Faunalytics operates with a limited budget and a small staff. Volunteers and occasional interns are vital for us to carry forward our essential work for animals and advocates.
You can make a difference for animals and advocates by joining our team of volunteers and working with the Faunalytics staff on exciting projects. We have a vision of saving animal lives by providing strategic help to advocates, but we need volunteers like you!
Volunteering with Faunalytics is empowering and hands-on and unlike any other volunteer experience. Our small team is already dispersed across multiple countries and most of our work is online. You can volunteer from your home or anywhere with internet.
To volunteer, you must be willing to complete one or two short forms, provide a resume/CV or LinkedIn profile, and conduct at least one introductory call/interview. Depending on the extent of your volunteer role, we may also ask you to join us on Slack.
Please note: Currently, we are only looking for volunteers in the following specific roles. Unfortunately, we are not able to consider working with other volunteers at this time due to our small staff and limited time.
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. If you have experience reading academic journals and are able to translate findings for a general audience, this is the volunteer job for you!
Faunalytics produces more than 250 research summaries for our library every year, plus a variety of reports, blogs, and other materials. We work with a diverse group of volunteer writers and need skilled editors to ensure consistently high quality. If you have 3+ years of experience editing scientific articles or similar topics, please touch base.
The Faunalytics website is built on WordPress and the Genesis framework. We need experienced developers to help improve and enhance our site, build new features, and conduct quality assurance. Sample projects include implementing a more sophisticated search feature, automating updates to old library summaries, and optimizing site/page speed.
Faunalytics is fortunate to be a Google Ad Grants partner and we receive a substantial amount of free traffic from AdWords campaigns each month. We would welcome volunteer support from AdWords 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.
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 with 5+ years of experience to help us visualize that data. Other related tasks include helping design social media posts, charts, infographics, and print materials.
Faunalytics’ original studies are built on a backbone of existing research. We need support from academics with skills and experience in conducting literature reviews, as well as access to academic databases to help us with this aspect of our work. Those interested in writing for a lay audience are particularly encouraged to apply, as lit reviews in simple terminology also make a very helpful one-stop resource for advocates. Volunteers with a Masters or PhD in psychology, sociology, library studies, education, or any similar discipline are encouraged to apply.
Faunalytics conducts original studies on important animal protection topics and we also make use of open access data sets to learn more whenever we can. These studies often require complex research designs and sophisticated analyses of the results. Potential volunteers in this role will need to have expertise in statistics, and we have a strong preference for those who can produce their work in R, as it is open-source and available to everyone. Most likely candidates include those with a Masters or PhD in applied statistics, psychology, or a related field.
Faunalytics’ original studies are varied and require varied 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.
We are looking for a volunteer to maintain and expand a text capture mechanism to measure trends of animal activism and veg*nism on Twitter. The current solution uses Python, AWS, and Linux, so skills in some of these or willingness to learn these tools is needed. Experience with Natural Language Processing is a bonus.
Student Internships
In addition to volunteers, we also work with both graduate and undergraduate interns and there is usually a chance to earn course credit. Internships typically involve some combination of research, analysis, writing, and presentation, but the topics and specific tasks are flexible. Please note that all internships are remote and unpaid. If you’re interested in exploring an internship with Faunalytics, please contact us directly using this form. Thank you!
Other Ways to Help
If you like what Faunalytics does, but don’t have the time to volunteer, please consider a donation.
And please check our social media for short-term volunteer opportunities.
