Thanks for sharing this submission! I just wanted to chime in with an idea I sometimes think about. I sometimes notice that a lot of the research on animal advocacy is targeted at grant makers who need to decide which projects to fund. But people who execute these projects also need to make a lot of strategic decisions and I suspect that the research that can support these decisions is more neglected. I reckon this might be because 1. research is costly 2. research has a lot of positive externalities 3. animal advocacy organisations are much more numerous than grant makers so it’s more difficult to coordinate to provide this kind of “public goods”.
Because of these reasons animal advocacy organisations rely on their own experiences to learn lessons. There are limits to how much you can learn from this since the sample size is very small. It’s hard to predict what kind of work tests would best predict the performance of a campaigner when you have hired only 10 campaigners at most. Or it’s hard to understand what kind of campaign strategies are better when you have run 50 campaigns. So I sometimes wonder whether it would be better to have well-funded researchers that reach out to animal advocacy orgs, learn about their research needs and help them.
Though a major problem with such a suggestion would be ensuring accountability. It’s hard to ensure that this kind of research is really useful when animal advocacy organisations are not paying for it.
Agreed Emre, I think that’s a good point and probably something I didn’t consider much for the purpose of this piece. I guess one factor that makes it less valuable for organisations conducting this research internally is that they’ve got pretty strong incentives to find good results, otherwise it means their work isn’t effective. I think this can be a reason for people to measure the wrong thing, or otherwise not conduct research that really gets at the heart of whether they’re being effective or not.
Also agreed about not being able to extrapolate much when there is small sample sizes. Something I’ve found quite hard for campaigning-related research is the fact that it’s so context dependent that it’s unclear how much you can extrapolate from even 1000 campaigns if they’ve been conducted in 20 different countries working on 3-4 different issues. Obviously somethings will generalise, but some won’t! And it’s hard to tell which one is in which camp a priori.
And your last point is another tough thing about research. It’s well and good conducting great research—but often it can slip under the radar or people don’t actually implement the recommendations. I think this is a time when external bodies (e.g. charity evaluators or funders) can be good at holding organisations to account on doing the most impactful things.
Thanks for sharing this submission! I just wanted to chime in with an idea I sometimes think about. I sometimes notice that a lot of the research on animal advocacy is targeted at grant makers who need to decide which projects to fund. But people who execute these projects also need to make a lot of strategic decisions and I suspect that the research that can support these decisions is more neglected. I reckon this might be because 1. research is costly 2. research has a lot of positive externalities 3. animal advocacy organisations are much more numerous than grant makers so it’s more difficult to coordinate to provide this kind of “public goods”.
Because of these reasons animal advocacy organisations rely on their own experiences to learn lessons. There are limits to how much you can learn from this since the sample size is very small. It’s hard to predict what kind of work tests would best predict the performance of a campaigner when you have hired only 10 campaigners at most. Or it’s hard to understand what kind of campaign strategies are better when you have run 50 campaigns. So I sometimes wonder whether it would be better to have well-funded researchers that reach out to animal advocacy orgs, learn about their research needs and help them.
Though a major problem with such a suggestion would be ensuring accountability. It’s hard to ensure that this kind of research is really useful when animal advocacy organisations are not paying for it.
[doxxing myself—I wrote the submission above!]
Agreed Emre, I think that’s a good point and probably something I didn’t consider much for the purpose of this piece. I guess one factor that makes it less valuable for organisations conducting this research internally is that they’ve got pretty strong incentives to find good results, otherwise it means their work isn’t effective. I think this can be a reason for people to measure the wrong thing, or otherwise not conduct research that really gets at the heart of whether they’re being effective or not.
Also agreed about not being able to extrapolate much when there is small sample sizes. Something I’ve found quite hard for campaigning-related research is the fact that it’s so context dependent that it’s unclear how much you can extrapolate from even 1000 campaigns if they’ve been conducted in 20 different countries working on 3-4 different issues. Obviously somethings will generalise, but some won’t! And it’s hard to tell which one is in which camp a priori.
And your last point is another tough thing about research. It’s well and good conducting great research—but often it can slip under the radar or people don’t actually implement the recommendations. I think this is a time when external bodies (e.g. charity evaluators or funders) can be good at holding organisations to account on doing the most impactful things.