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This past December, three Faunalytics team members attended the Animal and Vegan Advocacy Summit (AVA) in São Paulo, Brazil, the first AVA to take place in Latin America. In addition to sharing data and research, one of our main goals at the conference was to better understand how Latine activists use research. Besides, being Faunalytics, there’s no better way to get to the bottom of a question like this than with data of our own! And so, between munching on jackfruit coxinhas and speaking in six sessions, we distributed a survey amongst the professional activists in attendance. Now, ahead of the AVA Summit in the United States, we are delighted to share the results, which we think will be helpful for advocates, funders, and researchers alike.

In some ways, you can think of this report as a spiritual successor to Phase I and Phase II of our investigations of how advocates use research and data. However, since this isn’t a formal study from Faunalytics (we didn’t preregister it or use a randomized sample), we suggest you take the results with a pinch of salt — valuable, but not completely scientific.

Survey Participants

We instructed advocates to take the survey in their native language to ensure there weren’t any language barriers, and because we wanted to capture the perspectives of everyone, regardless of their mother tongue. We received 50 results: eight people who took it in English, 23 in Portuguese, and 19 in Spanish.

A quick note on our sample: we assume that the attendees of the AVA LATAM conference were more likely to be in positions of leadership (as organizations will prioritize sending decision-makers to conferences) and more likely to be multilingual (as organizations are motivated to send the best communicators) than the average advocate in Latin America. Also, since we distributed the survey ourselves, the participants were more likely to be familiar with Faunalytics than might be found across Latin America. Thus, we believe that the linguistic barrier estimate below is likely an undercount, and the use of Faunalytics research is likely an overcount.

How Latine Advocates Use Research

First, we asked how participants use research. We provided five possible categories, which were themselves adapted from the findings of our study on research use: External Legitimacy, Internal Decision-Making, Movement Building, Catalyzing Action, and Identifying Problems. If you’re curious about these uses of research, check out our talk at the AVA Conference!

Here, we can see that most advocates are using research for a full range of purposes, leading with Internal Decision-Making and trailing with Movement Building. This isn’t surprising to us — most research on movement building tends to be conducted in the Global North, like our study on U.S. salaries or examination of advocate turnover. We’re also not surprised that organizations use research for many purposes — one of the themes from the conference was how most Latine organizations fill many advocacy roles at once, unlike some U.S. or European organizations, which might specialize in certain tactics or on certain topics.

Latine Advocates Face Barriers In Using Research

We then asked what might be the most important question of the survey: what barriers do advocates face in accessing and using research?

Unsurprisingly, advocates are facing regional and linguistic barriers to research, as well as the general barriers of not knowing where to look or a lack of time. Interestingly, Hispanic participants were more likely to have language barriers (63%) than Portuguese speakers (39%) and to struggle to find research relevant to their region (79%) compared to Portuguese speakers (65%). English speakers faced the fewest barriers by far.

Where Latine Advocates Source Research

We then asked where advocates are currently sourcing their research.

Advocates source their research from multiple sources, including internet searches, Faunalytics newsletter and website, other animal advocacy research organizations, Google Scholar, and more. Of the 8% of people who chose “other,” two people chose AI tools and one each wrote down the Effective Altruism (EA) Forum and scientific journals. Finally, we were thrilled to see that no advocates mentioned that they don’t use any research — something that warms our data-loving hearts!

Latine Advocates’ Research Wish List

We also asked participants to optionally share studies they wish could be done in Latin America. We sorted the 38 responses from 32 participants by discipline to get a feel for what types of research advocates are most curious about:

What Does This Mean For Faunalytics?

Faunalytics is dedicated to listening to the needs of the advocates we serve, and sometimes that means shifting our strategies based on the data we gather. We will keep these results in mind when planning out our next batch of original studies according to our Research Prioritization Process. We will also include these results during our strategy meetings this year in which we will create our next strategic plan.

In the third question, Portuguese-speaking advocates were less likely to source their research from Faunalytics than Spanish-speaking advocates. This indicates we need to work on our research dissemination in Brazil. We plan to launch a microsite in Portuguese by the end of 2025, to join our microsites in Spanish and Mandarin, to better service the Brazilian advocacy community. We also hope to make more targeted ads in Portuguese to help make sure Brazilian advocates know how to use our many resources.

Faunalytics is committed to serving the global animal advocacy community across continents and languages. In the meantime, if you are a Latine advocate who wants more access to research and data, come to our multilingual office hours or book a multilingual Research Ambassador presentation (all free!), or review our research resources, a document written specifically for the AVA LATAM conference.