Conversation with Che Green, Brooke Haggerty, and Jo Anderson of Faunalytics

Che Green is the Executive Director, Brooke Haggerty is the Operations Manager, and Jo Anderson is the Research Director of Faunalytics. They spoke with ACE Senior Researcher Sydney Heiss on July 22, 2019. This is a summary of their conversation.

What would you consider to be Faunalytics’ three biggest accomplishments from this past year?

Green: Our biggest accomplishment is around the research program and the great work that Jo has been doing, so I will let her take the lead on this first one.

Anderson: I think that the improvement and expansion of our research program, which started before I came on board and has continued and improved since then, is definitely one of our biggest accomplishments. I think that we are actually leading the field within the EAA (Effective Animal Advocacy) space, in terms of increasing the rigor and the transparency of the work that we are doing. We have pre-registered every original study that we have run for the past two years. We have been publishing full descriptions of our analyses and our methods and providing open access to the data for all those public studies using tools like the Open Science Framework. We also have a research ethics policy in place and standardized consent and debriefing procedures that we use for our studies.

Just in terms of how we come up with new research, we have started developing a prioritization framework for how we choose particular studies. We already had something in place on our website that goes over how we choose our topic areas. This process starts with prioritizing research that has a lot of impact for as many animals as possible, followed by research that impacts as many advocates as possible. With less priority, but still on the list, are the studies that would let us do a quick response to urgent questions in the movement: things that can be used immediately, and things that give unstudied or very understudied topics foundational-level research because that can also be very impactful. We’ve also started working more specifically on the prioritization framework within those topic areas. We use a rating scheme to decide which projects to start with, taking into account things like feasibility, potential impact, and a number of other criteria.

In terms of more specific accomplishments within that umbrella of the research program, I am very proud of our numbers. I think we have put out six major studies in 2018 and 2019. Plus another year of the animal tracker, our longitudinal study, and also eight original analyses of existing data sets with our own and others. In terms of the studies (there are too many, obviously, to go into the details), I’ll discuss a couple of our highest impact ones.

The first was our cross-national study where we looked at the BRIC countries in terms of attitudes toward farmed animals, and intentions and behavior for diet. It was a tricky study, but we learned a lot about cross-cultural research. Not only do we have the results from countries like Brazil, China, and India (that are incredibly important), we also learned a lot that we can tell other advocates about, like best practices for cross-cultural research, because it’s an expanding field. In our randomized control trial with Animal Equality, we looked at the impact of their video media on pork consumption. It was large in scale and has been high impact in terms of the reaction to it from EAs (Effective Altruists), who I think were happy to see rigorous research that showed the impact of individual outreach. There are too many other ones to go into, but we have studied clean meat messaging, best practices in labeling plant-based meat, and people who donate to animal causes. We are also now running a study that I think is not an accomplishment because we have not finished yet, but it will be for sure. It’s a longitudinal study of new vegans and vegetarians; we got funding from the AARF (Animal Advocacy Research Fund). I think that that will have a lot of impact for people as a follow-up to our previous research on current and former vegans or vegetarians.

Green: It’s a very productive research department, which is part of why it’s such a big accomplishment. Previously, we were doing maybe up to three independent studies per year. We thought of that as an area for growth, and Jo just ran with it.

Another main program area is our research library, which continues to be one of our biggest accomplishments. It has now just over 4,000 studies in the library, we continue to add about 200 new library summaries per year. These are summaries of existing research studies conducted by third parties. And we also do an additional 50 or so blogs, which usually touch on one or more research studies as well. That continues to be one of our most highly visible programs in terms of reach and breadth; we reach about 23,000 unique visitors per month.

Another area where Brooke has had a huge role since she has come on (about eight months ago or so) is our internal processes. Brooke brings a lot of expertise in terms of process management and operations. We have improved HR policies, and we are updating our accounting systems and things like that. We are also doing a pretty robust board self-evaluation right now where we are going through different responsibilities and identifying areas or opportunities for improvements. This process orientation has helped us professionalize a bit.

Just one more, if I can, we are pretty effectively using volunteers, both for the independent research and the library. On the research side, we are working with a lot of Ph.D. volunteers, very skilled people that are able to take some of the analytical tasks off of our plate. On the library side, the majority of the write-ups are written by volunteers right now. So with the team of just five, I think we are doing a pretty great job of making use of skilled volunteers.

Haggerty: I will just echo Che. I am really proud of the work we have done on just getting our internal systems where they need to be and just making sure we can run as efficiently as possible, and really proud of what we have done in the last eight months.

Could you speak about the strengths of Faunalytics more generally?

Green: Similar to ACE, our biggest strength is probably the area of focus, our mission. That is really just figuring out what works and what does not work for animal advocacy. That includes not just providing detailed information for EAA but also more accessible information and findings and interpretations of research for the layperson, the average animal advocate out there. We try to bridge both of those audiences with a relatively simple sort of front end to the information while also providing full data sets and more details for the people who want to get into it. We are increasingly doing infographics, webinars, and videos to try to convey information to people who learn differently. But I think just our general focus on what works best or what works at all for animal advocacy is hugely crucial to the movement. That is probably one of our biggest strengths.

Another strength is the talent on our team: I’m biased because I was involved in hiring all of these people, but the old adage of hiring people who are smarter than you was something I feel like I have accomplished. Jo has incredible research expertise, she is a Ph.D. Social Scientist leading our research department. We just hired a new Researcher three weeks ago and he will have his Ph.D. within the next three to four months; he is also a Social Psychologist. Brooke has spent many years running an organization several times larger than Faunalytics as their Executive Director so her operational expertise is obviously impressive in a lot of ways. Karol, our Content Director who manages all of our websites and social media, has a Master’s in Communication. He has produced feature-length documentaries, and he is very creative and good at that level of work as well. I am very stoked and excited by the team that we have, and we also get along great. I think that the talent that we have—the ability to provide that level of research for the movement—is based on that level of expertise.

Any additional strengths anybody else would like to touch on?

Anderson: Che already mentioned it, but I think this is an important strength. We make sure that the way we put out our research and what we are doing is accessible to everybody’s learning style and abilities, whether that’s summaries, videos, or webinars. It is important because people learn differently. We want our information to be accessible to advocates, no matter what their style is.

Green: And it is a growing strength. We have started doing those types of visual formats in the last year or two, maybe up to three. We are starting to invest more in that.

Anderson: If I can add one more, the way that we are positioned in between EAA and people who are working on the ground in all kinds of different advocacy groups is a strength in itself. Not only are we getting information from our research to those people, but they also provide feedback to us when we are designing our research program in figuring out where the important issues are, what are the questions people still have. I really value having that connection to the people on the ground, doing the work every day, through things like my office hours, email, and Facebook contacts.

Can you speak a little bit about your weaknesses?

Green: The first one is a weakness that we share with many others, which is measuring our impact. Even though we are researchers, and we have arguably a pretty deep understanding of impact measurement: We have been helping other groups measure their impact for 20 years. Not only is it challenging to begin with, but we are an additional step removed from the activism and the application of the information that we are producing. Because we are so focused on those medium- and long-term impacts, it is very difficult for us to measure that. We have made efforts over the years and those have largely been qualitative or small sample sizes in nature, but we are thinking a lot more about this going forward. We are using our research department expertise but now looking internally at how we can do a better job of measuring impact. I am speaking to how we are overcoming the weakness, but Jo, maybe you can just touch briefly on what we are doing there.

Anderson: Since Tom came on in particular, we have been working on formalizing, to the best of our ability, a way of measuring our impact. It is, of course, very difficult, but we are starting with the coarse data that we have right now to try and get at things like how many people are visiting the site, how they are broken down in terms of their affiliations, and advocates versus academics. The eventual goal is to try and come up with some sort of measure of how people in each of those categories tend to use our research and are able to help animals directly so that hopefully we can get somewhere closer to figuring out what our impact might be.

Green: Another weakness for us is visibility. Historically, I would take a lot of the blame for that, because I’m just not particularly good at marketing; it’s not my nature. But even when we have had more talented people come on board with those skills, getting the visibility for the research that we do continues to be a challenge. I think it’s partly because we are not investing in advertising except in a very limited sense. There are some things related to the visibility we’re not able to do as a relatively small organization. That said, because we are producing more independent research now, we created a formal dissemination plan that gets tweaked and tailored to each study to try to maximize the visibility both internally to the movement, and also externally to media. We are also doing more targeted outreach. For instance, with our recent donor study, Brooke actually led a lot of outreach to development directors and animal groups, so we could get the information in front of them and also invite them to a tailored webinar with exactly what they wanted to see. We are doing limited advertising and visibility continues to be one of the weaknesses. Every month at least, I hear a story about a long-time advocate who has found out about us for the first time, and that’s always mildly infuriating. We are improving but it still remains one of our weaknesses.

I wanted to touch on something we do not really think of as a weakness, but it has come up in the past couple of reviews. That’s topic selection and the amount of time that Faunalytics spends on non-EA related topics. The last time we talked, I think we estimated roughly two-thirds of our work went to farmed animals specifically. We have been in an ongoing evolution of that. We took ACE’s feedback in the last couple of reviews and we are being increasingly selective with the topics that we choose. Right now, about two-thirds of our library summaries are related specifically to farmed animals or effective animal advocacy. 100% of our independent studies are focused on either farmed animals or what we consider meta topics like increasing capacity, donations, or volunteers. Overall, as an organization, we think about 90–92% of our resources go toward what would be considered effectiveness-related topics.

At the same time, we think that it is important at least for the library work to devote some energy to those other topic areas. This is because we think that firstly, there is interesting information that can be applied very effectively to those topic areas. For instance, there might be occasionally great studies that can help somebody in the area of spay/neuter, or with anti-vivisection work or something like that. Secondly, and this is the point we have not made very effectively in the past reviews, is that we also think that the library serves as a cross-pollination tool to educate people about other topics. We want to dig into this more around that impact measurement. Our email subscribers can sign up by topic, so it’s personalized by the 6 different topics we covered in our library. Less than 1% of our email subscribers are signed up to just companion animal topics, while 66% are signed up to both companion animal topics and either farmed animals or effective animal advocacy. We need better information around that, but it gives us a sense of the fact that we are exposing a lot of these sorts of single-issue advocates to broader effectiveness topics.

How do you create or revise your strategic plan? Who is involved and how are decisions are made?

Green: We do strategic planning every year. We essentially do a major strategic plan roughly every three years (might be every two on a given year), and then we refresh it every year. We are coming up to that cycle where we will do a full strategic plan this year. Historically, it has largely involved me creating the plan with input from staff members and then getting the board approval for it. This year, it will be a much more collaborative process. Jo will be creating a strategic plan for the research department, Brooke will be helping me design a strategic plan at a high level and of course, will collaborate with the board. We touched on this in the last review when Faunalytics was going through a process, I think it was in 2015, where we created logic models for each of our program areas and for the organization overall. We also developed a theory of change, which was influenced by ACE’s model of theory of change. We use that to then feed into our strategic planning process as well. So it’s very collaborative between staff and board, and it’s based on those frameworks.

When you say collaborative between staff and everyone else, is it a meeting with a conversation, a formal submission of topics, or something else?

Green: I’ll separate a little bit from past processes to this year. Past processes have been largely me creating the plan, up until about three years ago. This year we are having ongoing board meetings and Brooke is involved with those, which are now touching on strategic planning as well. But we have not gotten to the point yet where we are involving Jo and Karol, for instance. That is going to happen in the next few months.

Does the board basically check off on it, or do they have input as well?

Green: They have input, but it’s more reacting to what I and the staff produce than actually designing it. So they will ask good questions and suggest we take certain directions, but it’s more that level of oversight than anything.

Since it’s going to be a more collaborative process this year, who has the final say, and what happens if people disagree?

Green: I would say that the board has the final say for signing off on the strategic plan, and I would probably have the final say in terms of its creation. We have not had to deal with too much disagreement over the years, which is great. Right now we are talking about having one of our first in-person get-togethers next year, and it is also going to involve strategic planning. I am now talking to Caryn about this, our Board President. I think that it will be very much a back-and-forth process. I don’t see a lot of disagreement, but if there is any, then it will be myself and the Board President who will likely make the final decision.

It sounds like you are working to make sure everyone’s needs are met, or their inputs are heard. If a staff member disagrees with something, is there a formal process in place?

Green: The formal process we have is that if a staff person disagrees and they don’t feel comfortable going to their direct manager, they can go to the Board President and sort of circumvent things that way. To my knowledge, that has not happened, but there is a process in place to allow it.

Anderson: I have not been involved with the formal strategic planning process yet, because we have not come to that point in the cycle since I have been on. But I just want to jump in and say that Che has always been very willing and encouraging of involving me in the strategic planning of the research department. Pretty much from day one, when I came on board, it was clear that my opinion matters and that I will have an impact on shaping the direction of that program. So even though we have not hit the formal point yet, I feel like we have already negotiated to a large extent in terms of how this works in a collaborative way. We don’t always 100% agree, but we are able to have a conversation about it and come to an agreement that we both like.

What is the best decision you have made this year as a leader?

Green: Hiring Brooke. My role is changing and becoming a little bit narrow, and Brooke’s process orientation and strategic nature have just been awesome. She has taken a bunch off my plate and also helped me take the organization in a more professional direction. The studies are fantastic, don’t get me wrong. I think that those are great. But we are very much a people-driven organization, so I think that is probably the best decision.

Anderson: For me, it was the decision to hire a full-time research scientist who can work at a level that is very similar to my own and with whom I can work collaboratively. Although it was a group decision of which I was part, not my own. He has only just started, but it is going incredibly well. It is going to do a lot to increase our capacity: both to put out more research, but also to have more of a back and forth within the organization between people who have strong training in research. I love that we have an entire organizational framework set up for talking to ACE and Mercy For Animals and the others, but it’s also just nice to have something within the organization where we can do that. I think it will improve both the quantity and quality of our research.

Haggerty: I’m involved with a lot of aspects of the organization but have not necessarily made one big decision that I would be the most proud of. I would say off the top of my head, we actually have donor software now. Before that, we had a good old spreadsheet, so I am really excited. But I will echo Jo that I really do feel like it is the team making decisions, Che has always been very open: He invites our feedback and we tend to come to a decision as a team. I think that’s really exciting. But if I have to answer you, I think I’m going with actual donor software that we have for free this year, which was an added bonus.

Che, can you say more about the mentioned changes to your role?

Green: I have taken a little bit of a step back and I am now actually at half-time. I am still the Executive Director: My role is now almost exclusively administration and fundraising, whereas Brooke has taken on a lot of that administrative work. It actually speaks pretty well to the collaborative decision-making process: We are increasingly empowering other people in the organization. Jo is a great example; she now has somebody working for her as the head of the research department. And others are taking on more and more responsibility as I take a step back. Over the next six to 12 months, I anticipate taking even more of a step back, possibly going to zero hours and just having the board role at some point. We are still figuring out that process. This is the five-year succession plan that we started in 2015.

What is the biggest mistake or the hardest decision that you have made as a leader in the last twelve months?

Green: Two come to mind. The first I would say, probably the biggest one, is that we are discontinuing the animal tracker study. That is 12 years of longitudinal work, and it is hard to just let it go. But we also think it was very much the right move. It has a couple of different audiences, the general advocacy audience, and the sponsors. There is a clear benefit for the sponsors and less so for the general animal advocacy audience. We just were not clear on the impact and the benefit to the movement, and we think that we can serve those sponsors in other ways. Giving up that key program area, I think, was one of the tougher decisions. The second I would say was letting somebody go from a research assistant position. Jo just spoke to this: We made the decision that we needed somebody at that higher level who she could work collaboratively with versus someone just helping her. That is always difficult.

Was there a decision you’ve made recently that you have not been able to follow through on?

Anderson: Not purely yes, but I have many plans for what we would like to do with the research department in an internal improvement way, including estimating impact and expanding on our research advice section of the website. I’d also like to more clearly differentiate what is meant as gold standard advice for EAAs versus advice for a small group that does not have the resources to run 1,200 people through an RCT (randomized controlled trial). There are many things I would like to do and I am hoping that bringing Tom on board and doubling our capacity will let me do a lot more of those things. We have started all of them, but we have not made 100% progress.

Haggerty: Copying Jo’s answer, our board of directors is working on long-term strategies and they are doing self-review. This is something we have started but it will take time to go through everything that needs to be discussed, so it’s a work in progress.

How do you measure the outcomes of your most important projects?

Anderson: So far, we only measure the outcome with a combination of anecdotal evidence from speaking to people, our community survey (which allows people to comment on which of our resources they have used), and a deliberate process of soliciting people that will read our content, like what Brooke was doing with the donor study. She did a huge amount of outreach to people that we thought would benefit from that information and essentially cold-called them. Many of them we already knew, but some were new organizations. That is less about measuring impact than creating it. Because it is so hard to measure, creating it is also a way of doing that and ensuring that we are having an impact.

For the future, we have a spreadsheet going behind the scenes with many different ways of operationalizing the impact that we are considering. It includes things like looking at page views by type of resource, but it is a fair bit of work to try and get those data, so we can draw a random sample of pages and compare that way. We are also starting up a research sign-up list where people can sign up to be on the Faunalytics research list and answer questions on whatever kind of survey we might have at the time. Just in the process of signing up for the list, we are collecting a few basic pieces of information about people. So even without running a study, we’re hoping that the list sign-up will be useful to us in that we’ll have a sense of what kind of work people are doing; whether they are farmed animal advocates or any animal advocates, whether they are in a grassroots organization or something bigger, etc. So yes, no one clear thing, but we are trying to come up with a really comprehensive list and figure out what the best options are from that.

Could you speak more about the board self-assessment and if you have a formal self-assessment at Faunalytics?

Green: As part of the strategic plan, we do an organizational review, but I wouldn’t call it a full robust self-assessment. Last year, the board did an evaluation of the Executive Director: myself. This year, the board is focused internally on evaluating itself. Basically, what we are doing is assigning each person one of the key areas of responsibility for a board, looking at best practices around those, and the delta between what we are doing and what the best practices suggest. Then we are coming up with action items as a result of that. We’re sort of tightening up our own house but also looking at that externally. We want to recruit additional advisors and board members as well as bring on additional skills and diversification.

When you finish a project, is there any process afterwards such as a post-mortem or a retrospective conversation about how it went?

Anderson: Not formally, but yes. We talk amongst ourselves, both within the research section and more broadly, about how much uptake we thought the study received, how much it was talked about on social media, how many people we were contacted personally, etc.

Green: We do also try to get feedback. With the donor study, we did a webinar as a result of that, and then a quick follow-up survey to try to feed into that impact assessment.

Have there been any additional recent changes in the organization? Have you improved any programs or cut any of the less successful ones?

Green: Big changes started during the 2017 review. We have reduced our client work to almost nothing because it was less discretionary with topic choices and it was arguably less impactful. Now we are being very selective about client work, and only taking on one or two client projects per year. We are also selecting them according to impact, using that same framework we described earlier, so it is almost always farmed animals or meta topics for our client studies. That was a big change.

I mentioned the animal tracker going away and my role reducing, the expansion of the research program. Last time we talked to ACE as part of this process, Jo was at half time, and she is now full time and she works with Tom. So our research department capacity has increased dramatically. Brooke’s hiring has really helped us improve our processes quite a bit, which was another big change. We did a pretty substantial overhaul of our website. It’s interesting because we relied on ACE’s method for doing it: We did the same card sort research to figure out a new navigation and overhauled our search. That was a big project for us.

Anderson: Related to the website, one part of that is the research advice section. Research advice more generally is something that we’ve changed, as we are moving away from client research. What has replaced it, not in terms of hours but in terms of perspective, is an occasional pro bono project which generally takes the form of the office hour that I mentioned earlier. Of the research team’s combined 70 hours a week, one hour goes to open office hour time, which is using Google Hangouts to allow anyone in the advocacy space to ask questions for me or for Karol, who also has one. People can ask about anything from needing to find stats, needing help to support a program, requesting advice on how to evaluate the impact of a program or how to measure things in general, and more. A lot of smaller grassroots-type organizations will not have the tools they need to get started, and they’ll frequently ask about how to collect data about their own organization. So I am proud of the change we have made in the capacity-building direction. I think that we are doing more now, with very few hours put toward helping support smaller organizations being more effective, as opposed to doing larger scale client projects that were less impactful overall. The vast majority of the people and organizations we’ve helped have been focused on farmed animals and veg*n advocacy.

Haggerty: One more thing that I can add is that Che and I are looking to diversify our funding a little bit and looking into other areas and opportunities for new funders to bring in a little bit more so that our research department can continue to grow.

Is there any evidence that would cause you to change your approach to helping animals?

Green: The utilization of what we are producing, certainly. If we had a better understanding of the reach and usefulness of the research, we would adjust accordingly. Of course, if perhaps there were more tractable ways of helping reduce wild animal suffering that would translate to research, we would potentially look into that more. We are largely an evidence-driven organization, so we would be responsive to those kinds of things.

Anderson: Essentially, when we created our new research prioritization framework, we included potential impact. We are trying to solicit stakeholders for the projects now so that we can be sure that the projects will be impactful. That is the plan going forward, which came from conversations we have had about what’s not working, or what’s not working as well that we want to improve on for future research.

How would you describe the culture at Faunalytics?

Anderson: Awesome.

Haggerty: I will change my answer from before, I think my best decision, other than getting that donor software in place, was joining Faunalytics. I love working for an awesome team that is helping do so much for the animal movement.

Green: As I mentioned it earlier, it’s not just the talent, it’s the people and how cool they are. I really enjoy working with them. I feel like we have pretty strong morale, and we offer a lot of flexibility in terms of hours and timing. We work remotely and that is challenging, but we do try to bake in some social time into our team meetings.

Anderson: I feel like morale is very good and that we all get along extremely well. Just speaking personally, if any issues come up, for instance when my cat had to go to the vet with ongoing kidney issues and we were stressed out and needed time, it was not even a question. The organization is not only responsive and flexible with that but also incredibly positive and supportive. It feels super cheesy but it’s a very family vibe, everyone is looking out for each other and is supportive. We get along really well.

Haggerty: I agree. We also have bi-weekly team calls where we talk about work issues and also personal updates. We also try to have strictly social calls every now and then where we just put work aside. We had one over the holiday; it was just really nice to get to know each other a little bit better. I have to echo Jo, it’s just a really great group.

Do you have any diversity programs? Is diversity considered when hiring?

Green: It’s definitely considered, but it’s admittedly an area where we can improve. We are actually fortunate to have a pretty diverse mix of staff and board in some ways, but that does not extend to racial diversity in any way and is not due to proactive recruitment programs. We are conscious of our need for increased diversity, knowing that we are not benefiting from multiple, broader perspectives.

That is something that we are thinking more about, particularly when it comes to recruiting volunteers, staff or advisors. We are focusing a little bit more on educating ourselves and the team around DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) related issues; we are talking to Encompass in a couple of weeks to specifically look at how we might be better at racial diversity. I think we do a pretty good job overall, but certainly have some areas for improvement too.

Anderson: And in terms of the practical benefits of having a diverse staff and board, it is nice that, with the obvious and major exception of racial diversity, we do have a range of sexual orientations and ages and disability status. It is certainly useful for having a range of perspectives when it comes to designing research and understanding what is important.

If you became aware of any sort of harassment taking place within the organization, do you have procedures in place for addressing it? How would you handle it?

Green: We do, we were actually one of the first EAA organizations to create a policy against sexual harassment and discrimination. We also have a disciplinary policy for employees that touches on that, but I am not sure if it’s finalized or if it’s still in draft form. We would address the infraction according to its nature, either through the manager or maybe go to the board level with Caryn. It is a situation that has not come up before, so we would figure it out as we go, but we do have the policies in place. We can email more detailed information on that.

Anderson: It also include specifics about how you can approach it as the employee if you were in that circumstance, which is important, because we are such a small organization.

Haggerty: The email will be more thorough and accurate. The policy gives the opportunity to talk to Caryn as opposed to just going to the Executive Director. Caryn is our Board President, so just having that avenue is important.

Anderson: And similarly, anyone in the research department can jump over me to another member of staff to report anything that was to come up. That is all explained during onboarding and they are provided with the full policy, of course.

How do you see Faunalytics’ work fitting in the overall advocacy movement? Are there ways that you support other advocates with your work?

Che Green: That basically is our work. All of our work is geared towards supporting other advocates. We do not compete for public eyeballs; that is not our goal. It’s about being behind the scenes. Our role in the movement, I think, is largely about being a source of evidence for what works and what doesn’t when it comes to animal advocacy. Occasionally, we will get public visibility for a study or a particular result or something like that, but we operate almost entirely behind the scenes. Our role is to aggregate and share third-party research and to answer crucial questions, hopefully, with our own research. As Jo has touched on, we work a lot with other individual advocates sometimes on a pro bono basis for small groups, and we host office hours for individual advocates and academics. Our entire reason for being is to collaborate with and improve the efforts of other animal advocates. That has been our mission for 20 years. As Jo said, we sit in that middle ground between EAA, academia, and animal advocacy. Hopefully, we provide that layer of robust data as well as interpretation for the lay-advocates that can actually apply the information on the ground.

Anderson: I appreciate the part of the organization that focuses on providing advice, as well as just data. We also have this flexibility to provide research support to the other EAA groups and to groups on the ground that are in need of help, because we do have people with a high degree of training in research and methodology.

What is something that Faunalytics does differently than other groups?

Green: Our approach to research is different. We have got very talented PhD-level expertise on the team to carry out the research. We have 20 years of methodological experience to bring to bear on animal advocacy topics. I think we are really unique, not only in our focus, as I touched on in your first question, but also in terms of the resources we bring to bear to focus on that; and mainly, the talent of the team.

Anderson: I feel like I just keep saying the same thing, but I think that we are different in that we have this huge network built up over the past 20 years with Che of all these different people who are aware of us. Visibility may be an issue, but at the same time, we had 225,000 unique visitors to the site last year. There are many, many people who are aware of us and using our work. Having that diversity of input and audience is part of what makes Faunalytics a little bit special and different, that we are able to be responsive to a very wide range of perspectives and ideas and to use that to improve our own program.

Haggerty: I think we are the bridge between activism and research to advocates who might not have that research, or maybe not even have the EAA mindset yet. We are a good bridge, but also perhaps an introduction for some organizations as to how they can be more effective. This is unique to us and is the perfect intersection of how we can be more impactful and how advocates can understand and run with it. I think we are really special.