I work as a Software Developer for Angle Health (a health insurance startup) and volunteer as a local organizer for The Humane League (THL). I’m interested in epistemology, improving institutions, and the psychology of motivation and mastery.
Zachary Segall
Karma: 213
The Hatchery Fund: Microgrants for Experiments in Animal Activism
The Real Enemy: The Right Use of Righteous Anger
Leveraging Environmental Forces in Animal Activism
I could not agree more! It’s a big part of what inspired this post.
Hi Siobhan, good question. I haven’t seen enough data to build a good sense of the success rate. Some of that is just the time scales—a lot of these campaigns have been in the past few years and we haven’t had a chance to see how good the follow through is.
There is some evidence that even companies that are breaking their commitments have made progress. When we do get companies to recommit, they’ll start publishing their numbers. A lot of them have made some progress (like 5% to 20%) and a few of them have made a lot of progress, getting close to 100% (maybe they broke their commitment because they didn’t want to be beholden to us?). Based on these bumps from the original commitment, I think it’s plausible that recommitment would cause another bump.
I had a conversation with my regional organizer a couple years ago about how companies weren’t committing to the BCC as readily as the cage-free egg commitment. I don’t know what the exact commit/win rate was, but it was low enough that THL decided to back off pushing on the BCC, leave those campaigns to other organizations (I think MFA), and focus on closing out the cage-free commitments instead. Most of our campaigns since then have been national and international cage-free commitment adoption and follow-through.
We’re getting into my speculations here, but I think there’s a couple reasons why companies were unwilling to commit:
The BCC is a bigger ask than cage free
The BCC has weaker public optics. “Let chickens out of cages!” Is a lot more resonant with the average person than “Companies should adopt slower growing breeds and improve shed conditions!” In other words, it’s not a very catchy goal.
THL is still a relatively small organization that can only create so much hassle for companies. Enough inconvenience to push cage free, but not enough for a big target. I have a couple forum posts going into more detail about our size and leverage.
Altogether, the BCC seems too big for our current level of collective power. If we had more activists and a stronger tagline, we might be able to push companies more effectively.
6+ years as a THL volunteer here, so I’m an informed source but not an official one. I don’t think the BCC will affect THL’s efficiency much directly, since we’ve mostly been focusing on cage-free campaigns for the past couple years. Those have largely been going well. The BCC has been hard to get more traction on and probably requires mobilization on a larger scale than we currently have.
Companies reneg with some frequency (at least enough frequency to keep us busy), which prompts us to run campaigns to get them to recommit to their pledge. Those have mostly been successful. I’d estimate somewhere around 70-80% success rate with recommitting, but of course actual data would be nice.
The 200-Person Revolution
Zachary Segall’s Quick takes
Whenever I talk about Effective Altruism (EA) to someone new, I talk about EA-the-Movement and EA-the-Philosophy. EA-the-Movement draws a specific kind of person (quantitative, techy, philosophical) and has selected a few causes it has determined to be the most effective. EA-the-Philosophy is about asking whether our donations and volunteering are going to places that get the most bang for our buck and those questions can be applied to anything we care about.
It’s a way of easing people into our way of thinking without insisting that they join our particular group or adopt our priorities. I find it’s especially useful if the quantitative or strong recommendations from EA-the-Movement to be offputting, or if they have previous associations with the movement. I think it’s worth making people who are doing good in some way more effective, even if it doesn’t end up getting them to do what we’d consider the most good. Although if someone spends enough time thinking with the EA Philosophy, it might end up leading the straight back to the EA Movement.
I had a similar experience when I started volunteering for The Humane League. I joined because I was looking for unskilled EA-approved volunteering and I was under the impression that THL would have plenty of people. It wasn’t until I became a local organizer and started digging into the numbers that I realized the activist population is tiny and there was an opportunity for individuals to significantly improve the movement base.
Part of my hope in writing this post was to tell more people about the need for non-crazy people with a pulse. I do think getting the word out about that while retaining the idea that we can make real change is a big challenge for organizers.
Great additions!
I hadn’t thought about the activist “uniform,” but it is often geared towards being striking rather than approachable. There’s also a danger of our identities as activists getting tied up in our apparel choices. I just started reading Change of Heart by Nick Cooney (one of the THL founders) and he tells a fitting story of an environmental campaigner speaking at a rally to an enthusiastic group of young campaigners:“He shouted to the crowd, “Are you ready to get out there and fight for the environment?”
To which they responded an enthusiastic, “Yeah!”
“Are you ready to get arrested and go to jail for the environment?”
“Yeah!!”
“Are you ready to give your life for the environment?”
“Yeah!!”
“Are you willing to cut your hair and put on a suit for the environment?”
The crowd fell silent.”The lack of investment in activating people makes sense. Maybe there’s some instances of incentives shifting as well. Once you have a nonprofit, a big part of your time becomes justifying the nonprofit’s existence, which will automatically syphon away attention from capacity building unless you intentionally redirect it.
Agree that activating people is an end in and of itself. With the loneliness epidemic going on, activating people and building community is a public service in its own right (even if it might not reach the EA bar on its own). And the nice thing to building capacity is that we can redirect a lot of that power to different causes, especially if we don’t tie our group identities too closely to any specific organization. I’d love to see different organizations playing up their different aesthetics while retaining collaborative ties—would really help with our recruiting surface area.
Great essay! I’m in the process of setting up a small micro-grants fund to promote scientific thinking among animal activists and this is exactly the kind of tribal knowledge that I’ve been looking for about what I might want to look out for when giving out money. Also hoping to fix some of that bad feedback mechanism by requiring people to develop a clearly testable hypothesis ahead of time :D