2023 Highlights and Insights | Impactful Animal Advocacy’s Year in Review
This post is a review of our work in 2023 under our previous name, Impactful Animal Advocacy, and our plans for 2024, outlining everything we did last year to connect and empower animal advocates, as well as reporting any outcomes we know of.
Why do we exist?
Started in 2023, Impactful Animal Advocacy has quickly grown to become one of the largest communities of highly engaged farmed animal advocates (that we know of). We work towards building a more coordinated and collaborative farmed animal advocacy movement through creating online spaces for advocates, enhancing knowledge sharing, and facilitating strategic connections for the movement.
What did we work on in 2023?
We created the Impactful Animal Advocacy Slack, which turned into our core program and within a year grew to 1,769 members in 2023, bringing professional animal advocates from around 80 different organizations as well as independent activists and students into one place.
We sent out a monthly newsletter filled with the latest updates, open positions, funding opportunities and upcoming events in the movement, and grew our subscriber base from around 372 to over 1,261 people, with on average 60% of people opening the newsletter and 25% clicking on at least one link.
We created a knowledge hub with resources for animal advocates, including a wiki about fundraising, a database of animal conferences, and an AI prompt library, receiving around 3,000 views in total.
We started to bring AI and animal advocacy closer together, providing AI training to several individuals and organizations, first ourselves, later in collaboration with NFPs.AI, as well as launching the AI For Animal coalition, which has monthly meetings and around 60 members.
We attended six animal advocacy conferences, including the Animal & Vegan Advocacy (AVA) Summit and Asia Farm Animal Day (AFAD), and two effective altruism conferences, hosting three networking sessions and one AI workshop. On the IAA Slack, we hosted multiple online events in collaboration with other animal advocacy organizations.
We launched a global peer-to-peer mentoring program for advocates in collaboration with Culture Canopy.
We leveraged our personal network in the animal advocacy movement to connect more than 120 advocates with each other based on shared interests or needs.
We took over moderating the Effective Animal Advocacy Facebook group, however, we haven’t dedicated much time and effort to it due to competing priorities.
What are the results of our work?
At the start of this year, we administered a community survey to all our members, and received 135 responses. According to these, as a result of our programs, 104 members (77%) made a valuable connection, 93 (69%) gained knowledge and 19 (14%) adopted an AI or online tool that (self-reportedly) made them more effective in their animal advocacy work, 12 (9%) started a new job, 5 (4%) started a new project or initiative, 5 (4%) started a volunteer or training position, and 3 (2%) received funding. The community survey also suggests that respondents made 469 valuable connections in total, or around 3.5 connections on average.
The majority of respondents indicated that they feel more informed about what is going on in the animal advocacy movement (86%) as well as feel more connected to the movement (82%).
Slack is the largest contributor to the above results (partly given that it has the most users), followed by the connections we personally facilitated. By contrast, the Effective Animal Advocacy group and the AI training have brought only modest benefits to users, at least as far as we know.
Throughout the year, we collected anecdotal “impact stories” from people who benefited from our programs, as well as 46 public testimonials, which you can view here. Some of our most prominent “impact stories” from last year include:
Nicoll Peracha at The Mission Motor, a charity providing training and coaching on monitoring and evaluation to animal advocacy organizations, found her co-founder Blake Hannagan after posting the job ad on the IAA Slack. They now host monthly M&E office hours and talks via IAA.
After meeting Cynthia Schuck from the Welfare Footprint Project at EAG Boston 2023, we collaborated on an online workshop about the project, which then led to setting up a dedicated IAA Slack channel as well as a monthly meeting series aimed at discussing and spreading their work. The meeting series currently has around 60 registered attendees.
Kevin Xia, board member of EA Austria, was inspired to start an Effective Animal Advocacy group in Austria and received help designing a survey project, asking over 400 vegans in German-speaking countries about their views on impactful animal advocacy. [Yes, that was me! :)]
A common piece of negative feedback was that the Slack and newsletter sometimes make people feel overwhelmed and afraid of missing out.
What conclusions do we draw from these results?
Overall, we are very content with what we managed to achieve as a new organization in 2023, considering our very limited resources (in total, we had 1.8 FTE over 6 team members and spent $52,000 in 2023).
Our most promising program seems to be Slack, so building on and further improving it will be our main focus for 2024.
Our newsletter and the knowledge hub are probably worth continuing because they take relatively little time for the outcomes that they produce. We are less certain about the online and offline events because we don’t have enough data yet.
We think that the Facebook group is likely to be less promising, so we will be making a decision about whether to continue it going forward soon.
For a deeper dive into our journey and achievements this year, check out the full 2023 report here.
