Retrospective: Letter-writing campaign to MPs on the Victorian Pig Welfare Inquiry

By Aditi Basu, Monika Janinski @ 2025-03-04T21:17 (+40)

Summary

This retrospective highlights a letter-writing campaign by Effective Animal Advocacy Australia (EAAA), conducted from September to November 2024, in support of recommended reforms from the Victorian Pig Welfare Inquiry. Our community advocated for the establishment of an Independent Office of Animal Protection and a ban on farrowing crates. Over 50 individuals wrote to 23 Members of Parliament across 24 Victorian regions and districts, resulting in three in-person meetings. Unfortunately this did not result in any immediate policy wins for animals, but we developed relationships with MPs and their offices and received advice and encouragement to continue our advocacy, which has laid the groundwork for future policy windows. As we experienced some challenges in communication and manual organisation, the campaign also provided valuable insights for future initiatives, emphasising the need for improved outreach and automation. 

Key lessons 

• Many MPs are supportive of animal issues but have little incentive to raise it as a political issue. One MP and one staffer said that politicians are often exposed to radical animal activists and need to be shown that animal advocates can be moderate and offer reasonable policy solutions.
• It takes significant time between writing to an MP and actually meeting with them (this took about 2 months on average). This makes it important to start a campaign several months before a Government decision would be made.
• It also likely takes significant time and ongoing campaigning between contacting/meeting with MPs and influencing policy decisions. This should be expected to be a long-term, ongoing process.
• People in EA and and vegan groups are generally excited to take political action if it's made very easy for them, but most people are reluctant engage deeply in the process. 

Context

On 25 May 2023, the Legislative Council Economy and Infrastructure Committee agreed to inquire into farmed pig welfare in Victoria, Australia. On 20 June 2024, they released a report containing the inquiry's findings and recommendations. The government provided a response to each recommendation on 20 December 2024. 

Our campaign

After consulting with experts, the organising committee of EAAA decided to initiate a campaign encouraging people to write letters to their members of Parliament (MPs) advocating for pig welfare reforms in Victoria, Australia. We conducted the campaign in September-early November 2024 before the government published its response in December, aiming to influence policy decisions. However, in hindsight, it would have been optimal to start our campaign earlier in the year.

Our aims were to:

• Demonstrate to MPs and the Minister for Agriculture that we are a coordinated, passionate, and very reasonable community.
• Inform MPs about animal welfare issues that they are likely not aware of.
• Identify MPs with an interest in animal welfare and build relationships through in-person meetings. 

We also decided to focus on 2 recommendations for welfare reform from the pig inquiry report rather than trying to capture all recommendations in our letters. We chose the following recommendations based on their perceived expected impact:

1.  Establishment of an Independent Office of Animal Protection. Successful establishment of this Office would also potentially mean widespread positive outcomes for species other than pigs. It would also have cascading effects on new animal laws.
2. Legislation of a complete ban on the use of farrowing crates. Farrowing crates are a large source of suffering in sows and their piglets, as they keep them separate in the days the piglets need connection with their mothers the most, and when mothers are most motivated to perform nesting and display maternal behaviours.

We prioritised writing to MPs from Labor (centre-left) as the party in Government. However, we also wrote to some Liberal-Nationals (centre-right) and the Greens (left). When writing to the Liberal-Nationals, we adapted our framing to focus more on values such as government integrity and impact on small-scale farmers. 

Results

We managed to support over 50 signatories to write to 23 MPs around Victoria. At the time of writing this, we have also managed to secure three in-person meetings with MPs. Some key outcomes include:

• Almost every MP responded, particularly those in the lower house (the house of the Government).
• Some MPs didn’t respond initially but then responded after being prompted with a phone call.
• We asked MPs to pass on our concerns to the Minister for Agriculture. Almost every MP did this.
• Most MPs provided a generic response about how animals are protected by legislation. But some seemed particularly engaged and interested. We will probably shift our focus towards building strong relationships with those MPs now that we have identified them.

Outcomes of the Inquiry

Government's response to the inquiry report was unfortunately not a positive one for animals. In response to the recommendations we focused on, they responded that they:

• Do not support an Independent Office for Animal Protection.
• Support in principle for ban on farrowing crates, but with the significant caveat that this will require coordination at the national level as part of the usual standard-setting processes. 

While these results are not in our favour, these are not unexpected given the relatively small scale and short-term nature of our campaign. We feel that our work still provides a strong launchpad for further campaigning in the lead-up to the 2026 Victorian election. 

It's important to note here that the Government fully supported a few recommendations from the inquiry, including recognising the potential development of the lab-grown meat industry in Victoria. 

Campaign Workflow

Our workflow broadly consisted of the following streams of work:

1. Reaching out to potentially interested people via Facebook Messenger and posting on EA and vegan groups on Facebook, and recording their information (name and electoral district and region) on a Google Sheet. We would then identify their district/region MPs and their MPs' political affiliation, and record these into this spreadsheet as well.
2. Drafting letters personalised to each MP (based on their focus areas and past achievements) on Google Docs.
3. Forming Facebook Messenger groups such that most people would be in two groups (one for their Region, one for their District). We would then link the relevant Google Doc containing the letter in the group and ask people to review it and make any edits as they would see fit.
4. Holding two hour-long drop-in sessions on Google Meet so people involved in this campaign could ask questions about it.
5. Asking people to sign the letters (one for Region, one for District).
6. Asking people to email the letters to their MPs (one for each Region / District)
7. Holding sessions / creating guidance materials and FAQs to help people prepare for in-person meetings with their MPs.

Challenges

Inevitably, we did face a few challenges during this campaign:

• Manual work. There was generally a lot of manual work involved during most of the process. This included writing letters personalised to each MP (totalling 23), and managing the Facebook Messenger groups and associated communications.
• People don't care for long messages. Each Messenger group was kicked off with a long message containing all the information signatories may have needed to review and edit the letters, including the pig welfare inquiry report, Google Meet links to the drop-in sessions, and links to the draft letters. However, a lot of people seemed to ask questions that reflected that this message wasn't read properly.
• People also don't care for short, frequent messages. There was one Messenger group in particular where a few members were getting very annoyed by the messages in the sgroup, and consequently ended up leaving the group.
• Reluctance in modifying the letters. Even though we gave ample time for people to review and edit the letters (1.5 weeks), we found that, with the exception of a few, most people still needed to be nudged multiple times. The impression we got was that most people were happy to sign the letters, but didn't want to uptake the work of modifying them.
• Not following the 80-20 rule. Organisers of this campaign kept looking for more signatories even after having a strong group of willing participants. This was probably not worth it because the marginal return from the final few participants was probably quite low in the context of the entire campaign. Additionally, not many new signatories scrolled back into their Messenger group chats to  extract the information required (see "People don't care for long messages." above). As a result, we needed to bring them up to speed with the context of the campaign, adding to our manual work.
• Messy spreadsheet. The initial Google Sheet we started to keep track of our signatories and their relevant information became progressively messier and harder to read throughout the course of the campaign as we added columns to keep track of various things like whether the Messenger groups had been formed, whether the letters had been sent, which recommendation each letter would be focusing on etc. 

Possible improvements

Communication

We have observed (from other projects we have worked on) that people tend to be more responsive via email than on Messenger groups. While the reason isn't clear, we suspect this might be because people are in more of a "productive" mood when they check their email than when they check Messenger. As such, if we were to do a similar campaign in the future, we would probably communicate to signatories via email rather than via Messenger groups. 

Automation

In retrospect, using an automation tool, like Zapier or n8n, would have improved efficiencies significantly and would have resolved, or at least minimised, a lot of the challenges described above. On a high level, this automation would look something like this: 

1. Use a Google Form to collect signatories' information (name, email, electoral district and region, and some information on their reasons for signing up for this campaign). This will automatically populate a spreadsheet with this information.
2. Use n8n's in-house artificial intelligence (AI) to search the internet and populate the above spreadsheet with the names of District and Region MPs for each signatory. The AI can also be used to extract important information about each MP that could be used to craft persuasive letters to them.
3. Using personal information as provided by each signatory (Step 1) and information about each of their MPs (Step 2), n8n's AI can be used to generate personalised and persuasive letters tailored to each signatory-MP pair.
4. The automation set-up would then email these letters to each signatory for their review and signature, and request them to email these letters to their respective MPs.

Using an automation setup like this would enable us to keep sourcing more interested people even well into the process, as there would be minimal effort required in getting them up to speed, unlike when the process was mostly manual. This idea was inspired by the AI-powered email outreach campaign that Open Paws recently initiated.

Possible alternative #1

Another alternative would be to simply direct letter writers to an AI tool, similar to the UK Voters for Animals GPT. This would allow us to entirely skip the process of generating letters ourselves and coordinating letter writers. 

However, being more involved as organisers does provide two major benefits: 

• It allows us to connect signatories together to sign joint letters to MPs. We have heard from one political expert that it can be valuable to demonstrate that it's a coordinated effort. We also heard from another political expert that MPs can find it annoying to receive multiple similar letters from different constituents.
  • On the other hand, we were told by a Victorian MP that ~6-10 emails on a topic would be needed to alert them about an issue, while a staffer to a Senator advised that getting their Senator's attention on a topic would require ~10-12 emails on the topic per day. It's unclear from this whether joint letters or or multiple individual letters are more effective.
• It gives us visibility over the outcomes of the campaign and allows us to support community members to follow up with a phone call and/or send email responses to interested MPs. This would be more difficult with a more automated process, but could be mitigated by having a tracking system like UK Voters for Animals.  

Possible alternative #2

Similar to above, another alternative would be to provide letter writers with a standard template for a letter and/or telephone conversation with an MP's office. Compared to using an AI tool, this would likely lead to less differentiated letters. 

This approach of providing more generic templates to members has been successfully used by the internal Labor party grassroots lobby group Labor Environment Action Network (LEAN), whose successful campaigning has been described as "the most effective grass roots effort..... seen within the ALP [Australian Labor Party]". Although there are likely other factors affecting the success of LEAN's campaigning which would not be applicable in all contexts, it is still worth noting this success.

Future plans

While we are still working on our future plans for 2025, some potential options include:

• Support the New South Wales community to push for their Government to implement an Independent Office, which was an 2023 election commitment.
• Continue to work towards an Independent Office in Victoria as a state election commitment in 2026.
• Expand our strategy to include other types of advocacy, such as supporting MPs to ask parliamentary questions, starting a parliamentary petition sponsored by an MP, drafting an open letter (e.g. signed by MPs, experts, and/or farmers), sending individual emails and/or making individual phone calls.