Iâm a strategic communications professional interested in learning how to communicate complex things to people who arenât by default very interested in learning about themâsomething I think is relevant to most EA cause areas.
I have communications and marketing experience across branding, audience strategy and targeting implementation, issue and audience research, creative campaign development, public relations, impact measurement, and media planning.
A lot of this focuses on addressing what seem to be the criticisms the FK team find least convincing and relevant to their goals (e.g. infighting shouldnât ever happen, FK must have been slighting Veganuary due to some larger movement-wide rifts). I know people are out there making those arguments, so I completely understand taking time to address them, but I think it would be useful to have more focus on the impact calculus thatâs supposed to make all of that moot. Iâd like to hear them engage on why this was expected to go well (and specifically to go better than a more audience-aligned approach), because that expectation is the only thing they use to justify both the anticipated and unanticipated negative results.
This feels like a really important point to me that hasnât been addressed yet, so Iâm 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 Farmkindâs homepage and core message refreshing, too! The arguments for recruiting compassionate people who arenât 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 hostilityâa hostility which mostly serves to be confusing to anyone who isnât thinking in earnest already about tradeoffs for farmed animals (almost everyone).
FK has made the argument repeatedly that they couldnât have expected media coverage from these outlets if they werenât hostile to vegans. I think thatâs 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 isnât a strong reason on its own to go after those outlets. In my opinion itâs probably the opposite. These outlets donât have good conversations about factory farmingâand in my opinion continue not to do so in the Forget Veganuary coverageâbecause 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 thatâs 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 didnât intend for this to be picked up as a âmeat eating campaignâ 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 workingâseeing significant success in friendlier environments like Dwarkeshâs podcast (really a great example of the right audience fit to their messageâpeople 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.
Iâm 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) isnât made strongly by this post. Itâs 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 FKâs 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 wouldnât distract from Veganuaryâs January work or compete for coverage) targeted at those that tried and failed at Veganuaryâor even just plan to go back to eating animal products afterwardâwith some angle like âTurn a new leaf without the kale: Hereâs how Veganuary dropouts are helping animalsâ 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 âGary Eats 48 Sandwiches on a Normal Tuesdayâ) your spokespeople could be lifestyle influencers who gave Veganuary a go. The large swath of people that would identify with struggling with veganism/âVeganuary already has demonstrated an interest and some level of motivation to seek the benefits of forgoing animal products, so theyâre closer to donating than your âI eat twice as much meat to own vegansâ conservative.
I could see something like this being very on-beat for more progressive outlets (itâs 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 Farmkindâs core message rather than backward from the media opportunity wouldnât necessitate the hostility that has caused so many problems, simply didnât feel coherent with the Farmkind brand, and was so unaligned with the organizationâs 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 pointsâall things that would have helped with both reach and impact. Even something like this, though, Iâd hope would be undertaken with more Veganuary team input than Forget Veganuary was.
I am very curious what other angles FK has tried that havenât 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 youâve 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.
As a communicator thatâs been repeatedly frustrated by how EA can inadvertently reinforce negative misperceptions about itself, Iâm thrilled about this. Itâs wonderful to see the way I experience EA more clearly reflected and see people and the impact they make (which is really what this is all about!) centered. I especially love how prominent the section with individual stories of impact is. Iâd love to see some more examples of people working together, however. Iâd hypothesize that feeling like you wonât be alone in taking action is very important to people considering taking EA seriously, so Iâd love to see more stories of partners and groups making impact mixed in with the individual stories. Iâm curious if the work you did with Rethink Priorities would back that up.
All in all, this site is much more conducive to how the average person takes in information and feels called to act. I also think it does a really nice job of preemptively defending from some of the criticisms of EA that come from those who havenât taken the time to try and understand it. I think the word choice updates are spot on and think itâs so valuable that âhelping othersâ is front and center rather than implied. Much more human. Much more warm and appealing!
Some bottlenecks on improving communications:
What are we pushing for? E.g. What policies are good to aim for/ârealistic? What should we push labs to do?
What is a general idea we think the public could get behind and which sufficiently tracks AI risk prevention?
Big questions! It seems like the first is a question for everyone working on this, not just communications people. Iâd be interested to know what comms can offer ahead of these questions being settled. What kind of priming/âkey understandings are most important to get across to people to make the later convincing easier?
Who is doing this kind of comms work right now and running into these bottlenecks? Through what orgs? Are they the same organizations doing the policy development work?
As a marketer, I have to say you hit the nail on the head about what makes someone great to partner with. Folks at EA orgs often have so many traits and habits that can set them worlds apart from your average brand in terms of getting the most out of marketing.
All of these come to mind:
Ability to focus onâor at least considerâthe long term
High barriers to trust but willingness to delegate once its established
Willingness to commit to the right level of resources to test
Conservatism with and commitment to sticking to the goals you establish
A genuinely high level of engagement with the actual results
Commitment to replicating what works
I think orgs that know they exemplify the above could stand to get a lot more confident about what marketing can achieve for them.
I also really appreciate the level of detail you shared and your point about good paid marketing being a multiplier of what your brand is set up to achieve. If your website, reputation, lower-funnel engagement opportunities, etc. arenât in good shape, your multiplier canât do anything with a zero by its side. Kudos to CFI for setting themselves up for success.
Iâd love to hear how you approached measuring and factoring in applicant quality into your results. What signals did you look at as you optimized to make sure the people you were pulling in at the top of the funnel were people that would be a good fit for CFI?