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This month, we spoke with James Odene, creative director and co-founder of User-Friendly Marketing, an ACE Movement Grantee and marketing agency dedicated to supporting the animal advocacy movement.
With extensive experience across both commercial and non-profit organisations, James combines behavioural science and marketing strategy to help advocacy groups communicate more effectively and reach more people. In this conversation, James shares the lessons he has learned from working in the movement, explains how User-Friendly Marketing measures its impact, and offers practical advice to any organisation looking to make marketing a genuine force for change.
1. Can you share an overview of what User-Friendly Marketing does?
User-Friendly is a marketing agency that supports the animal movement. We offer a range of services, but mostly work with groups on communications strategy, branding, website design and campaign work. As long-serving animal advocates, we see ourselves as fractional marketing support that feels more like your team than outsiders.
Alongside individual projects, we also run the Marketing 101 course which is designed to upskill anyone in the movement to understand marketing up to MBA level. And it’s entirely free, thanks to ACE funding!
2. What are the three biggest marketing lessons you’ve learned from working in the animal advocacy space?
Emotions win.
This isn’t surprising, but being emotionally captivating in our communications is still critically important. And sometimes, with the merger of EAA (Effective Animal Advocacy), this slips away a little and is replaced with language about ‘impact’, ‘effectiveness’ and ‘animals per dollar’. But we need to keep the message emotional. Being emotional doesn’t always have to mean feeling sad. We can be surprising, angry and even, dare I say it, funny. Expanding beyond just ‘sad appeals’ makes messages harder to ignore and more likely to drive action.
You are not the market.
It’s hard to remember this, but I think we have a tendency to talk as we’d talk to each other, expect people to change or act because we’ve told them the facts, or use vocabulary that doesn’t mean much to the outside world. I don’t think I’d ever used the word advocate before working as one! We need to have what marketers call market orientation. This essentially means we need to communicate in a way that our audiences need to hear, not how we’d like to speak. ‘What do they need to hear?’ and ‘Where do they need to hear it?’, not ‘What do we want to say?’
Clarity beats complexity.
There is often a tendency to say too much, include every angle, or try to communicate the full picture in one go. But the more complex something is, the less likely it is to land. The strongest campaigns are usually built around one clear idea, expressed simply and consistently. If someone cannot quickly understand what you are saying or what you want them to do, they will not act.
3. What does impact look like for User-Friendly Marketing, and how do you measure it?
Effective communication sits at the centre of most animal advocacy work. Whether the goal is donations, volunteer engagement, or corporate change, outcomes depend heavily on how well an organisation communicates.
Our work is often ‘full-funnel’. We help organisations increase awareness, strengthen engagement, and improve conversion into meaningful actions and we measure impact by looking at changes over time across all of these. This might include increases in reach, engagement rates, donations, petition signatures, or other key actions, compared to previous performance.
Even in cases where the work is more upstream, such as branding or strategy, we base our recommendations on established marketing evidence. That gives us confidence that we are increasing the likelihood of better outcomes.
4. What are the most significant challenges you currently face in advancing your mission?
Funding: Many groups do not have enough resources to take marketing, branding and communications strategy seriously. Marketing is often seen as something to add on later, rather than a core function, which means it is underfunded and limits what can be achieved.
Knowledge: We’re a passionate community, but there is a lack of marketing training and understanding across the movement. This feeds into funding decisions, where marketing is undervalued or misunderstood, and results in weaker execution even when good intentions are there.
Wild cards: I think we are awesome at learning from each other, sharing best practices and collaborating. What we could do better is test new ideas, new routes to impact, and new styles of communication. There is limited space for experimentation, partly due to funding constraints and partly due to risk aversion, which slows down progress.
5. How has the ACE Movement Grant helped strengthen User-Friendly Marketing’s work?
ACE has been a superb support in helping us build the Marketing 101 course and keeping it completely free to the movement. So far we have 323 people who have enrolled in the course with people completing it steadily all the time.
Of those who completed the course and filled in our final questionnaire, 91% rated it as excellent (70.8%) or very good (20.8%). And when asked ‘How helpful have you found the course in improving your ability to market effectively?’ 83% said very helpful (33.3%), or helpful (50%).
It wouldn’t be possible to create and run this course without ACE funding so I’m forever grateful for this support. I am extremely pleased to have worked towards training so many people on marketing best practices.
6. What would you say to animal advocacy organisations looking to invest in marketing?
It does not need to be complicated.
There are a small number of principles that make a significant difference, and these are covered in the Marketing 101 course. Start there if you can.
If not, seek guidance. There is a large amount of poor marketing advice available, often from people focused on a single channel (e.g., social media). Good marketing is broader than that and is built on well-established principles.
Done well, marketing is not a cost. It is a multiplier on the impact you are already trying to achieve.
Disclaimer/Note:
The responses in this spotlight were provided by User-Friendly Marketing and reflect the organisation’s own account of their work.
ACE is dedicated to creating a world where all animals can thrive, regardless of their species. We take the guesswork out of supporting animal advocacy by directing funds toward the most impactful charities and programs, based on evidence and research.
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