Also our thousands of donors over the past 12 months. Many of them email us expressing that our compassion calculator is exactly what they’re been looking for and/or that they’ve been put off by other animal advocates in the past and find our website refreshing.
What has your approach been over the past 12 months? Has it been consistently hostile towards veganism?
My assumption is that you’ve previously been targeting people who (1) care about animals and (2) are probably somewhat sympathetic towards the goals of veganism, (3) but want an easier option to help animals than becoming vegan.
This seems like a very promising approach, and I can imagine most of my friends and family falling into this category. Maybe I’m mistaken, but I’ve not otherwise percevied your approach (before this latest campaign) to be overtly hostile towards veganism.
This feels like a really important point to me that hasn’t been addressed yet, so I’m really curious how the FK team is squaring it now and how they thought about it as they planned for this.
I, even as a vegan, find Farmkind’s homepage and core message refreshing, too! The arguments for recruiting compassionate people who aren’t going to go vegan any time soon are plentiful and very exciting to me. But these arguments need to reach pretty far (with the provided research doing little to support that reach) to justify a need for overt hostility—a hostility which mostly serves to be confusing to anyone who isn’t thinking in earnest already about tradeoffs for farmed animals (almost everyone).
FK has made the argument repeatedly that they couldn’t have expected media coverage from these outlets if they weren’t hostile to vegans. I think that’s plausible. But it begs the question: Why go after these outlets in the first place? These outlets not historically having productive conversations about vegans and factory farming as FK says at the end isn’t a strong reason on its own to go after those outlets. In my opinion it’s probably the opposite. These outlets don’t have good conversations about factory farming—and in my opinion continue not to do so in the Forget Veganuary coverage—because that is not what their audience wants to read about. FK has posited that these audiences like to engage with hating on vegans. I agree and think that’s reflected in the not exciting result FK saw in reaching them.
Even in the best of circumstances with very friendly journalists, your press can be framed in unintended ways. Matching this lede, this spokesperson, and these outlets was nowhere near the best of circumstances and I think can only have been expected to be warped by the time it showed up in front of their audiences. It even seems to have been confusing to the journalists that got to hear the full story directly from Farmkind, given that Thom said in the David Ramms interview they didn’t intend for this to be picked up as a “meat eating campaign” in the way it was. So to expect your (frankly very nuanced and sort of arcane to your average conservative) message to be received as intended seems hopeful at best.
If what FK has been doing has been working—seeing significant success in friendlier environments like Dwarkesh’s podcast (really a great example of the right audience fit to their message—people who are opting in to think analytically about a topic and actively seek out discussions about interesting tradeoffs. This was badass and I probably talked too much about how exciting it was to me when it happened), it seems like doubling down on that strategy would have made a lot of sense. A lot of my friends and family would fall into this category of audience as well, @Matt_Sharp.
I’m curious why they felt there was a need to deviate from what was working exceptionally well, especially to do something like take a wild shot at dominos falling into place to get a presence in a (much more hostile) media environment like Piers Morgan. How likely did they think it was that that would work out as expected? What would they have considered a success if it ended up falling short of that? I think even rough answers to these will be really helpful for people across the movement trying to learn from this and win some points for transparency and strategic thinking for FK as well.
The series of dominos they hoped would fall has many points of failure, all of which are made more dangerous by the kind of coordination that results in missed emails and websites that need to be edited shortly after launch. These sorts of misses happen all the time, especially when people are trying to move quickly under pressure of working with journalists. But that should really heavily discount your estimated upside!
The case for taking this wild shot being worth the expected costs (even those estimated by FK as lower than they were) isn’t made strongly by this post. It’s more of a qualitative story about what might have happened if all went to plan that by description alone should be considered worth the risks.
In the various places FK has faced criticism for the campaign, their responses suggest that this was seen internally as the only viable route to try. But even aside from FK’s own success with a different approach on Dwarkesh, there are other options for high-impact media experiments that give non-vegans options to help animals.
Off the dome, a February Farmkind campaign (that wouldn’t distract from Veganuary’s January work or compete for coverage) targeted at those that tried and failed at Veganuary—or even just plan to go back to eating animal products afterward—with some angle like “Turn a new leaf without the kale: Here’s how Veganuary dropouts are helping animals” could be interesting. Instead of competitive eaters (this was truly goofy to me and seemed to be a caricature of how the omnivores think about eating animal products; the most relatable person to a normal omnivore is a normal omnivore, not “Gary Eats 48 Sandwiches on a Normal Tuesday”) your spokespeople could be lifestyle influencers who gave Veganuary a go. The large swath of people that would identify with struggling with veganism/Veganuary already has demonstrated an interest and some level of motivation to seek the benefits of forgoing animal products, so they’re closer to donating than your “I eat twice as much meat to own vegans” conservative.
I could see something like this being very on-beat for more progressive outlets (it’s lifestyle-focused, socially-positive, lends itself to the kind of self-deprecating self help people aged 25-44 like). An approach that works outward from Farmkind’s core message rather than backward from the media opportunity wouldn’t necessitate the hostility that has caused so many problems, simply didn’t feel coherent with the Farmkind brand, and was so unaligned with the organization’s place in a broader movement that they needed to shut the campaign down midway through. It would be more strategically focused, intuitive, and easy for Farmkind to stick to in talking points—all things that would have helped with both reach and impact. Even something like this, though, I’d hope would be undertaken with more Veganuary team input than Forget Veganuary was.
I am very curious what other angles FK has tried that haven’t worked, too. There are less newsworthy organizations than Farmkind that get press in less controversial ways. Timing is often the key consideration for newsworthiness, not just controversy (unless you’ve locked yourself into going after tabloids). So doing something related to Veganuary was a great idea. But I think it takes a lot of assumptions to conclude this was the highest-value way of doing it.
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.
But it cost $18,098 to reach this audience, the key question isn’t whether they can reach them, it’s whether the campaign is likely to create a net new impact for animals.
Why it was likely a loss, even if we take their most generous estimates, is because their calculations don’t appear to account for
(a) donations displaced as a result of this campaign (I think we’ve all seen/heard people publicly and privately saying they’ve withdrawn donations to them)
(b) time and resources diverted across the movement by the conflict they’ve generated, or
(c) what they likely would have raised anyway without targeting Veganuary based on their other campaigns.
If the goal is donations for farmed animals, why choose a strategy that predictably creates backlash and movement conflict while also targeting the ‘highest-hanging fruit’. From an expected value perspective, it’s hard to see why this dominates lower-friction alternative.
Meh. Not really, no. They didn’t ask donors if they were compelled by their forget Veganuary campaign, which strikes me as a very sloppy omission when testing a risky approach. Really, they should have been even more granular than that, such as asking donors if they are donating to stick it to vegans—I’d be inclined to believe that those types of donors will never donate again, because they’re animated by a media fervor about wimpy vegans, not by compassion for farmed animals. The high end of that estimate range is definitely not reasonable. But anyways, obviously some cohort exists anywhere you look, but my point is that this is not a significant target audience—FK argue that most people aren’t vegan and aren’t headed in that direction, but even fewer people are omnivorous offsetters, and even fewer are moving in that direction. Also, that someone was compelled to donate by this campaign doesn’t imply that they wouldn’t have done so without its anti-vegan elements, nor that their attitude to veganism is so intensely negative that there’s no harm in representing the movement to them as ineffective, annoying, and worthy of dismissal.
Is this not some evidence that the target audience exists?
Also our thousands of donors over the past 12 months. Many of them email us expressing that our compassion calculator is exactly what they’re been looking for and/or that they’ve been put off by other animal advocates in the past and find our website refreshing.
What has your approach been over the past 12 months? Has it been consistently hostile towards veganism?
My assumption is that you’ve previously been targeting people who (1) care about animals and (2) are probably somewhat sympathetic towards the goals of veganism, (3) but want an easier option to help animals than becoming vegan.
This seems like a very promising approach, and I can imagine most of my friends and family falling into this category. Maybe I’m mistaken, but I’ve not otherwise percevied your approach (before this latest campaign) to be overtly hostile towards veganism.
This feels like a really important point to me that hasn’t been addressed yet, so I’m really curious how the FK team is squaring it now and how they thought about it as they planned for this.
I, even as a vegan, find Farmkind’s homepage and core message refreshing, too! The arguments for recruiting compassionate people who aren’t going to go vegan any time soon are plentiful and very exciting to me. But these arguments need to reach pretty far (with the provided research doing little to support that reach) to justify a need for overt hostility—a hostility which mostly serves to be confusing to anyone who isn’t thinking in earnest already about tradeoffs for farmed animals (almost everyone).
FK has made the argument repeatedly that they couldn’t have expected media coverage from these outlets if they weren’t hostile to vegans. I think that’s plausible. But it begs the question: Why go after these outlets in the first place? These outlets not historically having productive conversations about vegans and factory farming as FK says at the end isn’t a strong reason on its own to go after those outlets. In my opinion it’s probably the opposite. These outlets don’t have good conversations about factory farming—and in my opinion continue not to do so in the Forget Veganuary coverage—because that is not what their audience wants to read about. FK has posited that these audiences like to engage with hating on vegans. I agree and think that’s reflected in the not exciting result FK saw in reaching them.
Even in the best of circumstances with very friendly journalists, your press can be framed in unintended ways. Matching this lede, this spokesperson, and these outlets was nowhere near the best of circumstances and I think can only have been expected to be warped by the time it showed up in front of their audiences. It even seems to have been confusing to the journalists that got to hear the full story directly from Farmkind, given that Thom said in the David Ramms interview they didn’t intend for this to be picked up as a “meat eating campaign” in the way it was. So to expect your (frankly very nuanced and sort of arcane to your average conservative) message to be received as intended seems hopeful at best.
If what FK has been doing has been working—seeing significant success in friendlier environments like Dwarkesh’s podcast (really a great example of the right audience fit to their message—people who are opting in to think analytically about a topic and actively seek out discussions about interesting tradeoffs. This was badass and I probably talked too much about how exciting it was to me when it happened), it seems like doubling down on that strategy would have made a lot of sense. A lot of my friends and family would fall into this category of audience as well, @Matt_Sharp.
I’m curious why they felt there was a need to deviate from what was working exceptionally well, especially to do something like take a wild shot at dominos falling into place to get a presence in a (much more hostile) media environment like Piers Morgan. How likely did they think it was that that would work out as expected? What would they have considered a success if it ended up falling short of that? I think even rough answers to these will be really helpful for people across the movement trying to learn from this and win some points for transparency and strategic thinking for FK as well.
The series of dominos they hoped would fall has many points of failure, all of which are made more dangerous by the kind of coordination that results in missed emails and websites that need to be edited shortly after launch. These sorts of misses happen all the time, especially when people are trying to move quickly under pressure of working with journalists. But that should really heavily discount your estimated upside!
The case for taking this wild shot being worth the expected costs (even those estimated by FK as lower than they were) isn’t made strongly by this post. It’s more of a qualitative story about what might have happened if all went to plan that by description alone should be considered worth the risks.
In the various places FK has faced criticism for the campaign, their responses suggest that this was seen internally as the only viable route to try. But even aside from FK’s own success with a different approach on Dwarkesh, there are other options for high-impact media experiments that give non-vegans options to help animals.
Off the dome, a February Farmkind campaign (that wouldn’t distract from Veganuary’s January work or compete for coverage) targeted at those that tried and failed at Veganuary—or even just plan to go back to eating animal products afterward—with some angle like “Turn a new leaf without the kale: Here’s how Veganuary dropouts are helping animals” could be interesting. Instead of competitive eaters (this was truly goofy to me and seemed to be a caricature of how the omnivores think about eating animal products; the most relatable person to a normal omnivore is a normal omnivore, not “Gary Eats 48 Sandwiches on a Normal Tuesday”) your spokespeople could be lifestyle influencers who gave Veganuary a go. The large swath of people that would identify with struggling with veganism/Veganuary already has demonstrated an interest and some level of motivation to seek the benefits of forgoing animal products, so they’re closer to donating than your “I eat twice as much meat to own vegans” conservative.
I could see something like this being very on-beat for more progressive outlets (it’s lifestyle-focused, socially-positive, lends itself to the kind of self-deprecating self help people aged 25-44 like). An approach that works outward from Farmkind’s core message rather than backward from the media opportunity wouldn’t necessitate the hostility that has caused so many problems, simply didn’t feel coherent with the Farmkind brand, and was so unaligned with the organization’s place in a broader movement that they needed to shut the campaign down midway through. It would be more strategically focused, intuitive, and easy for Farmkind to stick to in talking points—all things that would have helped with both reach and impact. Even something like this, though, I’d hope would be undertaken with more Veganuary team input than Forget Veganuary was.
I am very curious what other angles FK has tried that haven’t worked, too. There are less newsworthy organizations than Farmkind that get press in less controversial ways. Timing is often the key consideration for newsworthiness, not just controversy (unless you’ve locked yourself into going after tabloids). So doing something related to Veganuary was a great idea. But I think it takes a lot of assumptions to conclude this was the highest-value way of doing it.
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.
But it cost $18,098 to reach this audience, the key question isn’t whether they can reach them, it’s whether the campaign is likely to create a net new impact for animals.
Why it was likely a loss, even if we take their most generous estimates, is because their calculations don’t appear to account for
(a) donations displaced as a result of this campaign (I think we’ve all seen/heard people publicly and privately saying they’ve withdrawn donations to them)
(b) time and resources diverted across the movement by the conflict they’ve generated, or
(c) what they likely would have raised anyway without targeting Veganuary based on their other campaigns.
If the goal is donations for farmed animals, why choose a strategy that predictably creates backlash and movement conflict while also targeting the ‘highest-hanging fruit’. From an expected value perspective, it’s hard to see why this dominates lower-friction alternative.
Meh. Not really, no. They didn’t ask donors if they were compelled by their forget Veganuary campaign, which strikes me as a very sloppy omission when testing a risky approach. Really, they should have been even more granular than that, such as asking donors if they are donating to stick it to vegans—I’d be inclined to believe that those types of donors will never donate again, because they’re animated by a media fervor about wimpy vegans, not by compassion for farmed animals. The high end of that estimate range is definitely not reasonable. But anyways, obviously some cohort exists anywhere you look, but my point is that this is not a significant target audience—FK argue that most people aren’t vegan and aren’t headed in that direction, but even fewer people are omnivorous offsetters, and even fewer are moving in that direction. Also, that someone was compelled to donate by this campaign doesn’t imply that they wouldn’t have done so without its anti-vegan elements, nor that their attitude to veganism is so intensely negative that there’s no harm in representing the movement to them as ineffective, annoying, and worthy of dismissal.