One important distinction between FarmKind's campaign and Animal Rising's is that FarmKind wants Veganuary to succeed. The goal isn't to hurt Veganuary, or to start any sort of debate within the movement -- the target audience is the majority of the public whose views on diet change are entrenched but whose views on whether/where to donate are not.
Re: Bjorn on whether there's evidence that people are more likely to donate than change diet, a forthcoming study from Rethink Priorities found "people rated diet change as harder than making donations, with a medium effect size", "even amongst the lowest income levels, the difficulty of making donations did not exceed the difficulty of diet change". There's a lot of nuance in this study so I don't want to oversimplify it, but basically: Watch this space -- some interesting findings on what messages look most promising for motivating action for animals coming soon.
“Veganuary’s strategy depends on a recognizable brand built up over more than a decade. How do we put a price tag on that?”
I know this is a rhetorical question, but I think a lot of for-profit companies deal with this same issue during acquisitions. If you were serious about getting some estimate for this number, you could try to look at acquisitions of companies with similar properties and look for the amount paid for goodwill in the purchase agreement (calculated as purchase price minus fair value of identifiable net assets). Still, it’s hard to make this comparison, and I don’t know how the non-profit vs for-profit difference would change the amount.
That's very interesting! Relatedly, I heard in an interview recently about how the insurance industry has developed extremely sophisticated instruments for pricing risk. If we thought it was actually going to be action informing, we could get very quantitative about these tradeoffs.
I'm currently reading How to Measure Anything, which serves as a brief intro to the foundational topics regarding... measuring anything. But perhaps you've already read it.
Sorry if I've already asked you, but have you seen this analysis?
“Veganuary started in the UK in 2014, and I noted the production of broilers per person in the UK in January increased 4.27 times as fast from 2014 to 2024 as from 1994 to 2013.”
This post flippin' rips a**! An interesting descent into crucial considerations and open-mindedness. "The blind punching the blind" is going to come to mind whenever I think of a serious issue, now.
At first it "felt bad" to read the "Forget Veganuary" headline. However, after putting my feelings aside and recentering myself around the animals that need and will need our help, I'm grateful for this bold move. Our movement and funding is so small, I think now is our precious time to undertake status quo - defying campaigns while trusting that our funders are loyal and it it for the long haul.
Thank you Aidan for the piece and comparison between FarmKind's and the RSPCA's respective campaigns!
How much press did "Forget Veganuary" end up getting? I just spent 10 minutes searching for news articles about Veganuary and didn't see any other than the Daily Mail article.
I'm not sure how much this changes things: it doesn't answer questions like "is more attention on FV good or bad" or "was it reasonable ex ante or not." But it seems possible that the primary effect has been the intra-animal advocacy [debate / infighting].
lol I think it is very possible the internal dialogue has been the primary effect.
There have been some broadcast interviews you might not find easily and they might still land a few more as the month progresses! Also, the competitive eaters have released videos on their own socials. And we won’t want to evaluate the revenue raised by the campaign until the end of the month.
Tony Vernelli had at least one TV interview in the UK, and I'm pretty sure there was at least one other press article. I agree that's not huge (if that's all), though somewhat bigger than what the average campaigns of this size tends to boast.
Usually I find your posts much too long-winded but this was very good! Well done.
My initial reaction to Forget Veganuary was disappointment at their very confrontational messaging (even though I’m sympathetic to the welfarists and their argument that vegans simply aren’t getting it done), but your post makes me think more deeply about it. Of course the key will be what KPIs are going to be applied to measure the success of the campaign and how measurable it is in the first place.
Hey, I got the impression from this piece that Veganuary was in support of the FarmKind campaign. But this post from Wendy Matthews (CEO of Veganuary) suggests otherwise:
"We would like to clarify that Veganuary was not involved in developing the “Forget Veganuary” campaign and had no role in shaping or approving its messaging or execution. While we were given advance notice that FarmKind was planning a campaign promoting offsetting as an alternative to trying vegan in January and were kept informed about media timing, we did not have sight of the website content until after it was launched, nor of the final PR framing." https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/A8euyupr96ZHZuhzq/climatedoc-s-shortform?commentId=GzpX2vsdXAG7bqrTm
One important distinction between FarmKind's campaign and Animal Rising's is that FarmKind wants Veganuary to succeed. The goal isn't to hurt Veganuary, or to start any sort of debate within the movement -- the target audience is the majority of the public whose views on diet change are entrenched but whose views on whether/where to donate are not.
Re: Bjorn on whether there's evidence that people are more likely to donate than change diet, a forthcoming study from Rethink Priorities found "people rated diet change as harder than making donations, with a medium effect size", "even amongst the lowest income levels, the difficulty of making donations did not exceed the difficulty of diet change". There's a lot of nuance in this study so I don't want to oversimplify it, but basically: Watch this space -- some interesting findings on what messages look most promising for motivating action for animals coming soon.
“Veganuary’s strategy depends on a recognizable brand built up over more than a decade. How do we put a price tag on that?”
I know this is a rhetorical question, but I think a lot of for-profit companies deal with this same issue during acquisitions. If you were serious about getting some estimate for this number, you could try to look at acquisitions of companies with similar properties and look for the amount paid for goodwill in the purchase agreement (calculated as purchase price minus fair value of identifiable net assets). Still, it’s hard to make this comparison, and I don’t know how the non-profit vs for-profit difference would change the amount.
That's very interesting! Relatedly, I heard in an interview recently about how the insurance industry has developed extremely sophisticated instruments for pricing risk. If we thought it was actually going to be action informing, we could get very quantitative about these tradeoffs.
I'm currently reading How to Measure Anything, which serves as a brief intro to the foundational topics regarding... measuring anything. But perhaps you've already read it.
Oooh I haven’t!
Sorry if I've already asked you, but have you seen this analysis?
“Veganuary started in the UK in 2014, and I noted the production of broilers per person in the UK in January increased 4.27 times as fast from 2014 to 2024 as from 1994 to 2013.”
Shared by someone on an EA blog, I think.
Ugh, hadn't seen that.
This post flippin' rips a**! An interesting descent into crucial considerations and open-mindedness. "The blind punching the blind" is going to come to mind whenever I think of a serious issue, now.
Good to hear! I'll have more of my posts in the future just literally be copying what other people said, it's much less time consuming 🤣
At first it "felt bad" to read the "Forget Veganuary" headline. However, after putting my feelings aside and recentering myself around the animals that need and will need our help, I'm grateful for this bold move. Our movement and funding is so small, I think now is our precious time to undertake status quo - defying campaigns while trusting that our funders are loyal and it it for the long haul.
Thank you Aidan for the piece and comparison between FarmKind's and the RSPCA's respective campaigns!
Thanks for insisting on approaching the movement with an open mind!
How much press did "Forget Veganuary" end up getting? I just spent 10 minutes searching for news articles about Veganuary and didn't see any other than the Daily Mail article.
I'm not sure how much this changes things: it doesn't answer questions like "is more attention on FV good or bad" or "was it reasonable ex ante or not." But it seems possible that the primary effect has been the intra-animal advocacy [debate / infighting].
lol I think it is very possible the internal dialogue has been the primary effect.
There have been some broadcast interviews you might not find easily and they might still land a few more as the month progresses! Also, the competitive eaters have released videos on their own socials. And we won’t want to evaluate the revenue raised by the campaign until the end of the month.
Tony Vernelli had at least one TV interview in the UK, and I'm pretty sure there was at least one other press article. I agree that's not huge (if that's all), though somewhat bigger than what the average campaigns of this size tends to boast.
Usually I find your posts much too long-winded but this was very good! Well done.
My initial reaction to Forget Veganuary was disappointment at their very confrontational messaging (even though I’m sympathetic to the welfarists and their argument that vegans simply aren’t getting it done), but your post makes me think more deeply about it. Of course the key will be what KPIs are going to be applied to measure the success of the campaign and how measurable it is in the first place.
Ha thanks for the feedback.
I found this blog so insightful. Was looking for a summary on what had been going on in the movement lately and this was perfect, thank you!
Hey, I got the impression from this piece that Veganuary was in support of the FarmKind campaign. But this post from Wendy Matthews (CEO of Veganuary) suggests otherwise:
"We would like to clarify that Veganuary was not involved in developing the “Forget Veganuary” campaign and had no role in shaping or approving its messaging or execution. While we were given advance notice that FarmKind was planning a campaign promoting offsetting as an alternative to trying vegan in January and were kept informed about media timing, we did not have sight of the website content until after it was launched, nor of the final PR framing." https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/A8euyupr96ZHZuhzq/climatedoc-s-shortform?commentId=GzpX2vsdXAG7bqrTm