Should animal advocates de-emphasize diet change in donation appeals?

Insights from a large-scale survey of US adults

Authors of the research: Jamie Elsey, David Moss
Author of the summary: Siobhan Ballan

The recent controversy over FarmKind’s “Forget Veganuary”/“Can’t give up meat” campaign revealed an important choice that strategists need to consider: what kind of public engagement should animal advocates optimize for? Should the goal be to shift long-term norms around consumption, or to solicit near-term resources that can fund meaningful welfare improvements for farmed animals? Are these goals necessarily in conflict with one another?

In this post, we present the results of recent message-testing research conducted by Rethink Priorities in collaboration with FarmKind and reflect on what they might suggest for funders and advocates who are carefully considering donation-only framing versus donation framing that explicitly distances itself from diet change.

Note that this research was conducted before, and independently of, the “Forget Veganuary” campaign. Although the campaign raises related questions about donations and diet change, the experimental messages tested in the research were developed separately and were less provocative than those used in the recent FarmKind campaign.

What the survey tested

As part of Wave 2 of Rethink Priorities’ Pulse survey, we tested two different ways of framing donations using a large sample of US adults (n= 5,600), with results analyzed to be representative of the US adult population:

- A donation-only message, emphasizing how impactful a simple donation of $25 per month to the most effective farmed animal charities could be, and

- A diet-distancing donation message, similarly highlighting the benefits of making donations, but additionally emphasizing that people do not need to change their diet to help farmed animals

Respondents were randomly assigned to one of these messages or to a no-message control condition. We then measured how compelling they found the message, how impactful and how difficult they perceived donating and diet change to be, their interest in each behavior, and whether they chose to receive more information about effective donations.

This was intentionally light-touch experimental work that aimed to isolate how small differences in framing affect immediate perceptions.

Our findings

Several findings stand out from a strategic perspective.

• First, donating was consistently perceived as easier than diet change, though neither action was viewed as especially easy on average. The difference was meaningful across respondents and remained stable across subgroups. This reinforced the idea that donations function as a lower-friction entry point for many people.

Figure 1: Estimated mean ratings of the difficulty of donating and diet change, across messaging conditions and tiers. The “Gen pop” sample is representative of the US adult population, excluding those who already donate to farmed animal charities or have a vegetarian or vegan diet, respectively, when answering about donations and diet change. Tier 1 is representative of the US population who have not already taken either of these actions to benefit farmed animals. Tier 2 is representative of the US population who have not already taken either of these actions to benefit farmed animals and are sympathetic to the cause.

• Second, promoting donations did not appear to undermine beliefs about the value of dietary change, even when the message explicitly stated that people do not need to change their diet to help animals.

• Third, the diet-distancing message was slightly less compelling on average than the donation-only message. The effect was small but statistically reliable.

• At the same time, neither message reduced interest in diet change, and both increased reported interest in donating, with effects of small magnitude.

Figure 2: Estimated mean ratings of the difficulty of the compellingness of each donation-related message across tiers. The “Gen pop” sample is representative of the US adult population. Tier 1 is representative of the US population who have not already taken either of these actions to benefit farmed animals. Tier 2 is representative of the US population who have not already taken either of these actions to benefit farmed animals and are sympathetic to the cause.

• Finally, neither the donation nor the diet-distancing groups showed a reliable increase (an estimated 1 percentage point) in opting to receive more information about making effective donations when offered later on in the survey, compared to the control group.

Donation efficiency versus audience expansion

Some advocates suggest that explicitly acknowledging that people do not need to change their diet may reduce resistance to messaging while potentially also increasing reach. We did not test these mechanisms directly, though our compellingness ratings can be interpreted as a measure of resistance to each type of messaging. It remains possible that a message with slightly lower conversion could be more effective overall if it meaningfully expands shareability and audience reach.

The key point is that different messaging approaches may be chosen to prioritize different strategic objectives. Some organizations may reasonably aim to maximize immediate conversion once someone is already paying attention, while others may prioritize broader reach or audience expansion, even if this comes with some trade-offs. FarmKind has suggested that, all things considered, a diet-distancing approach may have advantages in terms of greater reach, even if it might be rated marginally less compelling to a pure donation message under controlled exposure conditions.

Rather than pointing to a single best practice, the findings suggest several considerations for advocacy strategy:

1. Donation-only framing may be advantageous in contexts where organizations are already engaging an attentive audience and want to minimize friction at the point of decision, for example, on a website, in an email funnel, or after a referral. In these settings, additional framing may not add value and could slightly reduce immediate appeal.

Other approaches could plausibly be just as effective at generating resources if they achieve greater reach, even if conversion per person is lower - something this study did not test.

2. There is little evidence that donation-focused messaging crowds out support for diet change. This suggests that there is not necessarily a strict choice between the two.

Limitations and open questions

Our findings apply to short, stand-alone messages and do not directly inform how messaging should vary across different formats or channels.

The survey does not aim to resolve deeper questions about the role of diet change in animal advocacy, nor does it capture long-term behavioral effects. It is also not designed to adjudicate between competing moral visions of what the animal advocacy movement should prioritize.

Closing thought

When advocates consider different messaging approaches, they are also considering questions about how people are invited into the movement in the first place. These choices can influence the pool of supporters, the resources available, and the strategic options at later points in a movement’s trajectory towards achieving its goals.

For readers interested in the full methodology, subgroup analyses, and detailed results, the complete Pulse report is available here. For any questions or comments about this work, please reach out to jamie@rethinkpriorities.org.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Siobhan Ballan for writing the research summary, and to Elisa Autric and Jamie Elsey for review.

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