EA - Impactful Animal Advocacy: Building Community Infrastructure by Impactful Animal Advocacy

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Impactful Animal Advocacy: Building Community Infrastructure, published by Impactful Animal Advocacy on November 22, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Tl;dr: Impactful Animal Advocacy (IAA) has grown from a side project in 2022 to a moderately well-recognized online hub for farmed animal advocates with over 2000 community members today. Our aim is to build infrastructure for a better connected animal advocacy movement. We are still a young organization and currently aim to focus on our core programs which include our Slack community, newsletter, and strategic connections.We are currently operating with 2 full-time and 1 part-time employee (1 is on a break) with a monthly expense rate of 5.5k USD. This is thanks to 2 team members agreeing to work on a volunteer basis. With this state of operations, we have a runway of 5 months secured.Additional marginal funding would be first used to ensure stable operations in 2024 and then to scale to include other promising programs such as an animal advocacy forum, resource hub, and collaboration with individuals and organizations in neglected regions.BackgroundWhen we first launched 18 months ago, we started with the Impactful Animal Advocacy newsletter. It was meant to be a helpful side project for friends and colleagues who wanted aggregated updates on the farmed animal advocacy movement. This quickly grew into other initiatives including a vibrant Slack community and active work in strategically connecting advocates. After the first year, we received some initial seed funding.This allowed for hiring the project founders for 1 day a week and this later progressed to one of the founders going full-time and the other becoming an advisor. Currently, we believe we have gotten through most of the challenges of early-stage organizational setup including creating and refining SOPs, OKRs, MEL metrics, project/task management systems, and obtaining fiscal sponsorship.Our current goalsTo create exceptionally good online spaces for professional farmed animal advocates to collaborate, exchange information, and be part of a communityTo share high quality resources and information relevant to the work of professional farmed animal advocatesTo serve an online coordination function for the farmed animal advocacy movementOur primary audience consists of engaged animal advocates who are interested in collaboration, including non-profit employees, project founders, and academics. We also have independent activists, funders, volunteers and established leaders on our platforms.We've seen rapid growth, with our Slack community reaching over 1,500 members and nearly 60 specialized channels in less than a year. Our newsletter is also gaining traction, with over 1,100 subscribers. Both platforms are community-driven, featuring content and insights shared by our members. Here are testimonials for our Slack and newsletter.Community storiesSince helping community members is at the center of what we do, our value is best demonstrated in their stories:Rosanna ZimdahlRosanna Zimdahl, a Masters student from Sweden wasn't connected to anyone in the movement. She is finishing a degree in MSc Engineering Energy & Environment, and besides that she likes to study systems thinking. She always wanted to contribute to the movement and during a systems mapping course she thought it would be great to apply it to an animal advocacy matter.The Slack space made it possible! She was inspired by the enthusiasm and took the opportunity to start a System Mapping course for farmed animal advocacy. Four other advocates she met on the space joined her to work on the project.If not for IAA, Rosanna wouldn't have found collaborators to do this which they learnt a lot from, and she will continue applying systems thinking methods to enhance the movement.Apoo...