Fan mail from the people you resonated with (over the last twelve months, 94% of which predates this radical shift) does not go to show that your messaging strategy does more good than harm. You could gather donations and glowing emails from donors inspired by your groundbreaking #DonateToAnimalsToAccelerateTheReturnOfChrist campaign, but dealing reputational damage to the animal welfare movement has a cost that your figures don’t show.
This post says that veganism is good, and other approaches to improving animal welfare are also good. So, together, these facts would not support deriding veganism to the public. A study showing that insulting veganism primes meat-eaters to be more pliable to pro-animal arguments and take pro-animal action would be evidence for the strategy of dissing veganism—but you don’t have that. All you have is studies showing that meat eaters listen to meat eaters more than vegans. That would support a “Hey, you don’t have to go vegan to help animals—I eat meat and I donate to offset” message. Tacking on “and vegans can suck it” just weakens the vegan movement and has no evidence to justify it; you might has well have taken it further (maybe a minigame where you slap an annoying vegan activist?) or gone lighter (“vegans are sweet, but man, sometimes I wish they’d be more understanding!”) with no empirical basis to guide the message’s intensity or to support the theory behind it at all.
I’d add that Historically most funding for animal rights has come from non vegans. Indeed most campaigning has too.
The funding element is probably still true today of the U.K. grassroots. Most legacy organisations in the U.K. like The League Against Cruel Sports, Animal Aid, CIWF, NAVS, maybe Peta are primarily still funded by non vegans. Indeed many of those orgs have a strategic comms dilemma not to alienate those ‘rights’ donors with the vegan message.
We ourselves raised £30k seed funding for our org from someone who owned a dairy farm. He was looking for an org with a bold, abolitionist strategy. I liberation pledged our lunch together and rather than pushback got an acknowledgment of the congruence of the pledge. So we don’t need to water down the message even, but be judicious and skilful.
Again, The Daily Mail has run plenty of pro Vegan and pro animal press over the years, as well as plenty of reactionary stuff. Indeed they ran a positive double page spread in the early days of Animal Rebellion—I was floored by both the quality and length of the article. Again, the previous day they’d run an almost equally long scaremongering article. But they are available to us.
It’s true that we won’t win animal liberation with only the people resource of today. Like all movements the vanguard has to engage the moveable middle and work across the spectrum of allies. Animal eating people care about animals too, as all those grassroots activists of the 1960-2000s demonstrate. Out there on cold wet winter days protesting fox hunting, vivisection and live export whilst eating bacon sandwiches.
There’s a large literature on how to engage across the spectrum, with the Freedom to Marry and Together for Yes campaigns both being particularly good recent exemplars. You can tap into people’s shared aspirational values to foster alignment and support without succumbing to an undermining or adversarial message and set of values.
Let’s inform ourselves by that body of knowledge to both fundraise and campaign in an effective manner rather than ignore more than a century of social movement thinking.
So yes, I’d agree, there’s certainly better informed, less risky, more holistically congruent and effective comms strategies available to us.
We ourselves raised £30k seed funding for our org from someone who owned a dairy farm. He was looking for an org with a bold, abolitionist strategy.
I read that as saying that this dairy farm owner wanted to support a campaign to abolish use of animals by humans—is that right? Surprising if so! I wonder how they square that with owning the farm.
Fan mail from the people you resonated with (over the last twelve months, 94% of which predates this radical shift) does not go to show that your messaging strategy does more good than harm. You could gather donations and glowing emails from donors inspired by your groundbreaking #DonateToAnimalsToAccelerateTheReturnOfChrist campaign, but dealing reputational damage to the animal welfare movement has a cost that your figures don’t show.
This post says that veganism is good, and other approaches to improving animal welfare are also good. So, together, these facts would not support deriding veganism to the public. A study showing that insulting veganism primes meat-eaters to be more pliable to pro-animal arguments and take pro-animal action would be evidence for the strategy of dissing veganism—but you don’t have that. All you have is studies showing that meat eaters listen to meat eaters more than vegans. That would support a “Hey, you don’t have to go vegan to help animals—I eat meat and I donate to offset” message. Tacking on “and vegans can suck it” just weakens the vegan movement and has no evidence to justify it; you might has well have taken it further (maybe a minigame where you slap an annoying vegan activist?) or gone lighter (“vegans are sweet, but man, sometimes I wish they’d be more understanding!”) with no empirical basis to guide the message’s intensity or to support the theory behind it at all.
I’d add that Historically most funding for animal rights has come from non vegans. Indeed most campaigning has too.
The funding element is probably still true today of the U.K. grassroots. Most legacy organisations in the U.K. like The League Against Cruel Sports, Animal Aid, CIWF, NAVS, maybe Peta are primarily still funded by non vegans. Indeed many of those orgs have a strategic comms dilemma not to alienate those ‘rights’ donors with the vegan message.
We ourselves raised £30k seed funding for our org from someone who owned a dairy farm. He was looking for an org with a bold, abolitionist strategy. I liberation pledged our lunch together and rather than pushback got an acknowledgment of the congruence of the pledge. So we don’t need to water down the message even, but be judicious and skilful.
Again, The Daily Mail has run plenty of pro Vegan and pro animal press over the years, as well as plenty of reactionary stuff. Indeed they ran a positive double page spread in the early days of Animal Rebellion—I was floored by both the quality and length of the article. Again, the previous day they’d run an almost equally long scaremongering article. But they are available to us.
It’s true that we won’t win animal liberation with only the people resource of today. Like all movements the vanguard has to engage the moveable middle and work across the spectrum of allies. Animal eating people care about animals too, as all those grassroots activists of the 1960-2000s demonstrate. Out there on cold wet winter days protesting fox hunting, vivisection and live export whilst eating bacon sandwiches.
There’s a large literature on how to engage across the spectrum, with the Freedom to Marry and Together for Yes campaigns both being particularly good recent exemplars. You can tap into people’s shared aspirational values to foster alignment and support without succumbing to an undermining or adversarial message and set of values.
Let’s inform ourselves by that body of knowledge to both fundraise and campaign in an effective manner rather than ignore more than a century of social movement thinking.
So yes, I’d agree, there’s certainly better informed, less risky, more holistically congruent and effective comms strategies available to us.
I read that as saying that this dairy farm owner wanted to support a campaign to abolish use of animals by humans—is that right? Surprising if so! I wonder how they square that with owning the farm.