If you are going to take part in Animal Advocacy Careers’ Fundraising Work Placement or are a fundraiser, it is crucial to reflect on the impact your work might have.
Not all fundraising is equal. In fact, some fundraising might even do more harm than good.
Our fundraising skills profile provides an introduction to fundraising for nonprofits in animal advocacy. In this article, we take a deeper dive into some of our most important research that will help you make the most of your fundraising work - and actually create a high positive impact.
Here’s what we will cover:
Let’s dive in!
Is fundraising for nonprofits a “zero-sum game”?
It has been suggested that fundraising for nonprofits is what economists would call a “zero-sum game”; a gain in funding for one nonprofit requires an equal loss in funding for other nonprofits. This loss could be spread across vast numbers of other nonprofits, so even a large gain for a particular nonprofit would probably be imperceptible to other nonprofits.
Indeed, the total amount of charitable giving in the US seems to have hovered around 2% GDP for years (source here, plus here and here relative to GDP) suggesting that most additional fundraising for charity doesn’t really “raise” money — it just moves it from one nonprofit to another.
Bad news? It gets worse, unfortunately. (But don’t give up hope yet… there’s good news below.)
Fundraising for nonprofits can cause harm
If fundraising for nonprofits is a zero-sum game, we should expect that, as 80,000 Hours explain, “most fundraisers at the margin are shifting money to charities that are less effective than the average charity.” Here’s why:
If you graph how cost-effective charities are… the median is significantly less than the mean. In other words, the effectiveness of the majority of charities is less than the effectiveness of the average charity. That sounds a bit odd, but it’s just because the average effectiveness is pulled up a long way by the small number of really good charities at the top. (Similarly, the average wage at a company is normally higher than what the majority of the staff are paid).
This means that most fundraisers at the margin are shifting money to charities that are less effective than the average charity. So, they are reducing the overall effectiveness of the charity sector. They are actually reducing how much good gets done!
This may seem demoralising. However, there are a couple of reasons to be cheerful.
Fundraising for charity isn’t quite a zero-sum game
Firstly, charitable giving isn’t entirely fixed. Widespread use of effective fundraising techniques (or any long-term, indirect processes mostly outside your control) could plausibly change the total amount of funding raised for nonprofits.
I said that the total amount of charitable giving in the US seems to have hovered around 2% of GDP for years, but it has in fact increased a small amount, from around 2.11% to around 2.25% between 2016 and 2020. This isn’t very reassuring though, because that’s quite a small increase.
Some nonprofit fundraising is very impactful anyway
Secondly, and much more importantly, as highlighted by 80,000 Hours’ article: if you “work for charities that are more cost-effective than the mean,” you are “shifting money from less effective charities to more effective ones, potentially doing a huge amount of good.”
The total donated to the combined category of environmental and animal causes by US donors increased by 46% from 2016 to 2020 ($11.05bn → $16.14bn, an increase that beat cumulative inflation of 7.84% by a substantial margin).[1] Farmed Animal Funders note that, having surveyed groups a few different times, funding in the farmed animal movement is “growing at what could be described as a quick pace.”
So, sure, fundraising for charity in general might not do much to grow the overall amounts of money donated, but you might be able to increase the total funding for a particular cause area by attracting donations that would otherwise have gone to other cause areas.
This could be incredibly impactful.
Some charities are plausibly orders of magnitude (i.e. 10, 100, 1000, or more times) more impactful than others. Large differences might occur between different cause areas.
For example, this comparison between The Humane League (an unusually cost-effective animal charity) and the Against Malaria Foundation (an unusually cost-effective human health charity) concludes that, “in expectation, THL is >100x better than AMF,” although they note a lot of uncertainties. Global health is in itself arguably a cause area with opportunities to do a huge amount of good relatively easily. So consider that fundraising for effective animal advocacy charities might look even more impactful if you thought that most of the funding would be redirected from other cause areas.
This principle of large potential differences in the cost-effectiveness of different charities might also hold when comparing the cost-effectiveness of different animal advocacy charities.
As a simple demonstration of this claim, consider that there are roughly 1,000 times as many vertebrate farmed animals alive as vertebrate lab animals: very roughly about 150 billion, compared to (at least) 100 million.[2] Now imagine that, for the same cost, one group of charities might reduce the number of farmed animals by 0.1% and another might reduce the number of lab animals by 0.1%. Given the huge differences in the relative number of animals, the former group would likely reduce orders of magnitude more suffering.
More concretely, the mid-points and best guess estimates of expected value for different intervention types given by Animal Charity Evaluators (at least, in their archived intervention reports) and Charity Entrepreneurship also suggest that several orders of magnitude of differences in cost-effectiveness are possible between different farmed animal interventions.
Animal charity fundraising can be high-impact
So, what are the key takeaways?
Most fundraising doesn’t really raise money for charities overall, it just redistributes money between charities.
Nevertheless, if you can redistribute money to a cause area – like animal advocacy – that tends to be unusually impactful, you can do a lot of good.
What’s more, if you can redistribute money to specific charities that are unusually cost-effective, then that’s even better.
Reflection questions
|
Effective fundraising: Are all dollars equal?
Consider the following four donor types:
| Animals | Mixed Causes |
Fixed Amount | (1) A donor that wants to maximise impact for animals, but always donates a fixed amount each year. | (3) A donor that wants to do good in various ways (animals or otherwise), but always donates a fixed amount each year. |
Flexible Amount | (2) A donor that wants to maximise impact for animals, has lots of money, and will give money to any charity or proposal above a certain bar. | (4) A donor that wants to do good in various ways (animals or otherwise), has lots of money, and will give money to any charity or proposal above a certain bar. |
When we think about the idea that fundraising is mostly a “zero-sum game”, and think about counterfactually, what the raised money would do otherwise, then the effects of fundraising for nonprofits that help animals looks pretty different in each of these scenarios:
Here, you are directly competing with other animal advocacy nonprofits. Any money that you raise for your organisation from this donor will be denied to another potential animal advocacy organisation. This is a good thing if your organisation genuinely helps animals more cost-effectively than the other potential recipients, a bad thing if it is less cost-effective than the others, and roughly neutral if it is similarly cost-effective.
Here, the element of competition is removed; you’re no longer directly competing with other animal advocacy organisations, since both you and they will get funded if (the donor believes that) the work is above a certain bar.[3] The bar could be in terms of cost-effectiveness (e.g. only funding charities that seem likely to spare 1 animal life or more per dollar donated) or something else, like how much they liked / resonated with the organisation or project.
Here, you are directly competing with other nonprofits, but not solely animal advocacy nonprofits. The pros and cons are similar to in the first scenario, but the differences in cost-effectiveness between potential recipients of the money are probably larger, because they come from different cause areas. This is especially promising if you believe (as we do at AAC) that animal advocacy is one of the most cost-effective causes in the world. For example, let’s say that the average animal advocacy charity removes 1,000 times as much suffering as the average homelessness charity (this number is made up, it’s not based on a careful analysis). If your fundraising proposal causes that donor to give to your animal charity instead of a homelessness charity, then you might have caused that money to have 1,000 times as much impact as it otherwise would have had.
Here, the element of competition is removed; you’re no longer competing with anyone, since both you and they will get funded if (the donor believes that) the work is above a certain bar. So money raised from contexts like this are essentially entirely impact wins.
It’s hard to tell which dollars are worth the most
So, all else equal, money raised from situation 4 does the most good, and money raised from situation 1 does the least good. But, of course, all else is not equal. For example, it’s probably going to be a lot easier to fundraise from a donor who focuses exclusively on animals than a donor who is interested in a wide range of causes. So you might end up doing more good overall by focusing on those sorts of donors; the improvement in usefulness of each dollar raised is lower than it might be if you’d focused on donors who give to a wider range of cause areas, but you might raise more dollars overall this way.
And of course, in real life, it will often be very hard to tell how flexible a donor is (i.e. whether you just need to make sure that your organisation clears their bar, or whether you’re competing from a limited pool).
You might be able to make a guess about how flexible particular major donors or grant-makers are, and check how focused on animals their giving tends to be. For example, there are subgroups of Open Philanthropy and EA Funds that focus specifically on animal welfare, and that tend to give a roughly similar amount each year, but have some degree of flexibility (e.g. see these calculations and these discussions).
A grant-maker on the farmed animal team at Open Philanthropy told us that, as the total amount they are able to spend is increasing, they are moving from a model focused on giving away a fixed amount to a model focused on assessing whether potential grantees meet their bar for cost-effectiveness; they actually try to model the what each organisation or grant is able to achieve in terms of Disability-Adjusted Life-Years, a metric commonly used in assessing human health interventions.
You might not be able to access any data like this about donors giving smaller amounts, though it may be possible to somehow target your messaging and outreach towards donors with certain interests or past giving history.
At other times, however, the donor’s category will be pretty clear cut. For example:
A Giving What We Can pledger who gives 10% of their income every year and who only gives to effective animal advocacy charities would be in category 1.
The Pollination Project’s daily grants programme gives out $1,000 every day either to animal advocacy or other cause areas, so is pretty clearly in category 3.
A wealthy vegan who gives varying amounts to animal advocacy groups, environmental groups, and whatever else tugs on their heartstrings enough for them to open their wallet would clearly be category 4.
Reflection questions for participants in the Fundraising Work Placement:
|
How much money do you need to raise to make fundraising for animals worthwhile?
In theory: raise $1 per $1 spent
Theoretically, from an organisational perspective, fundraising makes sense as long as it raises more than $1 for every $1 spent on fundraising.
For example, let’s imagine:
Your salary is $50,000 per year
Your manager’s salary is $75,000 per year, and they spend 20% of their time supervising and supporting you.
You spend $10,000 per year on software, travel, and marketing.
Then the organisation would gain money overall if you raised more than $75,000 in a year.
In practice: aim higher!
However, usually, the bar for fundraising work should probably be much higher than $1 raised for $1 spent.
Organisations are not solely bottlenecked by money, so the salaries of staff under-represent their true value. For example, nonprofits are sometimes bottlenecked by management capacity, so 20% of your manager’s time is actually worth far more to the charity (and therefore animals) than $15,000, even if they are only paid that amount for that time. The less you think funding is a bottleneck for your organisation relative to these other bottlenecks, the higher your bar should be.
Even if it is just about worth it from the organisation’s point of view, it might not have been worth it from your own point of view, because you could potentially have worked on higher impact activities yourself. For example:
You could potentially have just taken paid work in the for-profit sector and tried to earn and donate as much as possible.
You could have taken another nonprofit role and added more value to the organisation there.
When we account for the idea that fundraising is mostly a zero-sum game (at least when we compare across all charities, rather than just specific types of charities), you might actually be having a negative impact overall by spending money from a limited pool of funding.
Even though it arguably doesn’t make sense from the perspective of having high impact, at least some donors and reviewers care a lot about expenditure on overheads. So money spent on overheads without a comparable increase in money spent on “programmes” or direct work might indirectly cause reduced donations.
So how high should the bar be for returns on fundraising investment in order to make it worthwhile, all-things-considered?
Of course, it depends a lot on the specifics of the above factors, such as the most likely alternative uses of the donated money, what other work you could have done. It would be very difficult to create a generalisable model, but our intuition is that the return for an animal advocacy charity would need to be at least two times the amount spent on fundraising, and likely much higher than that (e.g. closer to five times).
This does seem to be achievable. For example:
A few years ago, 80,000 Hours found that “for each £1 spent on fundraising, studies have shown that charities typically raise £4-10.”
It’s okay to raise less while you’re learning
However, there is also an important reason why, for anyone reading this who is participating in the Fundraising Work Placement, the bar should be lower than it ordinarily would be: you’re not just here to have direct impact, but also to evaluate, explore, and prepare for high-impact career paths in the animal advocacy movement. I.e. you’re gaining information and career capital relevant to effective animal advocacy, which may enable you personally to have more impact in the long-run. In the same way that it is often worth paying for a training course, the Fundraising Work Placement could be valuable overall even if you raise less money than is spent on your placement.
So you shouldn’t worry too much, but you should still aim to raise lots of money for your partner organisation! (Ideally from situations where the counterfactual value of the money raised isn’t as high.)
It can be tough to know what you’ve actually raised
Note also that it might be difficult to estimate what you personally raise for your placement organisation, for a number of reasons:
Organisations might receive some funding even if they invest no effort into fundraising. For example, individuals who read about or participate in their campaigns or services might donate money without much prompting. Fundraisers shouldn’t claim credit for raising money if that money would have been donated even without them.
If you work as part of a larger fundraising team, it will be hard to tell what role you played in raising the money that was raised. Options for how you could estimate this include:
Guess the proportion of the overall money that was raised due to you. E.g. in a fundraising team of 5, it might be reasonable to assume that you (as a temporary team member) were responsible for 10% of whatever was raised.
Compare the amount that was raised while you worked there to the amount of money that was raised in the previous few months (and perhaps the few months after you leave), and/or in the same period in the previous year. Before you look at the figures, it could be a good idea to list out factors other than your personal involvement that might have led to an increase or decrease in the period that you worked there, relative to those other periods. For example, if your Fundraising Work Placement ends shortly before the end of year “Giving Season” fundraising push, you shouldn’t be surprised if the total funds increase shortly after you leave – that doesn’t mean you were a poor fundraiser!
We won’t explore research on best practice in goal setting here, but bear in mind that goals should be both ambitious and realistic/achievable.
Discussion questions:
|
Animal fundraising: Who can we fundraise from?
When we were researching and writing our fundraising skills profile, we asked our interviewees their thoughts on trying to reach donors who don’t usually donate to farmed animal advocacy or animal-free food nonprofits.
A few of them highlighted that:
Health, poverty alleviation, or environmental arguments seem more promising for reaching these people.
People engaged with the effective altruism community seem to be more amenable than average to starting to donate to animal advocacy causes if they do not already do so.
It’s very difficult to reach these people, so it feels like a low priority for fundraisers, day to day.
An analysis of data from the “Classy Fundraising Suite” suggests that “recurring donors are 440% more valuable than one-time donors.” Several interviewees emphasised that it tends to be much easier to get existing donors to increase the quantity or effectiveness of their donations than to bring in new donors.
But don’t forget: not all dollars are equal, so funds raised from new audiences might be more useful for helping animals overall.
Faunalytics found evidence from their 2019 survey of donors to animal charities that “the smaller proportion of donations to non-companion animal charities can be partially explained by their lack of visibility rather than donors’ lack of motivation.”[4] That is, fundraising efforts from farmed animal advocacy organisations could successfully raise more donations from donors to animal causes other than farmed animal advocacy. Faunalytics also found evidence in an online experiment that it is not substantially harder to raise donations for farmed animal advocacy than for companion animal issues.
As an example of the promise of fundraising outreach to donors to other animal causes, consider Polish animal advocacy organisation Otwarte Klatki. Almost all of their campaigning efforts focus on farmed animals, and their campaigns are sometimes supported by sponsored ads and billboards. By comparison, they rarely post about their circus ban campaign; in February, only 2 out of 104 posts on their Facebook page were about this topic. However, at the time of checking, their circus ban petition had 105,000 signatures, compared to 204,000 total (68,000 average) across 3 factory farming petitions. The circus campaign might not be as cost-effective as the factory farming campaigns in terms of its direct impact for helping animals, but despite very low resource costs [5], it builds engagement with new supporters and provides contact details (social media, emails, and phone numbers) for Otwarte Klatki’s fundraising efforts.
Reaching donors who already donate to animal issues, such as to companion animal shelters, seems easier than reaching other sorts of donors who don’t currently give to farmed animal issues. Faunalytics found that “people who have previously donated to any animal charity gave 92% more money to farmed and companion animals than people who had not.”
Heather Herrell of Animal Charity Evaluators noted that, “in the past, ACE did a campaign specifically targeted companion animal donors, and we didn’t have much success.” She had the impression that other organisations who had rented lists of companion animal donors had struggled to reach them, but that there had not yet been much of a “unified campaign” by farmed animal advocacy organisations to reach these donors. Chris Popa wasn’t sure whether those who donated to companion animal shelters were more or less likely to donate to ProVeg than other individuals that he spoke with, but he noted that if you aware of this information, you can tailor your message towards the donor’s interests, tapping into the empathy that they have for animals.
We asked interviewees if there were particular groups that they tended to target in their fundraising activities and would encourage other animal advocacy groups to target. Marcela Borges of Sociedade Vegetariana Brasileira noted that most of their donors were from people over 30, who have stable enough lives and more money to give. Chris Popa of ProVeg noted that older people tend to give more, but that it can be easier to get some sort of regular donation from younger people, who might increase their gifts later.
Two interviewees noted that vegans are easier to target because people can get defensive about their diet and so omnivores might be unwilling to give to farmed animal advocacy organisations. Three interviewees noted that they had had success in fundraising from the effective altruism community. And two interviewees encouraged applying for grants from organisations beyond those focused specifically on animal welfare, such as those interested in environmental issues or health and nutrition.
Of course, different effective animal advocacy nonprofits will have slightly different audiences and messaging angles that are available to them, given that they have slightly different focuses and goals. Consider, for example:
Groups like The Good Food Institute or ProVeg International who promote animal product alternatives can presumably more easily tap into funding from donors interested in addressing climate change or promoting healthier food options than groups that promote animal rights or welfare reforms.
Groups promoting animal welfare reforms or animal rights might have an easier time appealing to people who identify as “animal lovers” or similar, because the animals are more directly centred in their campaigns and messaging.
Some groups have campaigns that have more overlap with other social issues. For example, Mercy For Animals has done some campaigns seeking to work with exploited slaughterhouse workers, which opens up options for messaging relating to social justice.
Reflection questions:
|
Research into effective fundraising for animal advocacy
Learning about nonprofit fundraising
When you’re learning how to get good at something, you can draw on multiple different sources of evidence:
| Anecdotal / intuitive | Robust testing |
Your own experiences | This includes both directly relevant experience (e.g. past fundraising experiences) and indirectly relevant experiences (e.g. other times you’ve tried to support or persuade someone). You can self-reflect on these experiences and their implications, or seek explicit feedback from others. | Sometimes it’s possible to test things directly yourself, e.g. A/B tests on an email fundraising campaign. Of course, you can also run less formal or quantifiable tests. For example, in major donor fundraising you can’t run an exact A/B test, but you could experiment with different sorts of messaging and build an intuition for what works best and with who. |
Others’ experiences | You can ask people specific questions about uncertainties you have. If you read blog posts, books, or other advice from professionals, they often draw primarily on their own experiences and intuitions, rather than formal studies or explicit testing of hypotheses. | In some cases, you might be able to access the results of explicit testing by other fundraisers during their jobs (e.g. if a colleague tells you about the results of an A/B test they ran). Academics sometimes run formal experiments relevant to fundraising. |
Of course, these four boxes are not entirely discrete categories. In reality, there is a spectrum from more intuitive learning to more explicit, robust testing of specific hypotheses, and when you seek feedback from others about your own work, you are indirectly also drawing on their experiences. Nevertheless, this is hopefully a helpful categorisation.
Learning from all four categories seems important; you shouldn’t neglect any of them entirely:
If you’re a reflective, analytical type (or just tend to procrastinate), you might be most at risk of not getting round to actually trying out the thing that you want to learn about (in our case, fundraising) and missing out on key learnings from your own experiences.
If you’re more of a doer than a thinker, you might be more at risk of not picking up some readily available insights from others’ experiences.
If you don’t like reading academic style writing, you might be especially at risk of not learning from the bottom right category.
Our Fundraising Work Placement will be most useful for building up an understanding of the top left category, though it will likely also present some opportunities for learning from the bottom left and top right categories. This post aims to go some way to addressing the gap in the programme for learning from evidence in the bottom right category, by highlighting some research relevant to effective fundraising for animal advocacy.
Learning from research on the most effective fundraising strategies
Firstly, note that there is some academic research specifically about the most effective fundraising strategies. Rather than reading individual studies, we recommend that you (at least first) focus on reading existing summaries of key findings from across multiple studies. For example:
(Recommended) A group of academic researchers conducted a meta-review and meta-analysis of “What works to promote charitable donations?”. You can read the full academic paper or their more concise and informal summary; you only really need to read the first two pages of that document.
(Lower priority) Alternatively, this summary of a literature review about “Why Do People Give Money To Charity?” is quite concise and easy to engage with. However, this review is older and conducted by a less experienced researcher than the above review.
There are, of course, many other studies less directly focused on fundraising that have useful implications. The research on communications and persuasion seems especially relevant:
(Recommended) The “Moderators” subsection of the “Direct advocacy and persuasion” section in this literature review (“Theories of persuasion moderators,” “Communicator factors,” “Message factors,” “Other factors”) may be helpful.
(Lower priority) If you would like a book-length treatment of the topic, Persuasion: Social Influence and Compliance Gaining by Robert Gass and John Seiter is academic but quite engaging and easily readable. It describes a number of evidence-based tactics that are effective at encouraging behavioural changes. It is expensive to buy the most recent edition, though free versions can be identified online.
And some companies write up findings from their own A/B tests or other research. We’re not aware of a summary of resources like this, but here are some example posts:
Learning from research on fundraising for animals
Faunalytics have also written a series of research posts seeking to identify the most effective fundraising strategies specifically for farmed animal advocacy:
We encourage you to read those posts in full, since they are so directly relevant to effective fundraising for animal advocacy. However, we’ll briefly summarise some of the key findings from those reports:
“The most promising demographics to target for new donations are people aged 55 and up and people with incomes of at least $50,000.”
“A small percentage of major donors contributed a large proportion of the total dollars to animal causes.”
“People who have previously donated to any animal charity gave 92% more money to farmed and companion animals than people who had not.”
“Appeals with no descriptive text at all” (i.e. just a picture of either a dog or a pig) “performed as well as the rest” (i.e. appeals with two paragraphs of descriptive text). This finding points to minimal appeals as the most cost-effective messaging strategy for donations, as it suggests that lengthier ads may be unnecessary.”
Donors to farmed animal advocacy charities are not all vegetarian or vegan and don’t all participate in activism.
“In order of association size, the causes disproportionately associated with giving to animals were: environmental charities (excluding animal-specific ones), charities supporting troops or veterans, [and] disaster relief. The ones disproportionately linked to not giving to animal causes were: places of worship [and] educational institutions and charities.”
Of course, these principles might not hold true for all organisations or contexts; fundraisers and marketers may need to conduct further, more situation-specific testing.
If you’d like to hear from the experiences of fundraisers in the movement, you might be interested in the various talks on fundraising from the Conference on Animal Rights in Europe.
Reflection questions:
|
Next steps
If you want to find out more about fundraising for nonprofits that help animals, read our skills profile which touches on topics like who this sort of work is a good fit for and how to prepare for fundraising roles.
If you think you already have the qualities needed for high-quality fundraising, you can offer your support via our skilled volunteering board, or look for paid work on our job board. Both of these boards only include opportunities that we expect to be reasonably cost-effective.
Our Recruitment Specialist, Catherine Bunting, is also focusing substantially on helping animal advocacy nonprofits to find talented potential fundraisers. So if you’re not sure whether you’re ready to apply for roles yet or not, you can email Catherine your CV at catherine@animaladvocacycareers.org.
If you would like to receive our articles, latest research and updates, sign up to our mailing list here.
Footnotes
[1] Of course, of this money, only a tiny proportion goes towards farmed animal advocacy. We have not seen the full Giving USA reports. However, Faunalytics found from a large sample of “animal-cause donors” that “82% of respondents had given money to companion animal charities. In addition, two-thirds of those donors had not given money to any other type of animal charity… 12% [had given] to charities for farmed animals (including sanctuaries).” Using data available in 2016, Animal Charity Evaluators found that “while farmed animals account for over 99% of all animals used and killed by humans in the U.S., only 1% of donations to animal charities go to those that specifically focus on helping farmed animals.”
[3] There is some potential for indirect competition; maybe if the donor sees more proposals that meet the bar, they will raise the bar so that they are giving a similar amount again.
[4] Faunalytics found from a large sample of “animal-cause donors” that “12% [had given] to charities for farmed animals (including sanctuaries).” However, “when presented with a range of charity options in a hypothetical donation scenario, the percentage of people who donated to companion animal charities was about the same (85%), [while] the number of people who donated to other animal causes increased dramatically: 52% donated part of the money to charities for wildlife or endangered species; 49% to charities for a broad range of animals; 37% to marine animals; 29% to donkeys, horses, etc.; 28% to animals used in science; and 26% to farmed animals.”
[5] Dobrosława Gogłoza (former CEO of Anima International) told us via email that they “rarely post” about their circus campaign; this was mostly just “when there is something viral on the internet and we feel like we can capitalize on… We don't really spend time on actually doing anything in the campaign. Of course, if we meet politicians then we would mention the circus ban, but rather along with fur farming ban that we focus on much more. We don't have anyone hired to work on circuses, some volunteers just prepare content for social media about it every now and then.”