Pathways to Impact: An International Study of Advocates’ Strategies and Needs

A new report from Faunalytics surveyed nearly 200 animal advocacy organizations in 84 countries and six small focus-group discussions, exploring the diverse approaches taken by farmed animal protection groups globally, focusing on how and why organizations pursue different advocacy strategies.

https://faunalytics.org/pathways-to-impact-an-international-study-of-advocates-strategies-and-needs

Key Findings

Animal advocacy organizations pursue strategies across five major categories, each focusing on a different type of stakeholder. These are large-scale institutions (governments, large-scale food producers, retailers, etc.), local institutions (schools, restaurants, food producers, hospitals, etc.), individuals (through diet outreach or education), animals themselves (through direct work, such as sanctuaries), and other members of the advocacy movement (through movement support). Figure 2 in the full report provides more detail.
Most organizations (55%) pursue more than one approach, and most advocates (63%) are interested in exploring at least one approach that they’re not currently pursuing. Notably, most organizations conducting direct work with animals (66%) or individual advocacy (91%) would consider trying out at least one type of institutional approach.
Advocates are more open to considering policy advocacy than corporate advocacy, because it has fewer barriers to entry and less stigma. Some advocates have negative associations with corporate advocacy, as it may involve engaging with organizations strongly misaligned with their values. Corporate advocacy may also require a degree of professionalism and industry expertise that some forms of policy advocacy (e.g., petitions) do not.
Organizations that conduct corporate and policy work tend to be larger organizations that conduct multiple forms of advocacy. Organizations that focus on corporate and policy approaches are typically larger than those that focus on direct work and individual advocacy, which are sometimes volunteer-led. Larger organizations are also more likely to pursue multiple approaches simultaneously.
Working with local institutions provides advocacy organizations with a stepping stone from individual to institutional approaches. Local institutional approaches are often seen as a “sweet spot” for small advocacy organizations, offering a balance between scalability and tractability. These approaches are perceived as less resource-intensive than large-scale institutional approaches, and potentially offer an intermediate step for growing advocacy organizations who want to expand individual diet approaches to higher-leverage policy or corporate approaches, and are also compatible with more bottom-up theories of change.
Deciding on organizational approaches is not just an internal process. While an organization’s mission and available resources are key considerations, external influences, ranging from large international partners and funders to other grassroots community members, also play a key role in advocates’ decision-making process. Formal or informal research, including desk-based secondary research and primary/user research methods like message testing and stakeholder interviews, often informs this decision-making process.
Diverse global contexts restrict the viability of existing advocacy approaches in ways that foreign funders may not understand or anticipate. Local advocacy organizations may avoid certain advocacy approaches due to local political and cultural obstacles: for example, avoiding meat elimination messaging in favor of meat reduction or corporate advocacy in favor of political lobbying. Balancing the needs of the local context with the expectations of funders and parent organizations often limits the strategic choices of local advocates.
Advocacy organizations may be more willing and able to expand on their existing approaches rather than branching into entirely new approaches. Many advocates would prefer to scale up existing campaigns to cover additional geographies and species or adopt new media strategies to expand their existing individual messaging rather than adopt entirely new approaches.
Funding is always front of mind for advocates. Advocates indicate that funding is the most useful type of support, the most common barrier preventing organizations from expanding to more ambitious approaches, and the greatest challenge for current advocacy work. Complex, competitive grantmaking procedures can also be a hindrance that limits the ability of an organization to focus on its work, and concerns about the sustainability of funding may prevent organizations from expanding and diversifying their approaches.

Background

Animal advocacy organizations employ diverse strategies to support farmed animals that range from individual action all the way up to large-scale national interventions. Advocates may choose to promote vegan foods to their community, found an animal sanctuary, lobby their governments for strong welfare laws, or petition meat companies to give more space to animals in confinement.

This diversity in tactics creates a need for impact evaluation—while much of the advocacy research measures the effectiveness of various approaches or develops related theories of change, less attention has been paid to understanding why organizations prefer certain strategies, decide to adopt new ones, or stick to what they know.

Using a survey of over 190 animal advocacy organizations in 84 countries and six small focus-group discussions, this study aims to understand the diverse approaches taken by farmed animal protection groups globally, focusing on how and why organizations choose to pursue these advocacy strategies.

Research Team

The project’s lead author was Jack Stennett (Good Growth). Other contributors to the design, data collection, analysis, and writing were: Jah Ying Chung (Good Growth), Dr. Andrea Polanco (Faunalytics), and Ella Wong (Good Growth). Dr. Jo Anderson (Faunalytics) reviewed and oversaw the work.

Conclusion

This study explored the diverse approaches adopted by animal advocacy organizations, seeking to understand the strategies they employ, the reasons behind their choices, and the factors that facilitate or limit their ability to pursue alternative approaches. Our findings reveal an advocacy landscape where many organizations are not only implementing multiple strategies, but are also interested in exploring new approaches with potential for greater impact and lasting change for animals.

One consistent finding is that an organization’s capacity to explore or adopt new strategies is highly dependent on the availability of resources. Organizations frequently struggle with financial and staffing constraints that limit their operational and strategic scope. It is therefore not at all surprising that larger organizations, with fewer resource limitations, are more likely to pursue multiple approaches, especially large-scale institutional advocacy.

Many organizations from our study that transitioned into institutional approaches did so through a gradual process, starting from individual approaches or direct work with animals, progressing to local institutional approaches, and eventually reaching large-scale institutional approaches. This reinforces the role of local institutional advocacy as a potential stepping stone to large-scale institutional approaches, reinforcing a similar finding from a previous Faunalytics report. Nevertheless, the journey to expanding advocacy approaches is not uniform. Some younger and smaller organizations in our study seem to have “leapfrogged” straight into large-scale approaches with support from incubators or accelerators, suggesting alternative pathways to institutional impact. Further research into these processes, exploring possibilities for acceleration or alternative routes, holds significant potential for enhancing advocacy effectiveness.

Importantly, our study also finds that many advocates were more interested in expanding or improving upon their current approaches rather than fully transitioning to unrelated and entirely new approaches. These insights raise questions about organizational and movement strategies: Is it more beneficial to encourage organizations to diversify their approaches or to build on their existing methods? Would the animal advocacy movement benefit more from numerous specialized organizations or fewer but larger entities that engage in multiple strategies? How do these dynamics shift across different contexts?

While these questions fall beyond this study’s scope, they may be critical for informing future strategic decisions within the animal advocacy movement, and we hope this study has provided insights to support this ongoing discussion.

In the short term, there is a clear consensus among organizations that unlocking greater impact requires improvements in funding, staffing, and professional development. Additionally, we also discovered a strong demand for increased knowledge resources, both tacit and experiential (through networking and collaboration) and explicit (via access to research and data). While research organizations have a clear role to play in helping to fill explicit knowledge gaps, this report highlights that funders and advocates can also be instrumental to building and sharing knowledge by connecting organizations working on and interested in similar approaches.

Finally, our study finds that advocates’ perceptions of the most impactful or effective approaches may differ from funder perspectives, be affected by different values and theories of change, or by feasibility and tractability in a specific context. This highlights the need for more nuanced dialogue and understanding between advocates and funders. Funders might consider adopting more flexible criteria that better accommodate the diverse factors involved in organizations’ strategic decision-making, ensuring that their support aligns more closely with the actual needs and contexts of advocacy groups. Similarly, advocates should look to clearly articulate their strategic considerations and underlying theories of change, which could not only improve communication with funders, but may also strengthen the selection of strategic approaches.