Summary: I argue that EA supported animal advocacy is failing in building deeper forms of engagement with its supporters. I hypothesise 1. adherence to professional norms in community building and 2. predominance of single issue communication might be some of the reasons behind this problem.

EA supported animal advocacy has been very successful with certain forms of mobilisation. End The Cage Age petition in Europe got 1.4 millions signatures from real EU citizens. Referendums to ban cages were won with very large margins. Corporate cage-free petitions get hundreds of thousands of signatures from time to time. Compassion in World Farming reports they had 90.000 individual donors in 2023/2024 period. These are very serious numbers.

On the other hand, when it comes to other deep forms of engagement, I fear we are not growing our numbers. Mercy for Animals’ largest demonstration ever in their history seems to be 140 people. Other protests for cage-free and broiler work don’t seem to be significantly larger either.

When there are significant threats to our work, like the possibility of overturning Prop 12 or the EU dropping its cage ban plans; I don’t see many influential people speaking up and making a noise. There were very few tweets when the EU broke its promise to announce a date for banning cages. 

It seems that we are failing in cultivating deeper engagement. We can get people’s shallow one-off support. They will consent to what we do, they will sign our petitions, they will vote in our favour in the referendums. But they won’t sustain continuous engagement, and won’t be willing to make significant sacrifices to protect our work.

My own organisation hasn’t been very successful in cultivating this form of deep engagement either. Addressing that segment of the supporter funnel is my focus this year. I’m hoping that thinking publicly might also help in making progress. This essay will be weak in evidence because it’s mainly for generating hypotheses to design new approaches.

Here are two hypotheses on what might be preventing deeper engagement.

Professional boundaries

EA-supported animal advocacy organisations enforce mainstream professional norms. These norms go against some of the common practices in successful community-building in other areas.

For example:

Many successful community builders treat movement members as friends. They don’t maintain the usual professional distance.

They are willing to interact with movement members any time of the week.

They also spend time with movement members in private spaces like their own houses or the houses of movement members.

My observation is that many successful social movements from all ranges of the political spectrum had a lot of intimate social bonding especially in the early stages. I think we are missing that partially because it’s hard to ask your hires to treat supporters as their friends.

Professional boundaries also exist for a reason. So we should be tactful about how we relax them. But when I read biographies and memories of movement leaders I can’t help but notice the significant amount of time spent in other people’s houses.

Some actions I’m considering:

-Switching to a physical office and using it as a community space. Maybe even sharing space with a vegan restaurant.

-Spending more time in-person with our supporters myself.

Predominance of single issue communication

Many EA-supported animal advocacy orgs refrain from commenting on issues outside their focus areas. The priority is to make progress on what we all already agree on and leave the disagreements for later. I fear this might be preventing deeper engagement. I think many of our supporters had experiences like the following:

a. Through seeing a viral and powerful content on the suffering of caged hens, Deniz is deeply touched. She is shocked about what happens to animals. After an epiphany, she decides to make big changes in her life. She researches content on animals deeply. Decides to go vegan to put her passion into action. 

She realises that she had been blind to animals in so many ways in her previous life. She feels like her perspective on things needs a comprehensive overhaul. She needs guidance on how she should speak with her social circles, what she should do on edge cases in her new lifestyle, how she should reshape her thinking on politics etc.

Yet the organisation she got into contact with is still working on cage-free campaigns and doesn’t have answers to her questions about how her commitment to animals should affect other aspects of her life. Unable to find moral leadership she needs, she disengages.

There is another failure scenario like the following:

b. Eda cares deeply about political issue A and she has so many strong emotions around it. She naturally desires people around her to share her emotions. She looks at her beloved animal advocacy organisation to see how they are reacting. They are not reacting to the topic. She feels an emotional gap and disappointment. She disengages.

One way to address this problem is to have more thought leaders and organisations that don’t attempt to be catch-all brands and offer more holistic ideologies in different flavours. These thought leaders and organisations can preserve their own specific identities and also join together for common welfare campaign goals under umbrella platforms/organisations. Currently everyone seems to be trying to offend no one, which doesn’t seem to be optimal.

Some actions I’m considering:

-Writing a personal blog that will detail my thinking on many issues

-Encouraging our supporters to write more blogs and become thought leaders for people similar to them

Many thanks to Jakub Stencel and Haven King-Nobles for their helpful comments on the draft. Errors remain my own.