Faunalytics Once Again Named A “Recommended Charity” by Animal Charity Evaluators

Since 2015, Faunalytics has been among Animal Charity Evaluators’ list of recommended charities within the animal protection movement. Each year they conduct extensive evaluations to identify organizations that they believe make the biggest impact for animals and the animal protection movement. Faunalytics is proud to be included among their list of recommended organizations once again, a distinction we work hard to earn and live up to. Below we share highlights from ACE’s review of Faunalytics, our plans to continue improving, ways we hope to grow in the years to come, and how you can help us make these plans a reality. 

Highlights From ACE’s Review

Overall Assessment

“While we expect all of our evaluated charities to be excellent examples of effective advocacy, Faunalytics is exceptional even within that group. Giving to Faunalytics is an excellent opportunity to support initiatives that create the most positive change for animals.”

Program Strengths

“We think that out of all of Faunalytics’ achievements, the addition of new content to the research library, the Global Animal Slaughter Statistics & Charts, and the intervention research into 15 types of animal advocacy are particularly cost effective because they combine high-priority interventions with robust implementation.”

Cost Effectiveness

“Faunalytics’ work to increase knowledge and skills for animal advocacy is highly promising because it focuses on animal groups, countries, and interventions that we consider high priority. We find their work on conducting research to help farmed animals and wild animals in the United States and China particularly likely to be impactful. We assess Faunalytics’ recent work as highly cost-effective and believe they are in a strong position to use additional funding.” 

Leadership & Staff Engagement

“Among Faunalytics staff who responded to our engagement survey, the average score across questions on confidence in leadership and management was 5 on a 1–5 scale, indicating very high confidence. 100% of respondents agreed with the statement ‘I have confidence in the leaders at our organization’.” Meanwhile, “the average score across all questions was 4.9 on a 1–5 scale, suggesting that, on average, staff exhibit very high engagement and satisfaction.”

Impact Potential

“Overall, we assessed the impact potential of Faunalytics’ programs as relatively high, with a final IP score of 5.5 (on a 1–7 scale) placing them in the 4th quartile (top 25%) of the charities we evaluated in 2023.”

Constantly Learning & Improving

As much as we appreciate positive recognition of our work, we must also acknowledge the limitations ACE shared in their review. Back in 2021 ACE published a brief on conducting animal advocacy research, which suggests that it is a promising intervention for animals, especially when considering long-term impact. However, “[their] confidence in the short-term effects of this intervention is low due to the lack of empirical evidence about the extent to which animal advocates use research results to prioritize and implement their work.”

While we have long tracked how advocates use and engage with our work in our annual Community Survey, Faunalytics took ACE’s brief seriously and decided to take our impact evaluation a step further. Therefore, earlier this year we engaged an outside research firm to help us better understand how animal advocates use research to inform their decision making, and investigate factors that promote a transition from awareness of research to use of that research. This study is now complete and will be published in early 2024, along with an overview of how we’ll take what we learned and apply it to our work in order to increase our impact both short- and long-term.

A Data-Driven Animal Protection Movement

Plans for the Future

As Faunalytics grows, we have big dreams for our future. However, we take a thoughtful and careful approach to our growth, balancing both the health of our organization and the goal to scale in order to do more for the animal advocacy community. Currently, our internal strategic planning committee is working on a ten year plan and updated theory of change for our organization. In the meantime, we’re excited to share a peek of some of our near-term ideas.

Programmatic Plans:

• Host data-driven workshops and webinars across a variety of advocacy focus areas, and increase our presence and in-person offerings at conferences in order to further help advocates apply research to their work.
• Incorporate more visual resources and step by step guides into our library (our Guide to Getting Started in Legislative Advocacy is a great recent example). 
• Explore academic publication of our studies in the event that the peer reviewed journal publication process would lend legitimacy to this field of research and/or better support advocates using our research to influence external stakeholders.
• Continue translating our resources to an even greater extent in order to make our research more widely available to advocates across the globe, with a focus on Spanish and predominant languages in Southeast Asia.
• And as always… conduct more research! There are hundreds (literally) if not thousands of research questions that our movement needs answers to. Every year, Faunalytics engages in an extensive prioritization process in choosing our research agenda, whittling down our long list of ideas to a manageable agenda of the most important topics. The greater our capacity, the more questions we can answer to help guide animal advocates’ messaging, approaches, and strategies. 

Team Plans:

• Research & Content: Next year we plan to hire a Content Manager to help take our Research Library to the next level, and we’d like to bring on a Deputy Research Director or similar position to help oversee our projects and allow our Research Director to focus on strategy and impact. Looking ahead, we plan to hire additional researchers to tackle more research topics, as well as a Monitoring & Evaluation specialist so that we can properly support the numerous organizations who request our assistance with tracking their impact. 
• Capacity Builders: In the near future we’d like to hire an Operations and Finance Director, and looking ahead we hope to hire a Development Director. Both of these hires would greatly expand our Executive Director’s capacity and what we can accomplish in terms of strategy, fundraising, and overall organizational growth.
• Global Engagement: As we look further into our future, we hope to bring on a Global Strategy Director as well as additional researchers who will focus on projects in Southeast Asia. We also plan to retain and build upon our strong working relationship with The Good Growth Co. as we consider how to best support the broader animal protection movement. 

Room for Funding

According to ACE’s review, “Faunalytics has room for $400,000 of additional funding in 2024 and $600,000 in 2025. These two figures represent the amount beyond their projected revenues of $1,215,000 and $1,360,000 in 2024 and 2025, meaning that we believe that they could effectively use a total revenue of up to $1,615,000 and $1,960,000.”

To make our vision come to life, Faunalytics needs your support. It’s thanks to our incredible donors that we’re able to serve as the research branch of the animal protection movement. There are several ways to support our work, and no gift is too small to help us make a difference. We hope you’ll join our mission to help advocates be as effective as possible so that together, we may build a brighter future for animals. 

“By supporting Faunalytics, you play a crucial role in helping them achieve their plans and creating a better world for farmed and wild animals.”