Research In Progress | Completed Projects | Potential Projects | Legacy Projects | Prioritization
Every idea listed on the Potential Projects page was carefully selected based on a multi-stage prioritization and review process that you can read about here. This allows us to ensure that all new projects we take on will be high-impact and beneficial to the movement.
High-Priority Topics
Prioritization begins with a list of topics. Faunalytics’ list of important research topics in animal advocacy is publicly available, and we encourage other researchers to use it!
If you plan to conduct research in this space:
- First, please check our Research in Progress and Potential Projects pages first so that we can coordinate our efforts.
- And second, we just ask that you get in touch via our research director’s drop-in office hour or email to let us know. These contacts can often lead to valuable collaborations and opportunities to promote your work!
We prioritize our specific research questions according to their potential impact, which can take different forms, as described in the expandable sections below.
Faunalytics’ core mission is to help animals through research. Our top priority is projects with the potential to save or improve the lives of as many animals as possible. The vast majority of our original research has focused on farmed animals.
Faunalytics is a capacity-building organization. We empower advocates from all backgrounds by getting them the data they need to help animals. Advocates are at the driving force behind change for animals, and we recognize the potential of the ripple effect. Empowering one advocate has the potential to help many animals directly, and many more indirectly as they pass on their knowledge and bring in more advocates.
This prioritization metric is new in 2019. We will leave room in our research program for a few projects with quick turnaround and direct impact on high-level decision-makers. The best example of this type of project would be collecting data to support or refute an imminent debate on proposed legislation.
Animal advocates work on an extremely wide range of issues, with an equally wide range of support and background research. Although we do not actively seek out this type of project, we allow a small amount of space in our program for basic research on virtually-unstudied topics. In areas where advocates have no data at all, even small-scale, low-cost research can have a long-term impact for animals if it changes how they approach a problem.
Projects that fall under more than one section are particularly valuable to the movement as a whole. At Faunalytics, this has led to an increasing emphasis in recent years on identifying “meta” research projects: Those of value to advocates in all areas of advocacy. With our long history of providing research support to animal advocates (since 2000!) we are uniquely positioned to use research as a capacity-building tool.
