Faunalytics’ Plans & Priorities For 2023
With 2023 fast approaching, Faunalytics’ plans for the coming year are bigger and better than ever. We’re expanding our flagship programs, driving forward crucial new research, and building capacity for the movement. We pride ourselves on growing thoughtfully: The success of our slow and steady development over the past few years is reflected in our status as an ACE Top Charity, our impact metrics, and everything we hear from you, our community. We will continue to grow strategically in the year ahead and hope that you’ll join us on the journey!
Building Knowledge
New Original Research
First and foremost, I am thrilled to announce Faunalytics’ upcoming projects! In 2023, we will investigate research questions driven by our needs as a diverse and multi-faceted community of animal advocates.
Creating connections is central to who we are at Faunalytics, and our projects reflect that. Recognizing the need to build bridges and find alliances to increase our own impact for animals, we will dig into identifying collaborative opportunities with environmental organizations worldwide, and unpacking conservative political values with respect to animal protection. It’s sometimes easy to feel isolated as an animal advocate, like the world isn’t listening—but there are others out there who are more similar than they might seem from a distance. We want to help draw out those similarities and bring people closer together.
We also want to do more to understand and lift up our own people, by turning our attention to the status and needs of advocates ourselves. Building on our 2020 State of the Movement research, we will conduct a U.S.-based study of salaries and benefits in the farmed animal protection movement as well as an international study diving into the strategies and needs of advocacy groups. These projects put advocates’ needs at the forefront, because taking care of the people in our movement means we can accomplish more for animals.
Answering foundational questions is another long-standing pillar of Faunalytics’ research program. By that, I mean the questions that stand between an animal advocate and their ability to get started. In the coming year, we will tackle foundational questions around the costs and supply chain that animal products rely on, opening up the possibility of activism in new areas as we identify strengths and weaknesses. We will also examine the impact of humanewashing on consumer purchases, aiming to answer the foundational question of how it affects people’s total purchases: does this false advertising affect the bottom line of total animal product purchases? These are questions whose answers can create new avenues for advocacy.
It’s an exciting year for new research at Faunalytics. Stay tuned for these studies and more in 2023!
New Data-Driven Resources
Incredibly, our library of user-friendly article summaries for animal advocates is about to hit 5,000 posts early in the new year. You can help us celebrate this milestone by sharing an article or blog post that particularly resonated with you.
The only way to describe Faunalytics’ community in a single word is “varied.” No two of us are at exactly the same place in our advocacy journeys, and we all have our unique ways of engaging with animal protection issues. Faunalytics understands this, and we try to provide resources for the full range of needs and uses.
In 2023, we’ll be publishing a new installment in our Faunalytics Fundamentals series of infographics. It will provide an introduction to invertebrate protection, just as the others provide the fundamentals of other types of animal advocacy. In addition, we will release several new videos in our increasingly popular Faunalytics Explains series for those who like short videos: These are 2-4 minutes each on key topics from our research library.
Building Capacity
Research Support Initiatives
I think I speak for the whole Faunalytics staff when I say that my favorite thing to hear from advocates is how approachable we are. We pride ourselves on being people who understand the challenges and strengths of small organizations and love to help others in their work. While all our resources are geared to doing just that, some are particularly hands-on in the support they provide. In the coming year we will continue to emphasize and expand our pro bono Ask A Researcher and Ask A Librarian office hours, where we assist advocates one-on-one with conducting research, evaluating their own impact, and finding the data they need to support their campaigns. In 2023, we hope to reach more of you than ever before this way, and from even more countries.
With our increasingly global audience, we’re also expanding our efforts to provide resources and support to groups working all around the world. In the coming year, we’ll continue our Research Ambassador outreach project, bringing relevant data to advocacy groups around the globe. We’ll also add to our growing collection of translated research, and plan to update our website to make finding data even easier for advocates.
Collaborating With Advocates
This year we launched our inaugural applied research conference for advocates, Fauna Connections. With a first-year audience of over 760 attendees, it was a rousing success and we have even higher hopes for Fauna Connections 2023. We hope you’ll join us again next year for great research talks that focus on how to make the results work for animals.
In the meantime, 2023 also brings with it new partnerships. In the first quarter of the year we will publish a collaborative report on climate media coverage that we’re currently working on with Sentient Media. For the international project mentioned in the first section, the Pollination Project will be partnering with us as a stakeholder to ensure that the results are maximally actionable for funders. Additionally, in the summer of 2023, we look forward to hosting an emerging researcher as part of the Reducetarian Foundation’s fellowship program. We will also, as always, seek advocate stakeholders for our other upcoming projects. If your organization seems like a perfect fit for any of them, we’d love for you to get in touch!
Building A Future
Growing Our Team
As we grow and continue to provide more and more resources for the movement, we plan to add to our knowledgeable team of researchers and capacity-builders. Next year we will bring on additional research support to increase our output and enable us to directly help advocates identify the most effective strategies to end animal suffering, faster. We also hope to add 1-2 more board members to the team to round out the wealth of experience our current directors bring to the table.
Thinking Ahead
At Faunalytics, our tagline is Informed Action, Greater Reaction. The more advocates have access to reliable, relevant information, the more effective their advocacy will be. This same is true with Faunalytics – the more we understand how our research and resources are used to help animals, the greater our own impact will be.
Therefore, our 2023-2025 Strategic Plan will focus on efforts to increase awareness and proactive use of research among animal advocates, with an emphasis on communication and collaboration. By building relationships and bridges in the movement, we can build a better world for animals, together.
Help us transform the animal protection movement by donating to our research and capacity-building work. Your gifts, ideas, and support are what make our research possible – on behalf of all the Faunalysts, thank you for all you do.