The Faunalytics research library houses thousands of study summaries that are of interest to animal advocates working on a variety of issues. We always have a need for writers to help us stay up to speed on the newest studies that matter to advocates by reading academic studies and writing summaries for the animal advocacy community. 

Required Skills:

• Experience reading academic journals
• Ability to translate scientific findings for a general audience
• Strong understanding of research methods and analysis

Faunalytics is fortunate to be a Google Ad Grants partner and we receive a substantial amount of free traffic from Google Ads campaigns each month. We would welcome volunteer support from Ads experts to help us identify new keywords, create new campaigns and ads, and generally optimize the account. We also welcome support from SEO experts to help us improve our site and generate more organic traffic.

Required Skills:

• 2+ years of experience using AdWords
• Experience carrying out SEO optimization
• Experience with other marketing tools a plus!

Faunalytics produces a lot of content that emphasizes research and data. To better convey that information to animal advocates, we sometimes need to work with volunteer graphic designers to help us create engaging graphics and visuals. 

Required Skills:

• 2+ years of graphic design experience
• Ability to create content for multiple platforms, including social media, website content, and print materials
• Experience with Infogram preferred

Faunalytics conducts original studies on important animal protection topics and we also make use of open access data sets whenever we can. Our Research Scientists will sometimes work with volunteers on data cleaning, analyses, data visualization, and writing up results.

Required Skills:

• Expertise in data science and/or statistics
• Experience using R for data analysis 
• Experience with basic statistical analyses and packages
• Experience with data cleaning/wrangling

Most of Faunalytics’ research requires only basic analytic techniques (and if you want to work on those, please indicate your interest in being a volunteer Data Scientist as well), but occasionally we delve into areas that require advanced training in statistics: longitudinal analyses, cluster sampling and weighting, imputation, and more. If you have training in an area that might be useful in our work for animals, let us know! We might not have something right away, but we’d love to touch base with you.

Skills:

• Expertise in statistics, probably via Masters or PhD in statistics, applied statistics, or a related field
• We prefer experience with R, but it isn’t required

Faunalytics’ original studies are varied and require different types of support. You don’t need a degree in stats or graphic design to help us help animals! Some of our most-needed assistance is for research support tasks. These tasks are hard to define and rarely glamorous, but completely essential to our ability to do research. Examples include finding and categorizing Facebook posts about corporate welfare commitments, categorizing foods by veg*n/non-veg*n ingredients, and putting survey questions into a searchable spreadsheet format.

**Please note: We receive an overwhelming number of applications for research support positions, and we unfortunately don’t have enough opportunities to accommodate everyone. We recommend that you consider other volunteer opportunities in addition to research support.

Required Skills:

• Experience using Excel and spreadsheets
• Experience supporting other research projects preferred
• Strong attention to detail
• Enthusiasm for unglamorous and behind-the-scenes tasks!