Evidence Behind Conducting Research for Effective Advocacy

20 minute read

What is This Intervention?

• Effective advocacy research involves investigating and evaluating strategies, interventions, and cause areas to identify impactful and cost-effective ways to help animals. It can also include more foundational research, such as in the social sciences, to understand the context in which advocates operate.
• The aim is to inform the Effective Animal Advocacy (EAA) field and methodology, which entails using evidence and reason to do the most good for animals, adjusting interventions based on available evidence, prioritizing tactics with good evidence of causal effectiveness, and prioritizing more cost-effective tactics.¹
• Research is carried out by academics, research organizations, or researchers at animal advocacy organizations.
• Note that this evidence review focuses on research for effective farmed animal advocacy; see our separate evidence reviews for wild animal welfare research and farmed animal welfare science.

Summary: What is our Overall Assessment of This Intervention? How Confident are We in This Assessment?

• Effective advocacy research seems to be a bottleneck for the animal advocacy movement, and its funding is relatively low compared to other interventions, and when compared to research funding in other fields. However, advocates don’t simply need more research, but specific types of research, especially in China, Southeast Asia, and Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs).
• A major barrier is translating research findings into impactful actions. Given how much interventions vary in their cost effectiveness, effective advocacy research has the potential to be highly impactful if it encourages a shift from less to more cost-effective interventions and tactics. However, advocates generally prefer making small adjustments to their programs rather than adopting entirely new tactics, partly due to funder expectations and contextual constraints. This lack of flexibility could significantly limit the impact of research on advocacy outcomes.
• Based on our evidence review, we think the effectiveness of this intervention is highly context-specific. That means each research project needs to be evaluated on its own merits based on who would use the research and its potential impact, whether the research question is strategically actionable, and whether there is a plan to translate the findings into accessible and practical insights.
• Given the high cost of research and the challenges in translating research findings into impact for animals, research efforts need to be highly strategic. Promising, targeted research efforts include:
  • Fostering closer collaboration between researchers and advocates throughout the research life cycle to select and co-create relevant research questions, and to develop practical, actionable insights that are relevant to the end users’ specific needs and context. This includes producing localized and context-specific data that advocates can readily apply. Research in China and Southeast Asia could be particularly valuable given the large farmed animal population and relative lack of localized data, which can force advocates to use their limited capacity to produce their own research.
  • Creating high-quality evidence syntheses, such as systematic reviews, which can guide more impactful future research questions, help identify priority areas for further research, and give researchers and advocates an understanding of the state of the evidence around an intervention or cause area. Learning about the need for such syntheses contributed to ACE launching Better for Animals!
  • Establishing a movement-wide research agenda and increasing collaboration between research groups, which could help reduce duplication of effort, steer researchers toward the most important questions, and encourage more implementation-focused research.
  • Developing movement-wide standards for measurement, research methodology, and research best practices, which could facilitate synthesizing research and comparing the effectiveness of different approaches, and help improve research quality.
• All research efforts should be communicated and disseminated with end users in mind. That means:
  • Findings must be translated into accessible language and clearly actionable insights, as research is often difficult to interpret for those without a research background, and advocacy organizations’ capacity is often limited.
  • Communication should be proactive, using formats like videos and accessible summaries that are practical for advocates to apply.
  • This process may be aided by “knowledge brokers,” which are intermediate organizations that can help bridge the gap between researchers and advocates.
• Our confidence in this assessment is low to moderate, given the lack of Randomized-Controlled Trials (RCTs) or other empirical studies directly testing the effects of research, and given that most of the data presented is self-reported, which could be skewed by social desirability or other biases. Several of our conclusions are based on theoretical analyses or opinion pieces that, although well-reasoned and well-researched, can’t provide any causal evidence.
• We think research is indispensable for social movements, and as such, future meta research should place a strong emphasis on identifying strategies to increase the uptake of research findings. It would also be valuable to investigate the effects of using evidence to influence funders—given that this may be more tractable than influencing advocates—and of influencing governments and other research funders to incentivize a focus on high-impact research questions among academics.

In Depth

What does the research say about how effective this intervention is?

To the best of our knowledge, there are currently no empirical studies directly testing the effect of research on advocates’ effectiveness, and the impact of research in general is notoriously challenging to measure.² This evidence review therefore relies largely on indirect evidence, and focuses on 1) theoretical arguments, 2) whether effective advocacy research fills an important gap for the movement, 3) whether and how advocates use research to guide their work, 4) whether and how research has impacted the movement in the past, and 5) whether effective advocacy research seems likely to be a cost-effective intervention.

1. What’s the theoretical argument for research on Effective Animal Advocacy?

Theoretical arguments posit that advocates should use research evidence to optimize their efforts to reduce animal suffering, given the huge scale of suffering and the movement’s limited resources. However, this approach has also been criticized for focusing on easily-measurable results at the expense of more systemic strategies, and for potential issues with research quality and rigor.

• Fisher argues that there is a moral obligation for advocates to use evidence and reasoning to optimize their work because (i) with a clear goal of reducing animal suffering and limited resources, it is essential to maximize the impact of those resources to achieve the greatest reduction in suffering; (ii) resources currently disproportionately benefit smaller groups of animals, such as companion animals; and (iii) different interventions vary widely in their cost effectiveness, so advocates should prioritize those that offer the greatest impact per unit of resources spent.³
• However, critics argue that this approach can be overly focused on short-term impact and quantifiable metrics. These biases could steer efforts away from broader strategies such as movement building or political outreach, and failing to address the deeper structural causes of social and environmental injustice. Additionally, there may be concerns about the quality and rigor of research within the field, e.g., due to a frequent lack of peer review.⁴

2. Is effective advocacy research filling a gap in the movement?

Funding for research seems to be disproportionately low, both compared to other interventions and to research spending in human-focused fields, such as Global Health and Development. Survey and interview data (see also the next section) suggest that a lack of specific types of evidence bottlenecks advocates, but it is unclear whether this should primarily be addressed by more research, translating existing findings into actionable strategies for advocates, or better coordinating the sometimes-scattered research efforts within the movement.

• An Ambitious Impact (AIM) report argues that lack of evidence is a key bottleneck for effective animal advocacy, based on a landscape analysis of the animal advocacy movement, expert views, and comparison to the Global Health and Development movement.⁵ The movement’s evidence base, when measured in terms of expenditures allocated, has been estimated to be less than 1% of the resources allocated to research in the Global Health and Development movement.⁶ As part of a (very speculative) cost-effectiveness analysis, the authors estimate that the animal advocacy movement would be 15% more impactful with a better evidence base.⁷
• There has only been a minimal increase in relative spending on research within the farmed animal movement, from only around 3% of the $220 million allocated to farmed animal advocacy spent on research and development in 2021 to 4% of $260 million in 2024.⁸
• Another AIM report argues that while several groups are conducting movement-building research, its quality and focus remain inconsistent, with research agendas often driven by staff interests rather than strategic priorities, indicating a need for better coordination and more targeted efforts to address high-priority gaps in understanding of animal advocacy tactics.⁹

3. How are advocates using research findings in their work?

Several reports, mostly conducted by Faunalytics, have explored how advocates use research findings, and what type of research they are lacking in particular. Advocates generally report using research in their work, but they rarely shift their organization’s foundational priorities. Advocates are particularly in need of more localized data, especially in neglected geographical regions, and evidence reviews synthesizing existing research to provide actionable insights.

• In 2024, Faunalytics interviewed 20 staff members from farmed animal advocacy organizations on their use of research and data.¹⁰
  • The results suggest that advocates use research in five key ways: to bolster their legitimacy with external stakeholders; guide internal strategic decisions; identify pressing problems and potential solutions; build partnerships within and beyond the animal advocacy movement; and catalyze broader action by connecting animal issues to wider societal concerns, such as climate change and public health.
  • Research is not often used to set foundational priorities; organizations tend to adjust tactics and messaging based on new information without changing their core mission.
  • The most significant reported gaps in research include understanding how to effect change for under-researched species and in neglected regions such as the Global South, and a lack of social science insights on social movement tactics.
  • Challenges faced by organizations include limited time and expertise to translate complex research into actionable strategies, as well as a need for comprehensive evidence syntheses.
• In the second phase of the same project, the Faunalytics researchers conducted focus groups with leaders of animal advocacy groups in China and Southeast Asia specifically.¹¹
  • Here, too, advocates reported using research both internally and externally, and even sometimes to shift broader strategy (e.g., one participant reported that research drove a shift from individual outreach to corporate campaigns).
  • Key barriers to implementing research findings include issues with localization, credibility, accessibility, and usability. For research to be effective, it must be adaptable to the local context, and come from a trusted source that stakeholders find legitimate. Findings must be easy to find and afford, and the format and timing of the research must be practical for stakeholders to apply. Challenges also include time-intensive searches for research findings due to lack of data sharing and centralized research dissemination.
  • Many Asian advocates report being involved in producing their own research to compensate for a lack of localized data, further reducing the capacity of an already small movement.
  • Specific research gaps cited include behavioral research on Asian consumer behavior, meta-level studies on effective advocacy tactics, and intersectional research that explores how factors such as religion and social change may affect dietary change.
• A 2024 Faunalytics study involved a survey of 197 decision-makers at animal advocacy organizations across 84 countries, along with six focus groups of 20 participants.¹²
  • Consistent with the above findings, results showed that advocacy organizations tend to prefer scaling up existing campaigns or using new media strategies, rather than adopting entirely new approaches. However, 63% of advocates surveyed expressed a willingness to try at least one new strategy, with significant interest in institutional approaches among direct animal work organizations (66%) and individual advocacy groups (91%).
  • Importantly, strategic decisions are constrained not just by internal factors, such as mission and resources, but also by external factors, such as the expectations of funders and the local political and cultural context.
  • Nevertheless, research is seen as a key resource for advocacy, and advocates report a particular need for more local data, e.g., on dietary habits and diet change interventions, given their tendency to prioritize context-specific research to guide their strategies.
• Faunalytics’ 2024 community survey (which is based on a non-random sample with possibly particularly-favorable views of research) showed that while many advocates value Faunalytics’ research—79% said it guided their advocacy decisions and 77% noted improvements in their efforts because of it—only a few of them translate this into changes in their tactics: 31% of respondents aimed to use research to improve their advocacy techniques, and 23% used it to select strategies. Respondents expressed a clear need for more research in the Global South.¹³
• A 2019 AIM report generally corroborates these findings, suggesting that advocates are more receptive to changing details of their campaigns in response to new information—like refining specific advocacy asks—than to broader strategic shifts, such as transitioning from individual to institutional outreach. Most research is not currently used or applied by funders or NGOs; researchers the authors interviewed could only identify a few instances where research significantly influenced advocacy groups, and advocacy groups rarely cited research as a primary factor in their decision making. This indicates that the main concern around effective advocacy research is its practical application. However, as one expert we spoke to noted, it’s important to keep in mind that research is also used to communicate the thinking behind their current strategy to external stakeholders, without necessarily adjusting strategy.
• Influencing funders—particularly those aligned with effective altruism—may be more tractable than influencing advocates directly.¹⁴ Experts we spoke to agreed that lack of flexibility to shift strategy is much less of a barrier for funders. They also suggested this approach could be more efficient and cost effective: Influencing one funder’s strategy has the potential to impact many organizations at once, bypassing the need to convince a critical mass of advocates within each group to change their approach.

4. What are some examples of the effects of advocacy research?

While we were unable to find many examples of advocates reporting that specific pieces of research have led to increased impact, effective advocacy research has likely influenced the movement by encouraging the prioritization of animals suffering in large numbers.
Cost-effectiveness analyses have highlighted the high expected impact of corporate outreach to improve farmed animal welfare, encouraging uptake of this approach and leading to numerous welfare commitments for animals farmed in large numbers. In other fields, like poverty reduction, research has significantly strengthened impact by guiding strategic priorities and effective interventions.

• Intervention research into promising cause areas, combined with a greater emphasis on the Scale, Neglectedness, and Tractability framework,¹⁵ has led some advocates to prioritize efforts on animals farmed in great numbers, especially chickens and fishes.¹⁶ This shift has likely resulted in the movement’s initiatives benefiting a larger number of animals overall.
• Research and cost-effectiveness analyses have also led many advocates to support or work on corporate campaigns, with thousands of commitments won to improve chickens’ wellbeing in the past three decades.^{17 18}
• An expert we consulted also highlighted that research by AIM¹⁹ has led to the founding of numerous animal advocacy groups, some of whom ACE considers highly effective, such as Shrimp Welfare Project.
• While examples from animal advocacy specifically are limited, other fields, like poverty reduction, have seen significant improvements in their evidence base through research, including numerous randomized-controlled trials (RCTs) and a stronger understanding of effective development strategies. Notable research centers, such as The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, Innovations for Poverty Action, and the Center For Global Development, demonstrate the impact that focused research can have, despite being a slow and costly process even in highly evidence-driven fields.²⁰

5. How cost effective is advocacy research?

Cost-effectiveness analyses of advocacy research are highly speculative, with outcomes highly dependent on model inputs. Overall, the models we considered suggest that research can be highly cost effective, but it is very challenging to predict which projects will have an outsized impact, and the choice of research question is a critical factor in determining a project’s overall impact.

• Rethink Priorities’ cross-cause cost-effectiveness model²¹ estimates the impact of different types of research projects, based on factors such as the quality of the intervention, funding status, and the probability of finding or improving a target intervention. Estimates range from -3,330 to 47,000 DALYs averted per $1,000, depending on model inputs.²² These variations highlight the importance of considering factors such as counterfactual costs, the likelihood of discovering or improving an intervention, the potential increase in cost effectiveness from research-based improvements, and how much counterfactual credit should be assigned to a given research project when estimating the impact of research projects.
• A rough back-of-the-envelope cost-effectiveness analysis published in the Effective Altruism Forum in 2022 estimates that reallocating 2% of funding to more effective interventions (based on research findings) could lead to 8.2 additional chicken-years affected per dollar, based on a 20% improvement in funding allocation effectiveness.²³ However, the cost-effectiveness estimate depends heavily on the extent to which an intervention or funding allocation can be improved, and the author thinks this figure could reasonably be between 5–50%.²⁴
• Rethink Priorities developed a model for estimating the cost effectiveness of research to influence funders. While the estimate depends on several inputs, such as the likelihood that a piece of research will influence funder decisions, the amount of money that could be influenced, and the cost of the research project, the authors note that the model implies that it can sometimes be more cost effective to conduct research than to directly fund highly effective interventions. Furthermore, moving some funders from low to middling cost effectiveness can be competitive with—or even more effective than—working with highly cost-effective funders.²⁵

Strength of evidence

• Regarding the meta research on effective advocacy research, there’s a significant lack of empirical studies, particularly RCTs, directly testing the causal impact of effective advocacy research on advocacy outcomes. This makes it difficult to establish cause-and-effect relationships.
• Much of the existing data comes from self-reports by advocates (e.g., surveys, interviews). This type of data can be susceptible to biases such as social desirability (respondents answering in a way they perceive as favorable) or recall bias (inaccuracies in remembering past events or influences).
• Several conclusions are drawn from theoretical arguments or opinion pieces. While these may be well reasoned and thoroughly researched, they do not provide any empirical evidence.
• Qualitative focus group and interview studies often involve small sample sizes, which can limit the generalizability of the findings.
• It is notoriously difficult to directly measure the impact of research and to attribute advocacy successes to specific research projects.

Under what conditions is this intervention more or less effective?

The effectiveness of research likely varies widely based on factors such as the choice of research question, regional context, and research quality. There is no consensus on whether more primary research or more reviews should be prioritized.

• AIM suggests that, based on relative neglectedness, it might be particularly important to conduct more primary research and research in LMICs.²⁶
• A problem-mapping report on the EA Forum argues that secondary research, including systematic review articles, is needed to guide impactful research questions. According to the author, poor research questions are often driven by publication bias and an academic system favoring short-term, high-volume output. This makes it harder for researchers to gain a comprehensive understanding of a field, which can lead to misguided research priorities. Review articles can help synthesize evidence, identify gaps, and guide future research toward a higher impact potential.²⁷
• The same report also suggests that selecting the right research question is key to maximizing impact, and that influencing research policy and funder decisions could help guide research priorities.²⁸ Experts we spoke to agreed that research questions must be chosen based on their strategic implications, and that researchers often select questions that are too niche to be of real interest to advocates. Low-quality research can also be an issue, and often stems from inadequate peer review and poor methodological practices, while valuable replication studies are often neglected.²⁹
• According to AIM, among various possible approaches to expanding animal advocacy research, ask-focused research seems to be the most promising, followed by research directed at funders, creating a movement-wide research agenda, conducting RCTs on animal issues, and producing more in-depth intervention reports.³⁰ Experts we spoke to added prioritization research, cost-effectiveness research, and monitoring and evaluation as key priorities.
• Arguably among the most important factors influencing the effectiveness of research is whether and how it is used. Well-conducted research targeting high-priority questions can still have a negligible impact if the findings are not disseminated and actioned. While we are unaware of research specifically testing the conditions that make research findings more likely to be implemented, based on this evidence review we think some types of research are much more likely to be effectively implemented than others:
  • Research that is co-created with, or at least heavily informed by, end users (advocates), and tackles topics and questions that matter to them. Recommendations based on this research should take into account the contextual realities of advocates that could pose barriers to implementation, including cultural and political factors and the influence of donors and funders.³¹ Cultivating sustained relationships between researchers and advocates, built on a shared understanding of each other’s contexts, pressures, and needs, could help achieve this.
  • Research that comes with a strong dissemination strategy and is translated into accessible language and clearly actionable findings to save organizational capacity. Knowledge brokers, i.e., intermediate organizations that bridge the gap between researchers and advocates, can help with this.³²
  • For advocates who mainly use research to influence external stakeholders, research needs to be viewed as unbiased and credible, which can sometimes mean that academics or independent research institutes might be better placed than advocacy-focused researchers.³³
  • On the side of the end users, evidence from healthcare system studies suggests that having a dedicated “champion” within an organization, who oversees the implementation of research evidence in the organization’s tactics and strategy, can boost the uptake of more evidence-based practices,³⁴ though this has not been tested within animal advocacy specifically.

Our Priorities for Improving this Evidence Review

• For future iterations of this evidence review, we hope to include more case studies of specific pieces of research that have shifted tactics or strategies in the movement, with a plausible positive impact on animals. To this end, we plan to speak to more researchers and advocates in the movement.
• We’d also like to speak to funders in the movement and add a section on how funders use research in their strategies and decisions.
• We’d also like to consult with research organizations on how they measure their own impact and request internal impact data.

Last updated January 28, 2026.

We would like to thank Chris Bryant, Michael St. Jules, and Sueda Evirgen for their helpful feedback as peer reviewers.

1. Fisher (2017) 

2. Tilli (2021) 

3. Fisher (2017) 

4. Broad (2018) 

5. Hilton & Bansal (2023) 

6. See also Greig (2021) 

7. Note that this assessment is all mostly based on animal welfare science research (which is more relevant for ask prioritization than for identifying effective interventions). While a lot of the same considerations likely apply to effective advocacy research, not all will.  

8. Driscoll et al. (2025) 

9. Savoie & Sarek (2019) 

10. Jones & Anderson (2024) 

11. Chung & Stennet (2024) 

12. Stennet et al. (2024) 

13. Anderson (2024) 

14. Savoie & Sarek (2019) 

15. Wiblin (2019) 

16. Salazar et al. (2021) 

17. Chicken Watch (n.d.) 

18. But this might have also led the movement to overfocus on corporate campaigns; see e.g., here. 

19. See here for AIM’s research reports. 

20. Savoie & Sarek (2019) 

21. Rethink Priorities (2023) 

22. For comparison, cost-effectiveness analyses of direct interventions estimate that cage-free campaigns avert 4.59 DALY/$ (Grilo, 2024a) and Shrimp Welfare Project’s Humane Slaughter Initiative averts 639 DALY/$ (Grilo, 2024b). 

23. For comparison, a cost-effectiveness analysis of cage-free corporate campaigns estimates that cage-free campaigns improve 10.8 chicken-years/$ (Grilo, 2024a).  

24. Anonymous (2022) 

25. Greig & Davis (2023) 

26. Hilton & Bansal (2023) 

27. Tilli (2021) 

28. Note that this analysis refers specifically to the academic system, but many of the considerations likely also apply to independent research organizations or research conducted within advocacy organizations.  

29. Tilli (2021) 

30. Savoie & Sarek (2019) 

31. Stennet et al. (2024) 

32. Jones & Anderson (2024) 

33. Jones & Anderson (2024) 

34. McArthur et al (2021) 

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About Alina Salmen

Alina joined ACE in September 2022. She holds a Ph.D. in Social Psychology, with a focus on gender role beliefs and attitudes toward veganism. She is passionate about using her research skills to support ACE’s mission and reduce animal suffering as much as possible.

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