Give me feedback on a web app to encourage donations to animal welfare charities

By Luke Eure @ 2024-01-10T18:31 (+21)

I am prototyping a web app - called Let's Eat in Harmony - to encourage people to donate more to animal welfare charities. I'd love your feedback!

Primary goal: Get more people donating to effective animal charities
Secondary goal: Get people making more impactful dietary decisions with regards to animal welfare by understanding tradeoffs between different kinds of animal products they eat (i.e., eat beef rather than shrimp)

The target audience includes EA people, but I am positioning it to have wider appeal.

Here is the tool prototype. (A google sheet for now. Will build it into a web app if promising)

My requests from you:

Give the tool a try
Any feedback you have on the potential impact of such a tool, the marketing copy, the name, the calculation methodology, etc. please leave a comment here
If you used the Let's Eat in Haromony tool and are willing to give user feedback, please do so here!
I would greatly appreciate if you used the tool and are willing to do a 15-30min user feedback interview with me. If you're willing, please book some time here

What is Let's Eat in Harmony? (marketing copy)

Animal suffering is a systemic problem. Individual dietary choices can help save a few animals, but massive change will come from efforts - including those by animal welfare charities - to improve animal welfare through policy and technology.

By donating surprisingly little to animal welfare charities, you can have just as much positive impact on animal welfare as if you totally gave up eating animal products. And you would be supporting the systemic fight to make life better for animals.

Let's Eat in Harmony shows you how much you should donate in order to balance the impact of your diet on the welfare of animals.

To put it another way, Let's Eat in Harmony shows you how much you need to donate to have just as much positive impact on animals as if you totally gave up eating animal products.

Of course it's even better if you are able to reduce or eliminate animal products from your diet and still donate.

Caveats on current version of the tool:

It is quite simple and assumes you consume an average amount of animal products - but allows you to say "yes" or "no" to various foods that you may or may not consume. I don't plan to make it much more complicated for the user - I think simplicity and usability is better than a super personalized recommendation
This version is based on average US consumption data. Future improvement would be to allow you to select country and to use average consumption from your country
This doesn't include anything about environmental impact. In a future version I could allow trading off animal welfare vs environmental impact (the way Food Impacts does)

Bella @ 2024-01-12T10:10 (+6)

Hey! A little feedback on your feedback form (hehe):

I think it should include a space for open-ended comment (Anything else you want to mention?) and/or qualitative comments, as well as just ratings, for the things you're asking about.

Putting my qualitative comments here instead:

I think the name is not very good — it sounds to me like a translation from another language, e.g. Japanese, and not like a phrase I would say as a native English speaker (I almost never say 'harmony'). It's also kind of long, and doesn't relate to what the product does.
The current Google sheet has a few typos in it
I think your current copy is too long and complex. It sounds technical and dry rather than clear and inviting. e.g. 'Individual dietary choices' - just say 'The way people eat' or e.g. 'but massive change will come from efforts - including those by animal welfare charities - to improve animal welfare through policy and technology.' this sounds like I expect it to come from a white paper by an animal charity rather than a web app for consumers/aimed at people who might donate to that charity. Of course that does depend on who your target audience is here :)
It looks like your sheet makes the assumption that eggs and milk use no animals for production, which (even if the underlying calculations work out ok - I didn't check) could be confusing

Luke Eure @ 2024-01-13T12:47 (+1)

Hi Bella,

Thanks a lot for the feedback. Updated the form so people can give qualitative feedback there. Will make the google sheet clearer, and see if I can make the title and copy more compelling. Appreciate it!

Aidan Alexander @ 2024-06-30T14:53 (+3)

Hey Luke, are you still moving ahead with this? I just stumbled across this post, and next month I'm launching a donation platform for animals (called Farmkind -- https://farmkind.giving) that has this sort of "offset calculator" as one of it's features, so we should coordinate!

Luke Eure @ 2024-07-02T18:40 (+1)

Hey! I've paused my work on this project - still think it's very important just had to prioritize other things in my life. Very happy to talk though. I'll DM you

Lotte_de_Lint @ 2024-01-15T17:50 (+2)

I like the idea. However I think a limitation to think through, that I do not see described here, is how you will get people to visit and use your tool. Have you thought this out? What is your target audience? How do you reach them? And, why might they be motivated to use your tool?