Reflections on FarmKind’s January media campaign

By Aidan Alexander, ThomNorman @ 2026-01-23T21:09 (+168)

Summary

In January 2026, FarmKind ran a provocative media campaign which used controversial media messaging and materials to promote ‘offsetting’ as an option for individuals who are concerned about factory farming but are currently unwilling or unable to change their diet.

The campaign raised an estimated $16,700--$59,300 (explained in our Results section below) and generated a number of media ‘hits’ including TV and created some debate that many advocates have told us they found productive. However we made mistakes in its execution and generated unproductive controversy within the EA and animal advocacy movements.

This post aims to explain our theory of change, what happened, what we got wrong, and what we learned.

We still believe mobilizing the meat-eating majority to take action for farmed animals requires meeting them where they're at, which sometimes means provocative framing that distinguishes us from vegan advocacy -- though we understand many in the movement disagree. However, we regret specific execution failures, particularly our insufficient stakeholder consultation, which risks sparking infighting within the animal movement.

Context

FarmKind is a donation platform that aims to bring more money into the movement against factory farming. People donate through our platform directly to six highly effective farmed animal charities. The donations never touch our bank account and we don’t take a cut. In 2025 we spent $0.25M and raised $3.35M (13.27x gross multiplier; estimated 2.94x net counterfactual multiplier). Our platform has had >7000 donations from >2900 donors, of which 674 have active monthly subscriptions.

The goals of our campaign

All FarmKind activities ultimately aim to help generate counterfactual donations to cost-effective farmed animal charities. Our activities exist on a spectrum from:

This campaign was designed to "newsjack" mainstream discourse and pivot it toward factory farming.

Primary goals

Secondary goals

How we envisaged it working

Phase 1 (Bait): Each year, the media writes stories critical of Veganuary and ‘do this instead of Veganuary’ articles. For example here, here and here. We decided to use a provocative angle to bait UK tabloids and right-wing publications into covering us. The goal was to ‘judo-flip’ these outlets from their usual vegan skepticism into a more productive discussion about how to address factory farming, highlighting donations as an alternative -- Small expected benefit in terms of donations.

Phase 2 (Parlay): Leverage early tabloid interest into more sophisticated "prestige" media, radio, and most importantly TV. This is where we could state our core message clearly to a massive audience -- Brand benefit from prestige media + High potential donations from TV/Radio, which we’d be testing for the first time.

Phase 3 (North Star): Our ideal outcome was a high-profile debate (e.g. on Piers Morgan) between FarmKind and a vegan advocate. The audience would discover that both sides agree factory farming is an atrocity and that there are multiple great ways to do something about it, and are merely debating which one(s) individuals should choose this January -- Very high donation potential.

Launching the campaign

We partnered with three top competitive eaters to talk about donating to “offset” the animal welfare impact of their diet as they undertake one of their typical eating challenges. By working with individuals who are already eating meat, we reduced the suspicion often held by "entrenched" meat eaters that our secret goal is to make them vegan. This approach was informed by research from Pax Fauna, which suggests that meat eaters are more effective messengers to their peers than vegans are. Our goal was to provide social proof to meat eaters that people like them agree that helping farmed animals is a worthwhile cause.

We built a microsite for the campaign (originally at ForgetVeganuary.com, now at cantgiveupmeat.com[4]) which presents a controversial framing for our campaign: that even a competitive eater can have as much or more positive impact on farm animal suffering as a vegan.

This was accompanied by a mini-game where players have to make it through Veganuary by dodging common anti-vegan tropes. The purpose of this was to make the website more engaging and also signal that our campaign was not entirely straight-faced (playing as an oat milk carton trying to dodge “but lions eat meat” doesn’t scream ‘take me completely seriously’).

The website also explains how donations are used by our recommended charities to help farmed animals, and then gives visitors the option to set up a monthly donation through our Compassion Calculator.

This website aimed to serve a dual purpose: On the one hand, it had to be consistent enough with the campaign framing that it would encourage the media to run our story. On the other hand, we also wanted it to be capable of converting users into offsetters/donors.

We briefed the story as an exclusive to The Telegraph. This was then picked up by GB News and Daily Mail and Asia Business Daily. We also secured a TV spot on GBNews and an op-ed on The Daily Mail.

Coordination with Veganuary

Did you tell Veganuary about the campaign in advance?

Yes. We wanted to understand and consider any concerns about potential harms to their work, as we genuinely want their campaign to succeed. 

We first told Veganuary in early November that we were going to run a media push calling on people to offset their diets in January. In early December, as our planning developed, we told them that that campaign would be called ‘Forget Veganuary’ and that we would work with competitive eaters for the campaign.

Due to our internal coordination failure (explained in our "What we got wrong" section below), Veganuary did not see the actual landing page before launch. This was a significant oversight. While we had shared the concept and tagline, we should have ensured they saw the full execution and framing before it went live. We would have been happy to make adjustments earlier had we received feedback at that stage, but the responsibility for showing them the full picture was ours, not theirs.

Did Veganuary object to the campaign?

Not as initially described, but upon seeing the full execution yes: Specifically, Wendy (Veganuary's CEO) clarified that the campaign tagline was more direct than she had anticipated, and expressed concern that it could undermine both Veganuary and the value of diet change. By this point, we had conducted an interview with the Telegraph and the journalist was writing up the story, but from that point onwards, we looped Veganuary in more closely, including a number of calls between our founders and Veganuary leadership. We asked their view on whether/how to continue, shared drafts for their feedback (e.g. talking points before interviews and Op Eds before submission) and made amendments accordingly.

Is there bad blood between you and Veganuary?

The FarmKind team remain on open and respectful terms with Wendy and we want to emphasize that there is no personal animosity and we bear no ill will towards anyone at or associated with Veganuary. We remain in ongoing dialogue with Wendy, sharing all comms related to this campaign (including this) for feedback prior to release. Toni remains incredibly proud of the work she has done during her time at Veganuary and continues to wish for them to succeed. 

We particularly empathize with the perspective of Veganuary staff and community members. We acknowledge that the campaign may have been deeply demotivating to those working on diet change and we are sorry.

Does Veganuary endorse this campaign?

To be clear, we do not claim Veganuary endorsed this campaign, and they bear no responsibility for the decisions we made. We encourage anyone upset by this campaign to direct their blame entirely at FarmKind. Please do not take our actions as representative of any group other than ourselves.

What we got wrong

1) Underestimating the risk of movement infighting

We correctly foresaw that many individuals would dislike the campaign, but we mistakenly assumed that any negative reaction would be directed at us. We didn’t consider that we might be seen as speaking for a particular faction (e.g. welfarists or moderates) against another (e.g. vegan advocates or abolitionists). This was an oversight.

While we were in contact with Veganuary’s leadership and have no ill will against the campaign, we didn’t consider that the appearance of opposition could trigger genuine infighting within the broader movement. We have since learned that the movement can start fighting even if the organizations involved are not actually at odds.

Some advocates have pointed out that the ideal amount of movement debate isn't zero, and that productive disagreement sometimes requires challenging prevailing approaches. We take that point. However, infighting has historically been a destructive force within animal advocacy, consuming advocates' limited time and energy on attacking each other rather than addressing factory farming. If you're going to risk sparking it, that should be a deliberate, carefully considered choice -- not an accidental side effect.

To clarify what we mean by "infighting": We're not referring to critical forum posts or heated Slack discussions—that's normal movement discourse. The concern raised by experienced advocates was about larger-scale factional conflict where organizations or cohorts actively work to undermine each other's campaigns, counterprotest each other's actions, or spend significant resources attacking other parts of the movement. We don't have deep experience with the history of such conflicts in animal advocacy, so we largely deferred to advisors with far more movement experience. We heard a range of different perspectives on how to proceed and took a highly risk-averse approach.

We're genuinely uncertain whether this was appropriate or whether we cut our media push short unnecessarily, but we acknowledge the latter is a real possibility.

What we would do differently: We will more carefully model how campaigns might be perceived as factional even when that's not our intent, and consult with people across different parts of the movement earlier in the planning process.

2) Insufficient stakeholder consultation

Due to our mistake above, we did not consult or inform stakeholders like our past funders, our recommended charities and other key movement figures (other than Veganuary themselves) before launch. This would have allowed us to explain our intentions, our theory of change and our amicable feelings towards Veganuary ahead of time, ensure they didn’t take the tabloids at face value, anticipate problems we missed, and reduce the risk of movement infighting.

What we would do differently: For any future campaign with controversy potential, we will engage a broader set of stakeholders in advance -- not just the organizations most directly involved.

3) Internal coordination failures

We had a lapse in internal communication regarding exactly what information was shared with Veganuary. FarmKind’s leadership did not, at first, request to be copied on all emails with Veganuary, which led us to mistakenly assume they had seen the landing page before launch. As a result, Veganuary’s feedback on the landing page could only be considered after the campaign was already live. We want to be clear that, as founders, Thom and Aidan take full responsibility for this oversight.  

What we would do differently: Leadership will be copied on all external communications for campaigns of this nature.

How we responded to concerns

As described above, we made significant mistakes in how we executed this campaign. We heard concerns from a number of fellow animal advocates and EAs and this gave us pause. We re-evaluated to see if we’d missed anything. The concerns we found most compelling were:

  1. If this sparks infighting, that could very easily do more harm to animals than this campaign could possibly do good
  2. Our recommended charities’ existing donor base might mistakenly believe that they endorse the campaign and stop donating as a result. This concern was most acute for The Humane League UK, because the campaign was most widely covered in the UK (where Veganuary began and is most widely known). Even though FarmKind only directs donations to THL International, this was not clear to all THL UK donors.
  3. That our campaign might reflect negatively on, or be taken as endorsed by, our funders.

In response, we:

On personal attacks: We want to address something that shouldn't need saying but does: A number of individuals directed personal attacks at our Head of Special Projects, Toni Vernelli, who has dedicated decades of her life to campaigning for farmed animals. There's an important distinction between critiquing strategies or campaigns—which is how movements improve—and attacking the people behind them. The former is legitimate and welcome. The latter is neither acceptable nor constructive.

Results

In addition to the early tabloid coverage, as hoped, we landed national TV coverage on GB News and radio coverage on LBC and an Op Ed in the Daily Mail where we got to say our core message more clearly[5] and to a larger audience. However, to moderate the risk of inciting infighting, we leaned out of controversy.

As a result of this more mild-mannered approach, the LBC radio interview wasn’t aired. This change in approach lost us momentum in the media, and meant we stood little chance of landing the North Star coverage like Piers Morgan. We think that, on balance, this was the right call given the risks raised, but we could be wrong about this. For example, any damage to the movement might already have been done and we may simply have given up potential upside.

The campaign also sparked significant commentary in online channels aimed primarily at vegans and animal advocates.

There is some really thought-provoking and valuable discourse in here, and so long as it doesn’t lead to infighting, we’re glad to see it! This discourse seems to have rallied many advocates around Veganuary, which we’re glad for, particularly given they face criticism from within the vegan community itself.

As of 22nd January, we estimate donations generated by this as $16,692 using the most conservative attribution logic, and $59,262 by less conservative logic[6] -- probably lower than it would have been had we not pulled back from controversy mid-campaign. This translates to a 0.82 - 3.27x gross funding multiplier[7]. This doesn’t include future donations that these donors might initiate, or any future podcast interviews or other coverage this campaign might unlock. It also doesn’t include additional donations to Veganuary that this campaign may have caused (we observed a number of cases of people on social media claiming they were going to donate to Veganuary because of this). Whilst this is more donations than resulted from any news coverage we’ve previously received, we do not consider this an exciting result.

FAQs

Are you anti-vegan?

No. FarmKind’s co-founders are both vegan[8] and we believe veganism is a powerful tool for helping farmed animals. We want Veganuary to succeed in driving diet change.

However, even though broad public opposition to factory farming is high[9], rates of veganism have remained stubbornly flat. In the US, for example, polling finds the number has remained roughly the same since 2012 and in the UK since at least 2019.

We believe we need to provide more options and lower the barrier to entry for the vast majority of people who are not currently vegan, so they can start helping. Donating is one such option. Recent research from Rethink Priorities finds that diet change is perceived as significantly more difficult than donating and equally impactful.

Meanwhile, donating has some advantages as a way to help fix this problem:

To summarise: Veganism... good. Other ways of helping animals... also good. 

Giving people multiple options makes it more likely that they pick one, and take their first step on what we hope will be a lifelong journey of increasingly ambitious action for animals.

Aren’t you concerned about dissuading people from being vegan?

We recognize that many people -- including us -- have a gut-level negative reaction to the campaign's framing. But we are not the target audience, and our personal reactions aren't strong evidence about the campaign's impact on the people it was designed to influence. We encourage critics to distinguish between 'I personally dislike this' and 'I believe this will be net negative for animals.' The former is expected and largely irrelevant. The latter is important.

We take the possibility of dissuading people from being vegan very seriously. But we view the actual risk as low and far outweighed by the benefits. The rate and trend of veganism over time shows that most people aren’t vegan and aren’t about to be. Most individuals hold deeply entrenched views regarding their consumption of animal products, whereas their views on whether or where to donate are often much more flexible.

We believe the potential upside of reaching the non-vegan majority -- many of whom may be hearing for the first time that they can still take significant action against factory farming -- far outweighs the risk to the small minority of "diet swing voters". We believe this is true even considering the risk of people reading just the headline and not the message about donating: We find it hard to believe that a single provocative headline would materially shift someone's long-term moral or dietary convictions. If a "swing eater" claimed to be swayed by one headline, we’re skeptical they were seriously considering diet change in the first place. After all, if individual messages were capable of easily changing dietary choices, we would expect to see far more progress in traditional vegan outreach over the past several decades.

We want to emphasize that we could be wrong about this. We remain open to the possibility that our message might drive more people to stop being vegan than to donate and if we had reason to suspect that this risk was high, we would respond accordingly. However, we don’t think that the prima facie case for this risk is strong, given what is already known about public attitudes to veganism and diet change.

We agree with those who argue that ending factory farming in the long term may require a substantial shift toward veganism and widespread positive public sentiment. However, we believe that a typical tabloid reader’s perception of veganism is far more entrenched than their views on whether to donate to charities working to reform an inhumane industry. Donating funds things like alternative proteins, institutional meat reduction and corporate campaigns. We believe that funding these interventions helps change the food environment such that veganism is more convenient, relatively cheaper, and more ‘normal, natural and nice’, making veganism more socially acceptable and sustainable for the average person later on.

As an aside, we suspect that donating may be a promising on-ramp to diet change in the long-term. Our actions aren’t simply downstream of beliefs: Our actions can change our beliefs. Forthcoming research from Samantha Kassirer supports the view that getting people to take even trivially small actions for farmed animals can increase their moral sympathy towards them 6 months later. A similar phenomenon is often at play when people who change their diet for non-moral reasons later become convinced by the moral argument: Once we start taking action on an issue (like factory farming) we have less reason to avoid thinking about it and less dissonance in seeing ourselves differently (e.g. as pro-animal). That makes us more open to further actions. We discuss this further here.

Have you measured whether you’re dissuading people from being vegan or supporting animal advocacy?

We did not prepare this measurement in advance because, as explained above, we think this risk is likely to be low. However we do take the risk seriously, and so we are talking with MEL advisors like The Mission Motor, seeking their advice on whether there is a right-sized way to measure this going forward.

It is worth noting that we have not yet encountered a vegan advocacy organization that systematically measures whether its messaging might inadvertently dissuade people from -- or hurt their perception of -- veganism or other animal advocacy, nor have we seen anyone calling for them to do so. While the evidence on backfire effects in advocacy is often mixed and highly context-dependent, there are certainly reasons to worry that some “go vegan” messaging could be counterproductive:

As a movement, we should be consistent in our demands for empirical rigor. Just as FarmKind should put our assumptions under the microscope, we believe it is equally important to test the assumption that typical vegan advocacy is net-positive.

Why not just do something much more nuanced?

The mainstream media rarely provides a platform for nuance. We considered various media hooks and have experimented with less controversial approaches, both independently and with PR agency support. They failed to gain significant traction.

When we start talking about factory farming, the script in people's minds is that we're about to ask them to change their diet -- so they stop listening. We used to get comments like "I'm not going to go vegan, I love bacon too much" on videos where we weren't talking about veganism at all. To reach many people, we need to make it explicitly clear we're not asking them to go vegan.

Why did you pitch to tabloids and right-wing outlets?

As mentioned earlier, the aim was to cause outlets that normally are silent on the issue of factory farming and critical of Veganuary (see here, here and here) to have a more productive conversation about which action people should choose to combat factory farming this year, instead of whether to do anything about it at all. This tabloid coverage wasn't expected to drive significant donations directly, but to springboard us to a major TV appearance. For context, last year's Dwarkesh podcast appearance raised over $2.5M -- a single high-profile media hit can be transformative. Our target was something like Piers Morgan.

As mentioned earlier, we pivoted mid-campaign to mitigate infighting risk, and this more mild-mannered approach caused our GB News interview to go unuploaded and our LBC interview to go unaired, killing our momentum toward that goal.

We didn’t pitch outlets like Guardian because they typically write positive stories about Veganuary (e.g. these two this year) which we had no interest in co-opting.

Conclusion

We ran a provocative campaign that generated significant controversy and modest donations. We made real mistakes in execution, particularly around stakeholder consultation, and are genuinely sorry for any distress this caused to Veganuary staff and others who felt blindsided.

We still believe that experimenting with ways to mobilize the non-vegan majority is important and under-explored. When people learn they can start taking meaningful action for farmed animals without overhauling their diet, doors open that would otherwise stay closed. We'll continue pursuing that goal, with better coordination next time.

If you've read this far, thank you for hearing us out.

  1. ^

    This includes estimated value of recurring donations based on our historical retention rates

  2. ^

    We expected TV to drive donations more reliably than news articles for a number of reasons, including a) the readership of articles across sites is very ‘spikey’; b) audiences self-select by reading headlines and not clicking the article which means a higher proportion of readers are likely to come to an article with pre-existing strong views on a given topic; c) TV allows us to put forward our message more directly without the filter of a journalist’s write up which would likely leave out our direct ‘call to action’.

  3. ^

    To clarify: This was our goal. We are not claiming that this was a goal shared by us and Veganuary.

  4. ^

    We changed this at Veganuary’s request, as their legal advisers were concerned that if they didn’t contest the use of their Trademark, it could weaken their legal position in the future if a non-aligned company or organization were to use our name in a similar way.

  5. ^

    The Daily Mail changed the headline and made other small edits without consulting us.

  6. ^

    Unlike many of our fundraising efforts which involve matching codes that make it easy to precisely identify donations, this one is harder. We estimated donations attributable to this campaign by looking at donations that (a) occurred after the first news coverage and before January 18th, (b) came from donor who had never donated through our platform before, (c) weren’t attributable to any other source [i.e. they didn’t use a matching code and they didn’t choose one of our other campaign when answering the “where did you first come across FarmKind?” question in the optional post-donation survey]. Our less conservative estimate counted all donations meeting these three requirements. Our conservative estimate only counted donations which either (a) were made through the offset calculator widget, (b) said they heard of us in a news article, or (c) donated a very specific number that very likely came from our calculator e.g. $209. We manually excluded 10 donations for which we have evidence that they weren’t caused by this campaign. If you’re wondering why we don’t just look at donations made through the offset calculator widget, the answer is that we know from our donor interviews that many (likely most) people who discover us through the calculator complete their donation through our standard donation widget.

  7. ^

    The campaign took roughly 2 FTE months of staff time. Costed at the average salary of the staff members involved, that’s a fully loaded cost of $8,817. Eater sponsorships cost $10,081. Total cost is roughly $18,098

  8. ^

    As for the rest of the team, we never ask job applicants about their diet because we strongly believe that it’s not important. What’s important is: Are they the people who will do the most to fix factory farming in this role? The good one can do for animals in their job is independent of (and has the potential to be hundreds of times higher than) the good they can do through their diet. Moreover, as a donation platform aimed at marketing to the majority of the population who aren’t vegan, ruling out candidates unless they aren’t in our target audience would be ill-advised. Nonetheless, this is something we get asked about regularly (see example).

  9. ^

    A 2017 survey from the Sentience Institute found that 69% agree that “factory farming of animals is one of the most important social issues in the world today”, with 49% supporting banning it altogether. Faunalytics finds that if you look at specific industry standard practices, levels of opposition are even higher, ranging from 71 to 85%.

  10. ^

    Bastian, B., & Loughnan, S. (2017). Resolving the Meat-Paradox: A Motivational Account of Morally Troublesome Behavior and Its Maintenance.

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    Loughnan, S., Haslam, N., & Bastian, B. (2010). The role of meat consumption in the denial of moral status and mind to meat animals.

  12. ^

    Bastian, B., Loughnan, S., Haslam, N., & Radke, H. R. M. (2012). Don't Mind Meat? The Denial of Mind to Animals Used for Human Consumption

  13. ^

    Salomon, E., Preston, J. L., & Tannenbaum, M. B. (2017). Climate Change Helplessness and the (De)moralization of Individual Energy Behavior.

  14. ^

    Landry, N., Gifford, R., Milfont, T. L., Weeks, A., & Arnocky, S. (2018). Learned helplessness moderates the relationship between environmental concern and behavior.

  15. ^

    Gifford, R. (2011). The dragons of inaction: Psychological barriers that limit climate change mitigation and adaptation.  

  16. ^

    Brehm, J. W. (1966). A theory of psychological reactance.

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    Dillard, J. P., & Shen, L. (2005). On the nature of reactance and its role in persuasive health communication.

  18. ^

    Quick, B. L., & Stephenson, M. T. (2008). Examining the role of trait reactance and sensation seeking on perceived threat, state reactance, and reactance restoration.

  19. ^

    Sprengholz, P., Tannert, S., & Betsch, C. (2023). Explaining boomerang effects in persuasive health communication: How psychological reactance to healthy eating messages elevates attention to unhealthy food. Journal of Health Communication

Wendy Matthews @ 2026-01-23T21:31 (+96)

"We particularly empathize with the perspective of Veganuary staff and community members. We acknowledge that the campaign may have been deeply demotivating to those working on diet change and we are sorry."

Thank you for saying this, Thom and Aidan. Ultimately, we’re all here because we believe there’s a better path forward for our food system, even if we disagree on the best strategy to achieve it. In the spirit of minimizing further infighting risk, I want to confirm that this summary of our communications fairly reflects the sequence of events. Veganuary and FarmKind will continue reflecting on what happened together behind the scenes, and my hope is that we can now collectively shift focus away from internal process challenges and toward the more productive conversation around execution and overall impact. Onward from here.

minthin @ 2026-01-25T17:57 (+1)

Thank you for saying this Wendy, it is very big of Veganuary to have the bigger picture in mind for animals.

Ozzie Gooen @ 2026-01-26T07:05 (+41)

I'm not a marketing expert, but naively these headlines don't look great to me. 
"Veganuary champion quits to run meat-eating campaign"
"Former Veganuary champion quits to run meat-eating campaign - saying vegan dogma is 'damaging' to goal of reducing animal suffering"

I'd naively expect most readers to just read the headlines, and basically assume, "I guess there's more reasons why meat is fine to eat." 

I tried asking Claude (note that it does have my own custom system prompt, which might bias it) if this campaign seemed like a good idea in the first place, and it was pretty skeptical. I'm curious if the FarmKind team did, and what their/your prompt was for this. 

I appreciate this write-up, but overall feel pretty uncomfortable about this work. To me the issue was less about the team not properly discussing things with other stakeholders, than it was just the team doing a risky and seemingly poor intervention. 

Ben_West🔸 @ 2026-01-28T03:28 (+7)

My read of their phase one plan is that they were intending to get these pretty low quality tabloid stories as a springboard to getting higher quality stuff. Maybe that was a bad plan, but the fact that the bad tabloid articles were in fact bad tabloid articles doesn't seem to discredit that?

NickLaing @ 2026-01-28T07:02 (+1)

I think it partly does discredit that? Its a pretty low probability bet that bad tabloid articles will likely graduate to more serious articles. Especially given that this campaign actually did get quite a lot of media (maybe even more than expected?), and that still didn't happen.

Ben_West🔸 @ 2026-01-28T07:26 (+7)

Hmm. I understood them to be saying they (semi-) voluntarily scaled back before phase 2 was complete, so we can't read that much into the fact that phases 2/3 (where the high quality journalism happens) didn't happen. Maybe I misunderstood?

NickLaing @ 2026-01-28T08:18 (+2)

Ah that's entirely possible.

Aidan Alexander @ 2026-01-30T07:33 (+2)

Yep Ben is right. We did turn the tabloid coverage into further deeper coverage and were on our way to the North Star but leaned out of controversy to a degree that killed our momentum. Of course we don’t know what would have happened otherwise, and it should certainly be characterized as a “low probability bet” because trying to land media hits is inherently “hits-based”, but this was a reasonable PR strategy that our two staff who both have ample PR experience devised. I don’t think we should put much stock in our armchair PR intuitions

TylerMaule @ 2026-01-24T16:25 (+36)

Accepting that this campaign was debatable ex-ante and disappointing ex-post, I think it's helpful to view it in the context of the broader reality: 

Given the dire[1] status quo, I am generally grateful when thoughtful, conscientious actors like FarmKind take the initiative to try new approaches in the hope of unlocking positive change for animals. Although this campaign didn't achieve its aims, it’s good to see that it generated some useful lessons—and, most importantly, I hope the harsh reaction won’t unduly discourage future attempts to test new ideas.

  1. ^

    Factory farming is arguably the moral atrocity of our time, and still getting worse despite current best efforts

JM1987 @ 2026-01-26T19:27 (+31)

(Mandatory "this is anecdotal evidence" disclaimer). 

I personally started using FarmKind's Compassion Calculator after the Dwarkesh podcast with Lewis Bollard to offset my animal product consumption and am committed to continue doing this indefinitely, which would be roughly $54,000 over my lifetime in today's dollars. I would put the chances of me becoming a lifelong vegan at less than 5%, so one could reasonable credit FarmKind (along with that podcast) with ~$50k in counterfactual donations from me alone. 

Of course I am biased towards justifying my own choice, but I have a strong intuition that providing options for people to contribute toward farmed animal welfare without having to make large life changes is not only good, but possibly the most tractable path toward large scale change here. I'd love to hear counterarguments here though.

As for this specific campaign, I don't have any high confidence takes besides acknowledging that this type of reflection and lessons learned post is good in all worlds. 

Molly Jo Molloy 🔸 @ 2026-01-25T05:02 (+21)

A lot of this focuses on addressing what seem to be the criticisms the FK team find least convincing and relevant to their goals (e.g. infighting shouldn't ever happen, FK must have been slighting Veganuary due to some larger movement-wide rifts). I know people are out there making those arguments, so I completely understand taking time to address them, but I think it would be useful to have more focus on the impact calculus that's supposed to make all of that moot. I'd like to hear them engage on why this was expected to go well (and specifically to go better than a more audience-aligned approach), because that expectation is the only thing they use to justify both the anticipated and unanticipated negative results.

ClimateDoc @ 2026-01-24T12:42 (+18)

Thanks for posting an update about the outcomes and your reflections. It sounds like the right lesson that it would be good to consult more widely in the movement before trying similarly risky approaches.

I just wanted to ask a somewhat technical question about the estimate of the amount raised:

We estimated donations attributable to this campaign by looking at donations that (a) occurred after the first news coverage and before January 18th, (b) came from donor who had never donated through our platform before, (c) weren’t attributable to any other source [i.e. they didn’t use a matching code and they didn’t choose one of our other campaign when answering the “where did you first come across FarmKind?” question in the optional post-donation survey]. Our less conservative estimate counted all donations meeting these three requirements. Our conservative estimate only counted donations which either (a) were made through the offset calculator widget, (b) said they heard of us in a news article, or (c) donated a very specific number that very likely came from our calculator e.g. $209. We manually excluded 10 donations for which we have evidence that they weren’t caused by this campaign.

This doesn't sound like it takes into account that (I guess) there would have been some amount donated through FarmKind without the campaign i.e. donations from new donors in that period not indicated as being linked to a campaign. What effect would subtracting this "background donation rate" have e.g. if it were based on a representative previous recent period of similar length (maybe from October-November or something if Christmas distorts things)? Or is this accounted for in a way I've not understood?

Ula Zarosa @ 2026-01-24T10:56 (+18)

Personally, I admire your integrity and willingness to write this post, despite very strong attacks (not constructive criticism) you endured for thinking outside the box and trying something more risky, which marketing specialists in commercial markets do all the time. This point, I think, is missed. In marketing, controversial campaigns are very common; sometimes they succeed, sometimes they totally fail; it's normal. One of the most successful campaigns in Poland is one big grocery chain -  Lidl, fighting with the other big chain - Biedronka, or I think there is this exchange between two car brands, where one disses the other in commercials. You literally wanted to try a classic marketing strategy that works for the richest brands in the world. I don't think there was anything wrong with the ToC to start with. 

I also don't think you could predict how big the wave of criticism will be. I have been in the animal movement for 25 years, 25 of those vegan as well, and yet I thought the intentions behind this campaign would be much clearer to fellow advocates. It turned out that our community was absolutely not ready for something like that, despite, as I said, it being a classical marketing strategy, and despite the goal being to help animals via counterfactual donations (donations that would not otherwise happen without this specific campaign, potentially coming from non-vegans).

I think the momentum for this campaign was stolen from you, so you could never really finish the ToC and see whether it would have been successful if you were not blocked by the movement. You getting donations is very interesting - as James mentions here, would this not suggest that there are some people who actually decided to donate because of the campaign? But the result obviously was much less than you probably had in mind. Still, it seems like you have not lost any money, and there might be some positive effects for Veganuary as well. 

I agree, the planning could be better, but it seems to me that with $3.3 million raised in 2025, a 2.94x counterfactual multiplier, and a 13.27x non-counterfactual, Farmkind is really in a good position to take risks and make mistakes. 

MHR🔸 @ 2026-01-24T13:57 (+16)

You mentioned survey research by Rethink Priorities a couple times in the post. However, the survey found that "the Donation message [a pure pitch to donate] was rated as more compelling than the Diet distancing message [a pitch to donate that specifically called out that one doesn't need to go vegan to help animals]." The difference in effect sizes was small, but I'm skeptical that the survey really supports the theory of change you were going for here. 

John Salter @ 2026-01-25T00:59 (+21)

I think this misses the forest for the trees. Yes, the pure donation message tested slightly better in conversion rate—but that's only half the equation.


Donations = Reach × Conversion Rate


The controversial framing got massive media coverage that a standard "please donate" pitch never would. Even if conversion is marginally lower, if reach is 10-100x higher, the math still favors the provocative approach.

The key question is whether the increased donations are worth the non-monetary costs.

Aidan Alexander @ 2026-01-25T02:10 (+15)

Read the Rethink research in its entirety and you’ll see the section with our reflections on the findings. It explains how the research influenced our strategy, and why campaigns like this can still make sense in light of it. We care a lot about what will actually work to drive donations — that’s why we requested this piece of research be done in the first place 

MHR🔸 @ 2026-01-25T15:05 (+4)

Oh thanks! I didn't see that!

Gregory Lewis🔸 @ 2026-01-24T10:46 (+13)

I think the biggest problem with Farmkind's campaign is that it was fundamentally manipulative and insincere. 

As I read it, the grand plan here was to pretend to trash Veganuary to 'bait' (your words) a lot of media engagement around this kayfabe controversy, and parlay this into a marquee presentation where the harvested eyeballs discover "we're actually all friends here, let us pitch you on different ways of helping animals!"  

The wider world tends to have allergic reactions to 'controlled opposition', 'audience plant', and related stunts, and so should we. I confess the fact that this one backfired in large part because you tricked too many people (including your allies) too well strikes me as a fitting comeuppance.

NickLaing @ 2026-01-24T12:30 (+25)

I agree with your statement in its entirety (even the "fitting comeuppance" bit), but I don't like the tone because it feels a little vindictive and mean to me. FarmKind were genuinely trying to help animals here, maybe messed up and I think you could perhaps be a little nicer while making your well articulated, very good point.

Gregory Lewis🔸 @ 2026-01-24T14:24 (+15)

I am also sure Farmkind was genuinely trying to do good. But I do think these sorts of schemes warrant calling out with some small degree of ire.

Although my vision may be jaundiced, this case fits a pattern of some folks in animal advocacy being willing to be somewhat-worse-than-spotless in terms of integrity or candour in the hopes of securing some tactical advantage (cf.). 

I think heading in the direction of treating non-animal advocates (within or without EA) as "legitimate targets for influence operations" rather than "fellow moral interlocutors" is unwise. Besides being unwise in the immediate "you weren't as clever as you thought you were and it blew up in your face", it also errs in terms of more insidious pollution of commons helpful for folks to coordinate on figuring out what is best to do, and cooperate in doing it. 

Thus I hope the lesson learned is, "avoid kind-of manipulative or insincere advocacy", not, "get better at pulling it off". Unfortunately, if it has, it is not readily apparent in the OP, given its reflections focus on first-order consequences and better coordination with other EAAs.

Brad West🔸 @ 2026-01-24T22:50 (+15)

I don't know that it is entirely manipulative or insincere, even if the founders of Farmkind are themselves vegan and support veganism. I think that they are trying to put forward a perspective and highlight a perspective that is also consistent with funding effective animal charities:

"I love consuming animal products and I am not giving that up. But I also think it's fucked up and wrong how animals are treated in the factory farming system."

And then they would initially use the interesting contrast between that and the vegan community to generate attention, while then emphasizing the commonality. That animals shouldn't be tortured and we can all do something to help make that stop.

I think that Farmkind is right that embracing people who have that perspective and validating that perspective may be part of growing the big tent, through not just funding but through engagement with the political process as well.

It seems like there were some execution issues here, but I hope that the appetite for creative and new ways to try to engage with the omnivorous supermajority continues growing.

JoA🔸 @ 2026-01-24T12:37 (+11)

I feel like your message implies that the central claim of Forget Veganuary (that focusing on veganism is unhelpful, and that donations are more promising) was not sincerely held by FarmKind / animal advocates. I strongly disagree. 

The view that diet change is not promising has been defended in animal advocacy since the early 90s, by a diversity of leading figures of the movement (Wayne Hsiung, Peter Singer, Yves Bonnardel, Nick Cooney).[1] It simply had never been made into a public campaign. So I don't resonate with the framing of the campaign as bait: on the contrary, it stated out loud a view that many advocates had. (Not saying that getting attention was not part of the campaign - though it's part of most campaigns).

  1. ^

    To varying degrees, with caveats, etc. 

minthin @ 2026-01-25T18:04 (+5)

Good point to be cautious about manufactured opposition. On the other hand, isn't rage baiting a common way to garner attention in today's environment? Isn't that exactly what makes your comment so attractive to respond to/rebuff? 

 

Perhaps I'm conflating rage baiting with manufactured opposition, but I do think FK is onto something here.

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 @ 2026-01-27T03:04 (+11)

Misinformation and clickbait are also common ways to get attention. I wouldn’t recommend those tactics, either.

The way that a lot of people get attention online is fundamentally destructive. It gets them clicks and ad revenue, but it doesn’t help cause positive change in the world.

I don’t think it makes sense to justify manipulative, dishonest, or deceptive tactics like ragebait on the basis that they are good at getting attention. This is taking a business model from social media, which in some cases is arguably like digital cigarettes, and inappropriately applying it to animal advocacy. If the goal is to get people to scroll a lot and show them a lot of ads, sure, copy the tactics used in social media. But that isn’t the goal here.

One form of ragebait is when you generate rage at a target other than yourself, but another form is when you bait people into getting angry at you (e.g. by expressing an insincere opinion) because that drives engagement, and engagement gets you paid. Making people angry at you is especially not applicable to animal advocacy.

Ula Zarosa @ 2026-01-24T11:06 (+5)

"The wider world tends to have allergic reactions to 'controlled opposition'" - I am unsure. In Poland, one of the most popular marketing campaigns is when one grocery chain is trashing the other - obviously this has been agreed, and Lidl is not suing Biedronka, or Biedronka Lidl, and people really love it :) BMW vs. Audi, Pepsi vs. Coca Cola - also did well globally. So I am unsure if what you say is correct. 

Gregory Lewis🔸 @ 2026-01-24T11:58 (+25)

Given Lidl literally sued Biedronka to get bailiffs to seize advertising billboards by Beidronka against them in 2024, and the price war between the chains, I don't see many signs of agreement or kayfabe in this competition. 

Regardless, the underlying competition in these adversarial advertising campaigns is genuine: Pepsi and Coke (e.g.) want each other's market share for themselves. Here things seem more like two parties A & B collude where B poses as a competitor to A, intending the subsequent playfight between them to be in both A & B's mutual advantage (at least that is what Farmkind intended, notwithstanding they flubbed both the 'collude with A' and 'mutually advantageous playfight' steps of the plan).  

I think most countries antitrust regulators (etc.) would raise an eyebrow at this sort of thing. I am sure it is generally regarded as a dirty trick in the marketplace of ideas (cf. I pay a fellow vegan to build up a media presence as an anti-vegan advocate, only to sandbag in a public debate with me where I trounce them, and publicly convert (back) to veganism). 

Toby Tremlett🔹 @ 2026-01-26T08:29 (+11)

Hey all, here’s a quick reminder of some relevant Forum norms, since this is a bit of a heated topic, and we might have some new users taking part:

You can report comments to the moderators by clicking the three dot menu in the top right of the comment box. 

(FWIW, this isn't a response to a specific comment, the moderation team was planning to write a comment to pin to this post). 

Seabass @ 2026-01-24T10:32 (+9)

Thank you for spending time explaining the campaign and responding to criticisms. The contrition feels more ‘sorry we underestimated how cross you would all be about this’ rather than ‘sorry we forgot to have a moral compass’. 

You didn’t just make mistakes in execution, you made mistakes that undermine the ethical values of animal rights. For example, your summary glosses over your campaign’s efforts to promote, trivialise and monetise the consumption of a whole goat. 

Would you agree that if you applied this approach to human social justice campaigns there would rightly be uproar? A domestic abuse charity paying a violent knucklehead with lots of followers to make a video ‘it’s super hard to stop beating your wife when it’s cold, dark and miserable in the winter, so just carry on and send a donation to BandagesForBatteredWives.org’. I know you’ll say it’s a flawed comparison because animal rights doesn’t have the same social acceptance as opposition to domestic abuse. But it never will if our own movement can’t agree that respect for the lives of sentient individuals is sacrosanct.

Alistair Currie @ 2026-01-24T13:11 (+7)

This is a commendably extensive response which addresses many of the concerns and complaints made. Few other organisations would do this and all credit to you for doing so and engaging in this way. But satisfactory? No. 

You built quite an edifice on a web of research and your dazzlingly elaborate theory of change. If everything went right, you would certainly have achieved your proximate goals. Problem is that rarely in the world of public engagement, media and comms does everything go right. 

That can, of course, be mitigated a bit by very careful planning, organisation and execution and the more complex and chancy a project is, the more important it is to do that right. By your own admission (and ample external evidence, including taking down the flagship website within days of the campaign launch) you didn’t do that. And here’s the rub - you weren’t just gambling on your own success, you were gambling with the work and success of others. In my view, you should not have done it at all for that reason. But if you’re going to go ahead, be VERY sure you’re doing it right. You weren’t and there was a failure of professionalism there that goes beyond “we should have checked someone else’s emails”. 

There is much more to say on the big picture and I’ve said some of it on my LinkedIn if people should be curious. (Summary: this campaign was ill-conceived, divisive, disrespectful, callow, unjustified by its expected outcomes, poorly executed and exemplifies the limitations of the EA approach.) In this post, I just want to flag that those of us privileged to be paid to work for animals in any capacity must never neglect the foundation of professionalism. We’ve got to do our jobs right. I put my hand up to many mistakes over my career and again commend Thom and Aidan for their transparency. Obviously, I’m no fan of the entire project on principle so people can judge my comment on this accordingly, but I don’t think this post yet shows a deep enough engagement with the substantive criticisms that have been made or with the reasons things didn’t go according to plan. 

NickLaing @ 2026-01-24T07:17 (+7)

thanks for this great analysis. I'm impressed by FarmKind's quick response to this. Knowing the reasoning behind helps me understand better what you were trying to do. Although i still think it wasn't a good campaign, I think it's good that you are trying innovative approaches to both capturing media attention and communicating about the best ways to help animals.

I think it matters and signals integrity that you are both vegan too. this should help more hard love animal rights campaigners realize that you are really in their side and not trying to undermine them.

All the best for future campaigns, don't let this scare you off staying bold and innovative in future :😊!

Ula Zarosa @ 2026-01-24T11:12 (+13)

I wish, though, that it would not matter to people if they're vegan, because the whole point is to show non-vegans that they can also do something good for farmed animals, without having to change their diet. So, in the future, I would hope that the pro-animal movement will have mostly non-vegans as members, because there are so few vegans, and so much to do. How will we drive top talent to work for animals, if we expect them to be vegan to run pro-animal campaigns, so that other advocates have a feeling they are the right people to do it? That's very alienating for potential allies to this cause, but I understand why you said that. Just don't think they have to be vegan at all, and that these high expectations are good to have. 

NickLaing @ 2026-01-24T12:28 (+2)

I wish that was the case too, but I think if like FarmKind you need to work with a lot of animal activists (that are often more ideological than utilitarian) while telling the general public its better donate than stop eating meat, then it probably helps to be vegan. Its not the easiest position to be in but I think Farmkind do it very well (besides this campaign).

I don't have "expectations" here, but I'm talking about what puts you in a better position running an org.

I don't expect people to be vegan to run pro-animal campaigns at all (I didn't say that) and I don't think you would have to be vegan to run FarmKind. 

InTheSky @ 2026-01-23T23:59 (+7)

The theory of change here just makes no sense to me—and even if it did, FK took it much further than would be necessary if “forget about veganism and look me in my eyes as I talk about farmed animal suffering” was the idea.

Who is so willing to entertain radical pro-animal positions (and remember that to basically every person outside of the animal welfare movement, “I am personally prepared to donate money to improve the welfare of farmed animals” is extremely radical, and is way less common a position than “I should make my money off of treating animals as badly as I have to in order to make money/eat my favorite foods”) that they would be won over by arguments to donate from compassion for animals, BUT has such a red line at changing their eating habits that any discussion of the matter that doesn’t just ignore diet change but even fails to deride it and those advocating for it (I recall references to activists trying to “trick you into going vegan”) would be dead on arrival—and this subject, who is willing to radically change their position on their responsibility towards animal welfare because they find the suffering of farmed animals to be a serious tragedy worthy of their donations, would be enthused by campaigns about people quitting veganism, eating a whole goat, etc. AND this person would never have gone vegan, so they exist in this very narrow (I believe imaginary) band of concern where they’re moved by compassion for animals and personal will to commit regular money to offset their animal consumption, but they would never have gone vegan anyways, so we had to stab that idea in front of them before they’d even listen to us about the issue of farmed animal welfare.

Who is this person? Who is so allergic to veganism that they are drawn to campaigns that crudely deride it and its adherents and revel in imagery of meat-eating and quitting veganism, but also feels exceptional compassion for farmed animals and is willing to make a durable commitment to donate money to animal activists (most of whom are the much-hated vegans) to help them?

I don’t think a large target audience of this kind exists, certainly not enough to offset the negative impact of promoting hatred and abandonment of the animal welfare movement’s most visible, durable, proven-impactful form and identity. And there will be no end to factory farming without the vegan movement. The same people who thumbs-up at “forget veganuary” will give two thumbs up to the next person who tells them “forget offset donations”—and there’s a long line of people ready to say that.

JamesÖz 🔸 @ 2026-01-24T00:04 (+3)

The campaign raised an estimated $16,700--$59,300

Is this not some evidence that the target audience exists? 

Aidan Alexander @ 2026-01-24T00:11 (+12)

Also our thousands of donors over the past 12 months. Many of them email us expressing that our compassion calculator is exactly what they’re been looking for and/or that they’ve been put off by other animal advocates in the past and find our website refreshing.

Matt_Sharp @ 2026-01-24T12:50 (+10)

What has your approach been over the past 12 months? Has it been consistently hostile towards veganism?

My assumption is that you've previously been targeting people who (1) care about animals and (2) are probably somewhat sympathetic towards the goals of veganism, (3) but want an easier option to help animals than becoming vegan. 

This seems like a very promising approach, and I can imagine most of my friends and family falling into this category. Maybe I'm mistaken, but I've not otherwise percevied your approach (before this latest campaign) to be overtly hostile towards veganism.

Molly Jo Molloy 🔸 @ 2026-01-25T05:00 (+22)

This feels like a really important point to me that hasn't been addressed yet, so I'm really curious how the FK team is squaring it now and how they thought about it as they planned for this. 

I, even as a vegan, find Farmkind's homepage and core message refreshing, too! The arguments for recruiting compassionate people who aren't going to go vegan any time soon are plentiful and very exciting to me. But these arguments need to reach pretty far (with the provided research doing little to support that reach) to justify a need for overt hostility---a hostility which mostly serves to be confusing to anyone who isn't thinking in earnest already about tradeoffs for farmed animals (almost everyone).

FK has made the argument repeatedly that they couldn't have expected media coverage from these outlets if they weren't hostile to vegans. I think that's plausible. But it begs the question: Why go after these outlets in the first place? These outlets not historically having productive conversations about vegans and factory farming as FK says at the end isn't a strong reason on its own to go after those outlets. In my opinion it's probably the opposite. These outlets don't have good conversations about factory farming---and in my opinion continue not to do so in the Forget Veganuary coverage---because that is not what their audience wants to read about. FK has posited that these audiences like to engage with hating on vegans. I agree and think that's reflected in the not exciting result FK saw in reaching them. 

Even in the best of circumstances with very friendly journalists, your press can be framed in unintended ways. Matching this lede, this spokesperson, and these outlets was nowhere near the best of circumstances and I think can only have been expected to be warped by the time it showed up in front of their audiences. It even seems to have been confusing to the journalists that got to hear the full story directly from Farmkind, given that Thom said in the David Ramms interview they didn't intend for this to be picked up as a "meat eating campaign" in the way it was. So to expect your (frankly very nuanced and sort of arcane to your average conservative) message to be received as intended seems hopeful at best.

If what FK has been doing has been working---seeing significant success in friendlier environments like Dwarkesh's podcast (really a great example of the right audience fit to their message---people who are opting in to think analytically about a topic and actively seek out discussions about interesting tradeoffs. This was badass and I probably talked too much about how exciting it was to me when it happened), it seems like doubling down on that strategy would have made a lot of sense. A lot of my friends and family would fall into this category of audience as well, @Matt_Sharp. 

I'm curious why they felt there was a need to deviate from what was working exceptionally well, especially to do something like take a wild shot at dominos falling into place to get a presence in a (much more hostile) media environment like Piers Morgan. How likely did they think it was that that would work out as expected? What would they have considered a success if it ended up falling short of that? I think even rough answers to these will be really helpful for people across the movement trying to learn from this and win some points for transparency and strategic thinking for FK as well.

The series of dominos they hoped would fall has many points of failure, all of which are made more dangerous by the kind of coordination that results in missed emails and websites that need to be edited shortly after launch. These sorts of misses happen all the time, especially when people are trying to move quickly under pressure of working with journalists. But that should really heavily discount your estimated upside! 

The case for taking this wild shot being worth the expected costs (even those estimated by FK as lower than they were) isn't made strongly by this post. It's more of a qualitative story about what might have happened if all went to plan that by description alone should be considered worth the risks.

In the various places FK has faced criticism for the campaign, their responses suggest that this was seen internally as the only viable route to try. But even aside from FK's own success with a different approach on Dwarkesh, there are other options for high-impact media experiments that give non-vegans options to help animals. 

Off the dome, a February Farmkind campaign (that wouldn't distract from Veganuary's January work or compete for coverage) targeted at those that tried and failed at Veganuary---or even just plan to go back to eating animal products afterward---with some angle like "Turn a new leaf without the kale: Here's how Veganuary dropouts are helping animals" could be interesting. Instead of competitive eaters (this was truly goofy to me and seemed to be a caricature of how the omnivores think about eating animal products; the most relatable person to a normal omnivore is a normal omnivore, not "Gary Eats 48 Sandwiches on a Normal Tuesday") your spokespeople could be lifestyle influencers who gave Veganuary a go. The large swath of people that would identify with struggling with veganism/Veganuary already has demonstrated an interest and some level of motivation to seek the benefits of forgoing animal products, so they're closer to donating than your "I eat twice as much meat to own vegans" conservative.

I could see something like this being very on-beat for more progressive outlets (it's lifestyle-focused, socially-positive, lends itself to the kind of self-deprecating self help people aged 25-44 like). An approach that works outward from Farmkind's core message rather than backward from the media opportunity wouldn't necessitate the hostility that has caused so many problems, simply didn't feel coherent with the Farmkind brand, and was so unaligned with the organization's place in a broader movement that they needed to shut the campaign down midway through. It would be more strategically focused, intuitive, and easy for Farmkind to stick to in talking points---all things that would have helped with both reach and impact. Even something like this, though, I'd hope would be undertaken with more Veganuary team input than Forget Veganuary was.

I am very curious what other angles FK has tried that haven't worked, too. There are less newsworthy organizations than Farmkind that get press in less controversial ways. Timing is often the key consideration for newsworthiness, not just controversy (unless you've locked yourself into going after tabloids). So doing something related to Veganuary was a great idea. But I think it takes a lot of assumptions to conclude this was the highest-value way of doing it.

Sarah70 @ 2026-01-25T08:25 (+5)

But it cost $18,098 to reach this audience, the key question isn’t whether they can reach them, it’s whether the campaign is likely to create a net new impact for animals.

Why it was likely a loss, even if we take their most generous estimates, is because their calculations don’t appear to account for

(a) donations displaced as a result of this campaign (I think we’ve all seen/heard people publicly and privately saying they’ve withdrawn donations to them)

(b) time and resources diverted across the movement by the conflict they’ve generated, or 

(c) what they likely would have raised anyway without targeting Veganuary based on their other campaigns.

If the goal is donations for farmed animals, why choose a strategy that predictably creates backlash and movement conflict while also targeting the ‘highest-hanging fruit’. From an expected value perspective, it’s hard to see why this dominates lower-friction alternative.

Billy Nicholles @ 2026-01-26T09:48 (+3)

Is the research you mention by Samantha Kassirer, or more detail on it, public yet? I've heard you reference it a couple of times and interested to see more.  

Thanks for the thoughtful and transparent write up :)