Faunalytics
Animal Welfare Research
Faunalytics maintains the largest database of animal advocacy research, works with animal advocacy organisations on projects to improve their impact, and produces original animal advocacy research.
What problem is Faunalytics working on?
The animal advocacy movement is generally lacking in research that can help guide its actions, and many charities do not make use of the research that is available.
Faunalytics is especially focused on farmed animals. Globally, there are more than 100 billion farmed animals slaughtered each year, the majority of which are raised in factory farms.
What does Faunalytics do?
Faunalytics works to empower animal advocates with access to research, analysis, strategies, and messages that maximise their effectiveness to reduce animal suffering.
Faunalytics fills this research gap by:
- Maintaining a library of over 4,500 research articles.
- Partnering with organisations on research projects to improve the effectiveness of those organisations' work.
- Producing its own original research in areas that it has identified as key knowledge gaps in the movement.
What information does Giving What We Can have about the cost-effectiveness of Faunalytics?
The impact-focused evaluator Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) has recommended Faunalytics after conducting an evaluation of their work. ACE writes: “Faunalytics’ programs support the animal advocacy movement by examining effective advocacy strategies, problem areas, and tactics, and by providing advocates with a curated database of academic research summaries. We believe that Faunalytics’ reports have the potential to influence priorities, inform the implementation of interventions, and build the field."
We looked into ACE as part of our 2023 evaluator investigations, and decided to not currently rely on their charity recommendations. However, we still expect choosing ACE recommended programs to be significantly more impactful than choosing animal welfare programs without an impact-focused evaluation behind them, and we remain open to (some of) ACE's recommendations being among the most cost-effective donation opportunities in animal welfare.
Please note that GWWC does not evaluate individual charities. Our recommendations are based on the research of third-party, impact-focused charity evaluators our research team has found to be particularly well-suited to help donors do the most good per dollar, according to their recent evaluator investigations. Our other supported programs are those that align with our charitable purpose — they are working on a high-impact problem and take a reasonably promising approach (based on publicly-available information).
At Giving What We Can, we focus on the effectiveness of an organisation's work -- what the organisation is actually doing and whether their programs are making a big difference. Some others in the charity recommendation space focus instead on the ratio of admin costs to program spending, part of what we’ve termed the “overhead myth.” See why overhead isn’t the full story and learn more about our approach to charity evaluation.