ACE Highlight: Impact Calculator

Animal Charity Evaluators and other charities (including Faunalytics, Mercy For Animals, and The Humane League) do research to estimate the impact of commonly-used interventions promoting vegetarianism to reduce animal suffering. So far ACE has evaluated leafleting, online ads, humane education, corporate outreach, and undercover investigations.

To better help advocates understand their impact, ACE created an online calculator which estimates the impact of a donation put towards either leafleting or online ads. The calculator enables donors and organizations to visualize the reduction of the number of animals on factory farms, broken down by species, and the number of years of suffering spared. This impact estimate also informs ACE’s charity evaluations.

Leafleting is one of the most widespread farmed animal intervention. Many organizations hand out booklets showing the cruelties of factory farming, quotes from vegans and vegetarians, and helpful information like vegetarian products and recipes. Two quantitative studies have been conducted on the impact of leafleting, one by The Humane League in cooperation with Farm Sanctuary and the other by ACE. (Read more about leafleting and its impact here.)

Online ads, which can be placed anywhere but are commonly run through Facebook, direct the viewer to a website which usually shows a video of factory farming footage and has helpful information, including links to order vegetarian starter kits. The ads are very low cost (~20 cents per click in US, ~2-9 cents for international ads), and Mercy For Animals and The Humane League both dedicate a portion of their budget to online ads. The impact estimate in the calculator comes from studies performed by The Humane League Labs, but because of the small number of survey responses, there is a great deal of uncertainty with the results. Mercy For Animals recently released a more robust study that showed attitude changes but no statistically significant behavioral change from the online ads; they hope to do further research. (Read more about online ads and their impact here.)