Five Years of Animal Advocacy Careers: Our Journey to impact, Lessons Learned, and What’s Next

By lauren_mee, Ana Barreiro, Engin Arıkan, Animal Advocacy Careers @ 2024-09-19T10:31 (+123)

This post is mostly about our key learnings, impact made and future plans

Thanks to my team for their help in both creating this post and unwavering commitment to driving forward AAC's ambitious plans for animals, in particular Ana Barreiro, Nayan and Engin for their contributions and feedback on this post. 

TL;DR:

• For five years, Animal Advocacy Careers (AAC) has tried to direct passionate professionals towards high-impact opportunities that have the potential to help animals the most.
• We've filled 105 roles in leading animal advocacy organisations, supported over 150 organisations with recruitment, and launched 3 core programs our online course, job board, and career advising service. At the same time, we built a community of 27,500+ supporters across social media, Slack, and email. Our efforts also led to 12 🔶10% Pledges and 11 🔷Trial Pledges at Giving What We Can. We cautiously estimate adding $2.5 million worth of counterfactual impact from these donations and placements at a spend of $950,000
• Until November 2022 we had only achieved 11.5 ICAPS, in September 2024, less than 2 years later we have achieved almost 5 times more impact through 54 ICAPs. We attribute this to refinement and focus of programmes but also the lag effect.
• We conducted four talent surveys, which, along with our own independent research, continue to form the foundation of our career advising and strategy.
• Addressing the talent bottlenecks in the effective animal advocacy movement has proven to be far more complex than we first expected. Beyond the initial challenges, we’ve encountered a range of issues that directly impact our theory of change and our ability to drive meaningful impact—such as the scarcity of job postings and difficulties in the hiring process. In response, we’ve broadened our focus beyond just non-profit roles to better address these challenges and open up more opportunities for talented individuals to contribute to the movement.
• Explore more about how AAC is transforming animal advocacy careers and find out more about our exciting plans for the future.

(Note: If you would like the full details of the programmes we have stopped, started, scaled and pivoted and a full programme evaluation our latest 2023/4 update is here)

Overview 

This piece highlights Animal Advocacy Careers’ accomplishments, mistakes, and changes since its establishment in 2019. We discuss AAC’s future plans as well as potential constraints to our impact. Our vision is to have an animal advocacy movement of international talent density with mission-aligned advocates in critical positions in society, accelerating freedom for animals. 
 

Background

AAC was founded in July 2019 through Charity Entrepreneurship’s incubation program. Its goal is to accelerate the impact of existing organisations by solving their major talent bottlenecks, attracting top talent to the movement, matching them to the most impactful opportunities and empowering professionals to make a real impact. 

To effectively match top talent with the most impactful opportunities, AAC first had to conduct research to gain a deeper understanding of the movement's challenges and overall talent landscape. We needed to identify the market size, determine which skills and roles were most in demand and hardest to fill, and uncover the root causes behind these talent bottlenecks. This research forms the foundation of our work, allowing us to address the movement’s needs in a more informed and strategic way.

In addition to conducting research, AAC launched several experimental programs aimed at addressing talent bottlenecks . These programs included management and leadership training, an online course, a job board, career advising, fundraising work placements, headhunting and recruitment efforts, organisational recruitment training, a candidate database, and effective giving for animals. Through trialing these programmes, we gained valuable insights into which programs made significant progress, which weren’t our comparative advantage, and which proved to be less tractable than we initially thought.

We also recognise that our role is not just about the number of people transitioning into new roles, as impactful opportunities are critically limited, but rather about ensuring that top talent is placed in positions where their skills can be most effectively utilised to accelerate progress in the animal advocacy movement. This means that AAC must do two things: 1. Attract & retain top talent and 2. Coordinate and match talent to the opportunities where they can do the most for animals.

Lessons learned

Note that some of these lessons seem extremely obvious in retrospect, but we are sharing them in case they are helpful for others and just for transparency. 

The talent gap is a major bottleneck but has its own natural ceiling & limitations. 

In line with the findings of Charity Entrepreneurship, the talent gap is a major bottleneck holding back organisations from achieving their goal of helping animals. This is also reported from other independent research such as Open Philanthopy’s movement building research and Rethink Priorities research here and here. However, we realised that the job market in animal advocacy has its own limits. Only a few animal charities focus on farmed and wild animals, and they tend to have a limited number of new job openings. Initially, there was limited information on the global market size of impactful jobs. Still, we anticipated that the job market in this sector would grow annually due to increased funding, but over the past three years, the market has remained relatively stable. Our job board consistently lists around 600-700 non-profit jobs globally, with an average of 5-7 positions available per organisation since 2021.

There are some possible reasons for this: most organisations are funding-constrained, limiting their capacity to increase and employ more advocates. This is more the case in 2024 post-FTX than it was in 2019 when AAC first started, and the funding landscape for farmed animal work specifically seemed to be on the increase. Importantly, however, in some cases, lack of funding is not the only reason why there are few organisations and why they decide not to grow. There are other practical issues preventing growth for example, standards and codes on eggs which are a prerequisite for cage-free corporate campaigns, do not exist in a lot of countries - which partially also explains the lack of funder interest in these cases.

Despite actively trying to increase our remit by researching globally for new impactful opportunities, the limitation is still fundamental, there just aren't that many impactful organisations out there. Many new organisations we identify are small meaning they fall below the 5-7 job posting annually average. Additionally, we are committed to maintaining a high standard for impact and do not want to just increase the quantity of jobs at the expense of quality. Our goal is to curate the most impactful opportunities by listing only organisations that have been independently verified by funder such as EA animal welfare fund, Open Philanthrophy or ACE, meaning our job board nudged people towards the most promising opportunities. 

Learnings: While it initially made sense for AAC to focus on non-profits and address key bottlenecks, the limited number of impactful opportunities and our growing talent pool now make it essential to increase our scope on high-impact opportunities to continue to attract and engage a diverse talent pool of top talent and as stated above we don’t want to dilute our quality. We are, therefore, taking the approach of trying to understand the highest-impact career opportunities more holistically in society and identify roles that can absorb more talent while still driving high impact for animals. In addition, not all our top talent are a good match for non-profit jobs but can still have a huge impact for animals in other roles; we have observed, without making much effort that at least 5 placements landed high-impact opportunities in society that are driving change for animals from outside non-profits. Therefore, we see it within our scope to identify and redirect more people to these roles so that they can accelerate change for animals outside of non-profits. Lastly, we truly believe that a lack of mission-aligned top talent in other critical areas of society outside of non-profits e.g. in government, earning to give and large food companies, is holding back our movement from making the progress that is needed (this is corroborated in our latest talent survey and through expert interviews).

This is also why we started our Giving for Animals programme: to identify and engage individuals who might not be a good match for non-profit roles but can still contribute to the cause with their current jobs or aiming for a very well paid job to donate more.

Measuring meta organisation's impact is hard and often flawed, leaving you with long-lasting uncertainty.  

In line with trying to have a higher bar for our measurement and evaluation in the animal advocacy space, in 2019, we attempted to do a randomised control trial for two of our experimental programmes. This was a mistake and is really a great example of the challenges of M&E in the meta space. In 2019 we attempted to do a randomised control trial for two programmes- our career advising and online course. The results can be seen here. 

The main reasons we think this was a mistake:

• It took a lot of resources to conduct this study in a way that adhered to the standards of research best practice. Additionally, we had to wait 6 months for the results before being able to continue with our programmes. Due to this, we missed out on the impact of many people who could have taken our course or career advising sessions and the 50% who were randomised into the control portion.
• Most importantly, It gave us the illusion of greater certainty. The results actually updated us in a misleading direction. Firstly we thought that both programmes were equally impactful & promising due to the results but that the online course was more cost-effective, this later proved to be incorrect. Over time, it shows that the online course had more of a minor impact on career decisions, whilst career advising was more likely to have a major impact on career decisions (see table below), and the positions were in more critical areas for the movement, e.g. founders or senior leaders. 2 years later, out of the 30 people who have changed their careers after taking the online course, less than 5, we would attribute a major influence to.
• We paused career advising for a year due to the above results and thought the online course had more scalability. Now, career advising is one of our most cost-effective programmes. 

Learnings: Our most valuable insights and updates have come from setting strong lead indicators and cut-off bars and observing the performance of our programs over time and under various conditions. In retrospect, conducting a Randomised Controlled Trial was not the optimal approach, particularly for programs with significant lag effects. A more effective strategy would probably have been to establish early indicators and long-term KPIs and to test both programmes over a more extended period whilst monitoring program performance and using learning to improve programmes over time. Ultimately this later approach aligns with our current decision-making process across our program portfolio and an acknowledgement that there is always a degree of uncertainty in our work and we must remain open to stopping programmes based on new evidence.   

Focusing too much on lean programmes and not the user 

Placing the user at the centre of a business strategy is a classic approach, and many of the most successful companies build their entire operations around their customers. However, our priority has always been on running lean, scalable, and cost-effective programs. We've consistently aimed to reduce each program's cost while still delivering results. This approach is largely guided by a constant assessment of cost-effectiveness across all of our initiatives. 

Additionally, we have observed that the majority of our impact is driven by a minority of our placements. This is due to differences in terms of the importance of different roles and our counterfactual influence in these placements. Supporting this idea, our interviews with advocates in high-impact placements reveal that many have specific needs and aspirations that need to be considered to successfully facilitate significant career changes.

Some of our best-performing programmes in terms of our highest-performing placements have been the ones that were more explicitly focused on attracting top talent but weren’t as scaleable (like our work placements) or gave more tailored and on going individual advice, like our career advising, where many of these placements required more than a one-off call to make these substantial career shifts.  

Learnings: The primary lesson learned is the necessity of balancing user needs with program costs. The most cost-effective programs will prioritise and incorporate user experience, recognising that attracting top talent requires quality products with clear value propositions. We cannot compromise on user experience solely for marginal cost savings, as this would likely not attract the right candidates and negatively impact referrals, which have been one of our best sources for our programmes. However, this doesn't imply that we should invest excessively in making a premium product that prioritises user experience over actual results. The goal for us moving forward is to strike an optimal balance between user satisfaction and program effectiveness within reasonable budget constraints, which may sometimes mean more upfront costs to build valuable programmes.

Hiring well is really hard, and still neglected 

 

Our organisation is dedicated to helping people get high-impact roles, many of which are at leading non-profit organisations. However, we have realised that in addition to our role of attracting and matching talent to these opportunities, the organisation's hiring process also directly impacts our theory of change.

1. Hiring well is just really difficult and time-consuming. Many organisations in our movement are very small and don’t have a dedicated person to oversee hiring and talent acquisition. Many of us do hiring as just one part of an extremely busy job, meaning it often doesn’t get the resources needed to make sure it is done right. 
2. When we tried to do some headhunting recruitment, we found a significant challenge around organisations' having sufficient role clarity. Many weren’t clear on what exactly they were actually looking for or would change their requirements halfway through the recruitment process. According to Scarlet Spark, lack of role clarity is also one of the most frequently identified issues when working with organisations on recruitment in their work.
3. Another one of the most neglected and first-to-be-dropped boxes in recruitment is often the candidate experience. According to our research, this can often put off a number of candidates, meaning many organisations are unknowingly putting off top candidates, which makes our work even harder.

This is an uphill battle for our capacity-constrained movement, and we sympathise with both the organisations trying their best to do it well amongst many other priorities and the many candidates who spend hours applying for roles only to get no feedback, response, roles closing down, or consistently extended deadlines. 

Learnings: This makes our job and theory of change much harder than we had initially expected because it’s not just about attracting talent and persuading them to make a career shift (which is no easy feat). It is also about helping top talent maintain motivation when their opportunities are limited, and their job application experiences are not great. As this also affects our theory of change, in 2022 we an a series of events and we tried to help organisations with this issue but since think that due to comparative advantage, Scarlet Spark is much better placed to help with this. We are partnering with them to create resources to help organisations recruit and hire better. Another solution for this will be when we can utilise AI to assist in recruitment, making it less of a burden on organisations. However, role clarity, criteria and expectations will still need to be clear.

The importance of talent density in a small team 

One of the hardest lessons I’ve learned in leading a small charity is the impact of talent density within a team. Having the right people is crucial in a start-up where every individual plays an outsized role. I have been guilty of trying to hold on to team members who aren’t performing or aren’t a good cultural fit and trying to coach them to try to be better in their roles. It’s also particularly challenging because with a small team you tend to care about them on a personal level, and you worry about the disruption it may cause to the team.

However, I have realised that not addressing this is much less altruistic; my job as a leader is to do what is in the best interests of AAC and, ultimately, the animal advocacy movement. An underperforming person is a vast resource drain that you can often not afford in such a small team, and delivering in their role isn’t just about efficiency—it’s about fairness to the whole team and the mission we serve. In a small team, every person’s contribution is critical, so when someone underperforms, time and resources get diverted towards managing or compensating for the gaps leading to missed opportunities and further burden on the existing team instead of being used to innovate or drive the mission forward.

It’s also likely that the person who is underperforming is not in the correct role for them and letting them find another role they are better suited to is also in their best interests. 

Learning:

As part of my regular self-check, I’ve adopted the “keeper test” from Netflix's book No Rules Rules, which emphasises the importance of talent density in small teams. The question I ask myself is: “If this person told me they were leaving for a similar job at a competitor, how hard would I fight to keep them?” If the answer is “not very hard,” it’s a clear signal that it’s time to evaluate whether that person is still the right fit for the team. It’s a tough but necessary consideration. That said, I frequently reflect on this with my team, and I’m grateful that, for every staff member I have now, my answer is a strong “I’d fight hard to keep them.”

As mentioned earlier, hiring well is a major challenge and takes a lot of time, which can make it tempting to keep team members even when they aren’t performing or when it feels like there aren’t better options available. We learned that hiring well is still at the core of maintaining and improving talent density. Recently, we’ve made some tentative improvements to our hiring process with the help of Scarlett Spark’s excellent resources; hiring checklist, hiring guide and interview guide. In addition we introspected and identified there were some themes of people who have left our team and now use early-stage screening calls and application questions to identify potential red flags, helping us avoid making the same mistakes.

The Importance of Targeted Channels and Personas

In the early stages of AAC, we needed to clearly understand which individuals would lead to our most impactful placements. With this uncertainty, we initially started expanding our presence on social media and other broad channels to reach as many potential candidates as possible. While this approach helped us grow, it also made it challenging to identify and engage the most promising candidates.

Through user interviews and data analysis, we discovered common characteristics among the individuals we helped place in the most impactful roles. For example, most of them had already built some career capital before joining the movement:

This insight led us to prioritise our career advising services on individuals with some degree of experience or knowledge. This allows us to provide more tailored support that is both cost-effective and impactful. By doing so, we're better equipped to address immediate talent bottlenecks within organisations.

However, we recognise that building a robust talent pipeline for the long term requires a different approach and that awareness and perception of non-profit roles is still one of the top most important challenges in finding top talent for organisations. For this, we continue to promote our online course widely, targeting broader channels to attract beginner advocates and help them develop the skills needed for future roles in animal advocacy. We also see there is still a need and interest for further information and education about effective animal advocacy. This is particularly relevant since individuals need to acquire adequate information about animal advocacy before committing to animals - especially since this is an unconventional career path. This is confirmed by our recent talent survey where over 100 organisations listed “Potentially good candidates do not consider animal advocacy to be a viable career path” as the second most decisive issue preventing them from getting top talent following better compensation.

This strategy reflects our two key objectives: one, to build the long-term talent pipeline by engaging and building awareness with new advocates, and two, to provide immediate support to top talent and organisations by connecting them with experienced candidates through our career advising programme.

Learnings: The importance of targeted strategies cannot be overstated. By aligning our efforts with the specific needs of each programme, we are able to maximise the effectiveness of our resources and ensure that our outreach reaches high-potential individuals. This dual approach—balancing broad awareness for long-term pipeline building with more segmented outreach for short-term, high-impact placements—might allow us to make a meaningful impact in both the short and long term.

The importance of building a funnel 

Initially, we focused heavily on attracting talent at the top of the funnel. However, we’ve realised that securing an animal advocacy job often takes considerable time—sometimes years. This makes it crucial to attract potential advocates and keep them engaged and motivated throughout their journey, even though it will often be more challenging for us to measure our actual impact on these changes.  This was initially deprioritised partly because it's tough to measure and truly understand our role in these longer-term changes. Still, we learned that these big career changes often require a lot of consideration and support, and we need to provide this support even if it’s harder for us to measure our direct impact. 

We’ve developed new strategies to support and retain these individuals over the long term. We’ve introduced more motivating content, such as advice on handling rejections, nurturing email flows, and encouraging them to volunteer. Additionally, we’re in the process of building a community to foster connections and provide ongoing support. These efforts are essential for preventing potential advocates from losing interest or giving up, ensuring they remain committed until they secure a role within the movement.

Learnings: The key takeaway here is that building an effective talent funnel goes beyond initial attraction. Nurturing and engaging potential advocates over the long term is equally important. By providing ongoing support, creating motivating content, and fostering a sense of community, we can help individuals stay committed and ultimately transition into impactful roles. This approach not only strengthens our talent pipeline but also ensures we’re making a sustained impact on the animal advocacy movement.

Our work over 5 years

Outcomes and impacts

• In five years, we estimate that AAC had an influence on 105 total placements in the animal advocacy movement, and in 35 of them, we estimate that AAC had a significant role. These are roles in major organisations such as; Rethink Priorities, Animal Ethics, CIWF, Wild Animal Initiative, Shrimp Welfare Project, Good Food Institute, and Animal Equality. In addition, we also had a significant impact on a few critical roles outside of non-profits in adjacent sectors (e.g. working for MPs). 
  The above equates to 54 ICAPs, the metric we use internally to measure what we consider to be the most important impact of our work.
• Some of these placements involved founders - 10 in total. We estimate that AAC’s services had a major influence in helping the founders of Animal Welfare League Ghana (an animal charity focusing on cage-free corporate campaigns- supported by EA - Animal Welfare Fund) and Farmállatvédelem (a new Hungarian animal charity focusing on cage-free corporate campaigns and fish welfare reforms - supported by ACE movement grants).
• Our Fundraising Work Placement programme helped bring 8 new people into the movement to test their fit in fundraising, resulting in 4 permanent new positions in our movement and $407,000 raised for organisations through these placements. The future value expectation is approximately $270.000 of counterfactual funds raised by these individuals during their placements.
• We have supported over 150 organisations with recruitment services.
• Until November 2022 we had only achieved 11.5 ICAPS, in September 2024, less than 2 years later we have achieved almost 5 times more impact through 54 ICAPs. We attribute this to refinement and focus of programmes but also the lag effect.
• We have built a community of over 27,500 supporters on our social networks, Slack, and email.
• Our services also influenced 12 🔶10% Pledges and 10 🔷Trial Pledges at Giving What We Can.
• We conducted four talent surveys, which gathered input from various organisations and helped advocates have a better understanding of where they can most effectively maximise their impact for animals with their skills. 

In case you are interested in AAC’s impact updates and which of the above programmes we have continued, we recently published our annual report for 2023 and an update on the status of our programmes. 

Organisational size

We are a relatively small organisation with 1 full-time and 6 part-time staff. As we become more confident in our programmes' impact, we have hired staff to focus on improving and multiplying the reach of our services. We will soon hire one other staff member focusing on career advising. 

Future Plans

Increasing the scope of our strategy towards adding adjacent sectors as impactful careers 

Key change: As noted above, initially, our primary focus was to be an organisation that merely served existing animal advocacy non-profits by attracting top talent to their roles. Over the years, it has become apparent through both the limited market size and recruitment strategy that we are better placed to be a meta organisation that focuses on attracting mission-aligned top talent and building up an internal understanding of the highest leverage opportunities for that talent across the animal advocacy ecosystem (which extends beyond non-profits) in order to direct them impartially to the best opportunities to help animals.

Although a key focus will continue to be channelling top talent to animal charities, we are excited to increase the number of opportunities available to individuals who want to help animals with their careers due to many of the limitations listed above. We will continue to explore and provide information about adjacent roles that individuals may decide to pursue, which might be equally or even more important. We will try to be transparent about our level of certainty on all of these approaches. These roles may be pursuing careers in political institutions, major retailers that hold decision-making powers about animal welfare policies, careers in media or academia that may allow individuals to use their platform to advocate for animals, or careers in adjacent charity fields like in environment or public health which may facilitate alliances and cooperations. 

We also believe that effective giving and earning to give are still underrated among animal advocates. Many individuals may find it feasible and meaningful to use their careers to donate more to effective charities. This is all the more important since funding constraints are one of the biggest bottlenecks in animal advocacy. We will publish more content and inform advocates more about these options from now on. 

Animal advocacy is still young and constantly evolving. Thus, we need to maintain a nimble and open mentality that there might be many untested yet potentially promising approaches to impact.

What’s next for our programmes? What programmes are we even providing these days? 

• We plan to scale up our career advising program. We had mixed results from this programme, and until recently, we only provided a small number of career advising sessions through referrals. Our assessment is that while career advising is not immediately beneficial for all recipients and is challenging to scale, it can be very beneficial for a significant number of talented people who need tailored answers and guidance in their career decisions. Therefore, we have created a more automated application process that will enable us to filter through the candidates we believe we can help the most and give further recommendations to those who we can not.
• We are launching a brand new website!! In line with our understanding that the user is pivotal to our success, we have invested in creating a brand new website with over 30 new pieces of career-advising content. It will cover topics such as the importance of animal suffering, how careers are the biggest opportunity to help animals, impactful interventions that can help the animals the most, and basic career advice for those considering helping animals using their career. We will also update its design and improve its user experience.
• We also plan to conduct ad hoc projects that we consider to be possibly high-impact. One example is our EU policy accelerator programme, which will launch in March next year.   

Funding Needs

Our annual budget in 2023 was $301.794. We expect it to be approximately $362,000 in 2024. 

Our main donors are Open Philanthropy and a handful of foundations and individuals who wish to remain anonymous. 

If our major donors continue their existing and generous support, we expect to continue our main programs with our existing team. 

On the other hand, we would like to grow and increase both the number of people we support and also invest in identifying more top talent. To do this, we aim to expand our donor base this year. As all organisations, we feel a bit uneasy about being very dependent on a few funding sources, which may change course very quickly, and that the funding we have is to maintain, not grow AAC. 

We currently have 7 individual monthly donors to whom we are extremely grateful. We would welcome more from anyone who values our work and would be kind enough to support us. 

Thank you for reading and supporting our mission—if you’d like to help us grow and continue making an impact, please consider becoming a monthly donor and joining us in our efforts to improve the lives of animals.

To stay updated on our programmes and impact, subscribe to our newsletter.