What Could $140,000 Achieve For Animals?
In December 2015, Faunalytics was named a “standout charity” by Animal Charity Evaluators. In their review, they said that Faunalytics could make effective use of an additional $140,000 in funding per year. Not surprisingly, we agree!
What could we achieve for animals with the extra support? We wanted to provide some insight into Faunalytics’ plans and priorities over the coming year. In short, we would: conduct a new study to help increase donations to animal causes; create new data visualizations; hire two more people; improve our website; and enhance our visibility.
Research is one of the most powerful investments we can make for animals. Here’s how we would prioritize additional funds to save lives:
How to Get More Donations for Animals
In the United States, less than one percent of all philanthropic giving currently goes to animal protection. It’s a paltry sum given the magnitude of animal suffering and the importance of animal protection as a social justice issue. By contrast, 32% of all charitable giving goes to religion and 15% goes to education. *
How can we encourage more giving to animal-related causes? What messages and tactics work best to persuade some donors to religion and education to also support animal protection? What will it take to garner a bigger piece of the philanthropic pie for what may be the most important social justice issue in history? Answers to these questions are essential if we’re going to grow the animal protection movement to the point where it can have even more influence.
At Faunalytics, we’ve been thinking about these questions for years. If we had the funding, our next major study would focus on identifying ways to encourage people who donate to non-animal causes to also support animal-related programs. We would begin with developing a better understanding of how donors to other causes view animal protection and which messages resonate most to convince those donors to consider giving to animals.
We would then validate the initial findings through a representative survey of recent donors by testing treatments with different messages (plus a control group). The results would provide much-needed information to animal advocates including an estimate of the volume of potential donations from people who might support animal causes, if we can persuade them with the right messages.
More money means animal groups have more influence and can save more lives. The $25,000 investment for this study could pay off many times over in new donations to our field.
Note: This study is in the very early planning stages. Faunalytics will consider a variety of approaches and methods when we are ready and able to pursue the project. We would also pre-register the study and solicit feedback from both animal advocates and other researchers.
See Information. Get Results.
In today’s busy times, if you want people to read something, make it short.
Better yet, make it visual.
What if advocates could quickly see a visual overview of the most fundamental data for a particular topic? That’s what we’d like to do with a new series of “intelligent infographics.” These infographics will give advocates a visual introduction to the best available data on animal-related topics. They can use what they learn to make better decisions, enhance their efforts, and help more animals.
We plan to start with the overall issue areas covered in our library: Companion animals; Animals used for food; Animals used in science, and Wildlife. We’ll also be creating visualizations for other important topics like veganism/vegetarianism and spay/neuter. A $20,000 investment would enable us to create 2-3 intelligent infographics over the next year.
We’re also seeking designers and programmers to maximize the impact of these graphics. Please contact us if you’d like to volunteer to help get crucial information across to advocates around the world.
Helping People Helping Animals
Faunalytics is powered by people. The lion’s share of what we do is working one-on-one with animal advocacy organizations, helping them evaluate and improve their programs. The expertise and skills of Faunalytics’ team members are the most important “assets” we have. But Faunalytics currently has just three paid staff, two of whom work less than full time. Our small staff is arguably our biggest challenge to accomplishing even more for animals and advocates.
If Faunalytics were to receive $140,000 in additional funding, we would use more than half of the amount to hire new staff ($75,000). This would include one full-time researcher who would be dedicated to supporting the needs of our clients and leading our next major independent study (see below). We would also hire one part-time office manager to handle some administrative tasks, allowing other staff members to focus more on our mission.
These new staff members would enable Faunalytics to help advocates help animals in new and better ways. If we were able to increase our staff as described, we anticipate being able to nearly double our client work (both pro bono and paid) and also conduct new studies more regularly. We would continue to aggregate and summarize secondary research in our library, but would have more capacity to develop resources and work with advocates to measure their impact.
A Research Library for the Movement
We launched the new Faunalytics website just nine months ago and we appreciate all of the positive feedback! It’s clear that people love the new format and are having an easier time finding access to all of our great research and resources. With the new site, we’ve been able to devote more time to writing summaries of important research. To the many thousands of you who take advantage of our website and our email alerts, thank you!
We have a number of enhancements in mind for the website, including a better experience for mobile users, improved search options, an enhanced survey platform for client projects, a streamlined donation process, refined email alerts, and more options for you to manage your preferences. We have some generous and talented volunteers who are helping us chip away at these changes, but we could speed up the process with a modest investment of about $10,000.
Building a Culture of Evaluation
Faunalytics summarizes and shares more than 300 secondary studies every year. We produce independent studies, client research reports, infographics, and resources like our Animal Tracker graphing tool. But our work is only valuable if people know about it, and we run into animal advocates every week who are finding Faunalytics for the first time. The more people we reach, the more likely it is that advocates will use research and data to inform their work for animals.
Faunalytics received an amazing reception at the Animal Rights Conference in 2015. There was tremendous interest in our work and hundreds of people signed up for our email alerts. If we were to receive additional funding this year, we would invest up to $10,000 to increase our visibility by exhibiting and presenting at both AR2016 and Taking Action for Animals. We would also set aside a small amount for travel to speak at other conferences, and for limited advertising.
How to Support Effective Animal Advocacy
In a nutshell, that’s the Faunalytics “wish list” for the next 12-18 months. We hope you agree that these would be valuable uses of additional funding and that our increased capacity would be valuable for advocates and for animals.
If our estimate of lives saved is accurate (and that’s a pretty big “if”), then an additional $140,000 would mean saving 900,000 more animals. We don’t expect anyone to write us a check for the full amount, but here’s how to contribute if you can:
- Donate online through our website or via PayPal
- Send a check to Faunalytics, PO Box 152703, San Diego, CA 92195
- Contact us for bequests, wire transfers, or stock donations
Thank you for supporting effective animal advocacy!