Analysis of EA funding within Animal Welfare from 2019-2021

By JamesÖz @ 2021-09-27T19:03 (+54)

Introduction

I saw a post on the Effective Animal Advocacy (EAA) Facebook group about possible future strategies for the animal welfare movement after corporate campaigns and I was curious where EAA funding was being allocated to currently, in terms of different styles of advocacy and focus areas.

 

I did some quick analysis on grants from Open Philanthropy, the EA Animal Welfare Fund and the ACE Recommended Charity Fund to see what types of advocacy (e.g. research vs corporate campaigns vs policy) the money was going towards and how it was changing over time. The analysis is not perfect and could be improved but I thought it was interesting regardless.

 

Methodology

Overall funding allocation across EAA from 2019-2021

 

Total EAA funding allocation broken down per year, from 2019-2021

 

Interesting stuff to note:

 

Limitations of this analysis:

Raw totals in $:

Advocacy Type

201920202021 (9 months)
Cultivated Meat$4,017,036$97,812$189,844
Plant-based meats (and other alt. proteins)$963,579$935,000$1,350,000
Wild Animal Welfare$335,000$701,364$4,049,844
Foundational research$855,518$2,207,005$789,328
Media & Investigations$655,000$2,488,939$38,832
Movement Building$2,153,563$4,158,748$1,234,410
Litigation$8,518$35,000$1,286,000
Legislation & Policy Advocacy$1,679,720$1,389,645$467,000
Other advocacy (e.g. education)$1,204,817$424,600$173,664
Corporate Welfare Campaigns (and related research)$29,377,981$15,563,234$4,888,829
    
Total$41,250,732$28,001,347$14,467,751

 

Breakdown by organisation:

 

Thanks to Jamie Harris for initial feedback on this analysis.


 


vaidehi_agarwalla @ 2021-09-28T13:02 (+3)

What is the total amount of funding per year? I don't think I saw it in the post.

JamesOz @ 2021-09-28T15:16 (+3)

Ah yes it was in my spreadsheet but not super clear! I've just added a table to this post and you can see the yearly totals in the bottom row.

vaidehi_agarwalla @ 2021-09-28T22:53 (+1)

Thanks!

Charles He @ 2021-09-27T20:42 (+3)

Funding is very heavy towards corporate welfare campaigns... I’m planning on writing more about this shortly but my first impression is that we have been and potentially are slightly still over-invested in this area relative to other advocacy methods.

I’m unsure about the value of this statement and the implied perspective and understanding.

In general, in farm animal welfare, there’s reason to see access to funding as more of a “bar” to meet instead of a pool of funds to compete over. Indeed, I think there’s eagerness to find new interventions that might be cost effective, or to fund certain foundational causes that seem extremely important. 

So if there is not a fixed pool of funds, the meaning of “over invested” is unclear.

Also, there’s just a lot packed into that statement. It’s unusual for anyone in EA to make a statement about overfunding any class of interventions, anywhere. I think it’s equally valuable and demanding of skill, to make useful broad meta statements about existing, operational classes of interventions. It’s plausible this requires at least as much insight, judgement, and management skill as running a successful intervention itself. 

Wild Animal Welfare is really taking off. It is now the second biggest area almost now after corporate campaigns. It went from 0.9% of total funding in 2019 to 28% of total funding in 2021 (so far).

I think there’s some value to giving higher resolution when reading some of the statements by the OP. 

For example, the most recent grant of wild animal funding is for two years of funding. This has a different meaning than "28% of total funding".

I think this lumpiness applies to other grants.

For this and other reasons, granting can be somewhat noisy (despite, or because it's optimal). So it can be hard to get signal by analyzing past grants.

People might be looking at this data to understand future funding and what interventions/areas seems particularly valuable. To try to answer this directly, I think that a reasonable guess is that if you want to know of areas where there is funding interest (including by Open Phil), the statements by the EA Animal Welfare is a really good guess:

JamesOz @ 2021-09-27T21:25 (+1)

Hey Charles, thanks for the response!
 

A few quick points:

  1. Agreed, it's a relatively information loaded statement with little explanation (yet). I'm planning on following up with some more thoughts on that soon but I just wanted to publish this data first. I've also added the original FB post where there's more discussion on this issue.
  2. To clarify, I'm not saying we're overfunding it or we should fund less corporate campaigns, rather than I'm surprised at how the proportion of our resources being spent then relative to other interventions. "Over invested" is probably a bad use of phrase so my bad there.
  3. Agreed about the lumpiness of grants - I did mention it and I've tried to clarify it further so hopefully it's a more accurate depiction of events now.
  4. The requests for proposals are definitely useful for people trying to understand future funding so thanks for linking those!

 

EDIT: On reflection, I thought my initial statement was stronger than I wanted to so I've reworded it to:

I’m planning on writing more about this shortly but my first (not fully developed) impression is surprise at how much we're funding these campaigns & related research relative to other advocacy methods. See some information on potential reasons why in this post.

So thank you for raising this Charles.

minthin @ 2021-09-28T17:51 (+1)

“There’s a relatively small amount of funding towards policy advocacy and legislative change, compared to what I expected, approximately 4.5% average across all three years.“

Could you elaborate on why you were expecting more?

I love this analysis, thanks for taking the time to put it together. I would not have expected it to be so lopsided toward corporate campaigns either.

Bryan Hanlon @ 2021-09-28T01:08 (+1)

This is really great. Thank you! Are you able elaborate on international spending on movement building?

JamesOz @ 2021-09-28T17:28 (+1)

Good question - I considered doing a separate advocacy category for this but decided against it for some reason. I re-did some of the analysis with this new category (see new spreadsheet here) and the results look as below.

As you can see on the far right hand side, there's a relatively steadily increasing number of funds going towards international movement building, specifically in neglected countries. That matches well with the request for proposals by the EA Animal Welfare Fund.