply personal loss. In June 2026, American Service Pets’ Director of Marketing, Kaci Schack, lost Addie, her beloved “soul cat.” Experiencing that grief firsthand reinforced how profound the bond between a person and an animal can be, especially when that animal has been a constant source of comfort and emotional support.
Kaci’s experience became the emotional foundation for the Rainbow Bridge ESA Memorial Community. We wanted to create the kind of space that grieving pet parents need: a compassionate place to talk about that relationship, preserve the memories that made their animal special, and connect with people who understand the depth of the loss. The goal was not simply to acknowledge pet loss for one day. It was to build an ongoing community where people could share openly, remember their animals as individuals, and find comfort in the stories of others.
“Losing Addie showed me how deeply pet grief can affect every part of your life. We created the Rainbow Bridge ESA Memorial Community so people would have a lasting place to honor that bond and feel less alone in their loss.”
Why did you choose Walls.io for the project?
We needed a platform that could turn individual submissions into a unified visual experience. Each tribute needed room for both an image and a personal story, but the complete collection also needed to feel welcoming, easy to explore, and connected.
Walls.io allowed us to create that experience without building a custom memorial platform from the ground up. We could embed the wall directly into our website, moderate submissions before they appeared, and present stories in a format that gave every animal and every contributor meaningful space.
The platform also gave us the flexibility to create something that could remain active beyond the original campaign and continue growing over time.
How did people submit their tributes?
We created a dedicated landing page that introduced the memorial community and invited pet parents to share a photograph and story about an animal they had lost. After submitting, contributors could see their tributes become part of the larger memorial wall.
Behind the scenes, we connected Walls.io with Zapier and Klaviyo. The integration allowed us to acknowledge submissions and provide follow-up communication tailored to the contributor’s existing relationship with American Service Pets.
This combination gave participants a simple submission experience while allowing our team to manage the community and its communications efficiently.
How did you promote the memorial community?
The wall launched in late July 2026, with its first concentrated promotion centered on Rainbow Bridge Remembrance Day on August 28.
We introduced the community through email, organic social media, a Facebook event, and a press release. We also established a dedicated Facebook group where people could continue discussing pet loss, remembrance, and the lasting impact of their animals.
Although the promotional campaign helped introduce the wall, we intentionally designed it as an evergreen resource. We continue directing bereaved pet parents to the community and sharing selected stories throughout our content.
How did your community respond?
In less than two months, the wall received nearly 200 tributes, and submissions continued after the primary Rainbow Bridge Remembrance Day promotion had ended.
People wrote about animals who stayed beside them during panic attacks, recognized when their anxiety or PTSD was becoming overwhelming, helped them through grief and illness, or simply brought stability and joy to everyday life.
One contributor remembered her animal as “the light that dragged me away from the darkness.” Another wrote, “It was my greatest honor loving you your whole life, but now we will spend the rest of mine missing you.”
The stories were often heartbreaking, but they were also filled with gratitude. People remembered favorite toys, car rides, greetings, routines, and personality quirks. Those details made the wall feel less like a collection of generalized memorials and more like a celebration of individual lives.
What did Walls.io make possible that would have been difficult otherwise?
Walls.io allowed us to bring many distinct stories together without losing the individuality of each one. Visitors can move through the wall and encounter different animals, relationships, and experiences, while still recognizing the shared emotions connecting every tribute.
It also made the initiative sustainable from an operational perspective. The embedded wall, submission process, moderation capabilities, and integrations gave us a repeatable system that can continue supporting the community without requiring a custom-built platform.
The campaign also generated measurable organizational value. Within the first weeks, attributable revenue covered the annual cost of the Walls.io subscription. That helped demonstrate that a purpose-led community initiative could provide a meaningful public resource while also being sustainable for the organization maintaining it.
Was there a response that particularly affirmed the project’s purpose?
Deborah Barnes, the founder of Rainbow Bridge Remembrance Day, learned about the initiative and described it as “an important support service for those who have loved and lost a pet.”
That recognition was meaningful because it reflected exactly what we hoped to create: not simply a promotional campaign, but a supportive space for remembrance.
The strongest validation, however, has come from the contributors themselves. Their willingness to share vulnerable stories and introduce the community to animals who meant so much to them showed us that people wanted and needed a place like this.
An Ongoing Community, Not a One-Day Campaign
The Rainbow Bridge ESA Memorial Community remains open for new tributes and continues to grow. American Service Pets plans to keep sharing stories from the wall, introduce more grieving pet parents to the resource, and revisit the campaign around future remembrance observances.
The organization is also exploring additional ways to use Walls.io to invite participation, celebrate the human-animal bond, and create community around experiences that pet parents share.
By combining compassionate storytelling with an accessible interactive platform, American Service Pets and Walls.io created a permanent place for animals to be remembered, one photograph and one story at a time.