Welcome to the EA forum and the EA world! And thank you for considering giving to effective charities. And no less importantly, thank you for being transparent about your donation decision reasoning, it is really admirable.
I weak upvoted your post and voted disagree (X), and I am going to explain why I disagree, and I hope I am communicating in an inviting and constructive way.
My biggest gripe with corporate outreach is that the animal charities only play a small role in companies reducing animal suffering. You see, in order for a company to make a pledge to transition to, say, cage-free hens, you first want the company to want to do so. That requires will from the investors, consumers, and industry peers. The amount of influence that the charities can have on the will is pretty small.
I think your impression is quite far from the truth at least when it comes to the cage-free egg movement. A short summary is that the whole global trend of cage-free shift/pledges is virtually entirely due to the work of animal charities and advocates. The short explanation of how they did so was that they used the combination of friendly outreach (called the “good cop strategy”) and threatening actions (called the “bad cop strategy”) to both try to lure companies to pledge, and when they don’t do so, use threatening actions to incur costs to companies that don’t pledge. Too much details about the bad cop actions is both hard to read, and might incur some strategic risks so I won’t go into them here. But the short story is that bad cop strategies do increase at least the perceived costs (by their public relations departments or top management), sometimes actual costs, of companies.
Also, in case you wonder, good cop strategies are there for a reason too. First, “giving someone a chance” before threatening actions is likely seen as a more civilsed strategy. Second, you might be surprised how many companies would just pldege after the friendly outrech. (a true story: the sourcing manager of a mid-sized company were themselves shocked by how horrific the battery cages of their egg suppliers were, and tried to convince their company to pledge, and they did)
you first want the company to want to do so
So you are right that for a change to happen, we need the companies to want to do so, but animal charities don’t just aim at companies that already want to change, or wait for companies to suddenly want to do so. They first try to be friendly, if it doesn’t work, they try to force something out.
THL estimates that their global corporate accountability work spared more than 3.4 million hens from cages in 2024
2022 revenue: $17,807,227
This gives us a ballpark estimate of $5 per hen spared from a cage. But given the fact that they only play a small part in this kind of progress happening, let’s say 10%, the ballpark estimate becomes $50. Not so great.
Let’s set aside the issue that the year don’t match. I think first, it’s wrong to take the whole revenue (or expense for that matter) as a divider as THL also spend their money on other programs, such as regranting, movement building, education etc.
But more importantly, if you want to apply a 0.1 discount multiplier to their impact per dollar, you are essentially applying it to their claimed number of hens spared. But your reason for doing so was that you believe only ~10% of this change was actually due to THL. But it seems to me in their language they are trying to state the impact due to their work. So even if you believe that charities like THL played a small part in the corporate decisions to go cage free (which I disagree), you don’t need to discount if they are only reporting impact that they believe to have been caused by their work. So is your reason for discounting stemming from a belief that they (gravely) over-reported their impact?
I do think some companies are acting based on being more aligned such as high-end brands like Waitrose in the UK. Even in these cases, it can be a kind of getting things over the line scenario, where talking to them is the small nudge that results in counterfactual changes.
But as FAI mentions the cost of “bad cop” actions to companies seems significant. If you’re looking for RCT-level evidence of this unfortunately we don’t have it. This mostly looks at case studies, broadly how companies value their reputations and how comparable corporate scandals affect market evaluation and performance. I’d be interested to see this replicated specifically for cage-free. Taking historic or upcoming campaigns by working with groups for intel and tracking their effect on companies.
Welcome to the EA forum and the EA world! And thank you for considering giving to effective charities. And no less importantly, thank you for being transparent about your donation decision reasoning, it is really admirable.
I weak upvoted your post and voted disagree (X), and I am going to explain why I disagree, and I hope I am communicating in an inviting and constructive way.
I think your impression is quite far from the truth at least when it comes to the cage-free egg movement. A short summary is that the whole global trend of cage-free shift/pledges is virtually entirely due to the work of animal charities and advocates. The short explanation of how they did so was that they used the combination of friendly outreach (called the “good cop strategy”) and threatening actions (called the “bad cop strategy”) to both try to lure companies to pledge, and when they don’t do so, use threatening actions to incur costs to companies that don’t pledge. Too much details about the bad cop actions is both hard to read, and might incur some strategic risks so I won’t go into them here. But the short story is that bad cop strategies do increase at least the perceived costs (by their public relations departments or top management), sometimes actual costs, of companies.
Also, in case you wonder, good cop strategies are there for a reason too. First, “giving someone a chance” before threatening actions is likely seen as a more civilsed strategy. Second, you might be surprised how many companies would just pldege after the friendly outrech. (a true story: the sourcing manager of a mid-sized company were themselves shocked by how horrific the battery cages of their egg suppliers were, and tried to convince their company to pledge, and they did)
So you are right that for a change to happen, we need the companies to want to do so, but animal charities don’t just aim at companies that already want to change, or wait for companies to suddenly want to do so. They first try to be friendly, if it doesn’t work, they try to force something out.
I think you are heavily underestimating the impact of effective animal charities. Estimates of the effectiveness of cage-free egg campaigns are typically like “38 to 250 hens spared per dollar” or “Corporate campaigns affect 9 to 120 years of chicken life per dollar” (instead of $per hen spared). But let’s set even that aside, I wonder if you can share a bit more about your reasoning here.
Let’s set aside the issue that the year don’t match. I think first, it’s wrong to take the whole revenue (or expense for that matter) as a divider as THL also spend their money on other programs, such as regranting, movement building, education etc.
But more importantly, if you want to apply a 0.1 discount multiplier to their impact per dollar, you are essentially applying it to their claimed number of hens spared. But your reason for doing so was that you believe only ~10% of this change was actually due to THL. But it seems to me in their language they are trying to state the impact due to their work. So even if you believe that charities like THL played a small part in the corporate decisions to go cage free (which I disagree), you don’t need to discount if they are only reporting impact that they believe to have been caused by their work. So is your reason for discounting stemming from a belief that they (gravely) over-reported their impact?
Re-the impact of groups on corporations. I wrote a piece on this here.
I do think some companies are acting based on being more aligned such as high-end brands like Waitrose in the UK. Even in these cases, it can be a kind of getting things over the line scenario, where talking to them is the small nudge that results in counterfactual changes.
But as FAI mentions the cost of “bad cop” actions to companies seems significant. If you’re looking for RCT-level evidence of this unfortunately we don’t have it. This mostly looks at case studies, broadly how companies value their reputations and how comparable corporate scandals affect market evaluation and performance. I’d be interested to see this replicated specifically for cage-free. Taking historic or upcoming campaigns by working with groups for intel and tracking their effect on companies.
I think attribution is broadly a fair concern though and could affect many interventions outside of anything you are directly paying for e.g. any lobbying-based interventions would have the same concern regardless of cause area.