Donating toward Efficient Online Veg Ads

Summary: A few animal groups, including The Humane League, are running ads on Facebook pointing to videos of factory farming and encouraging viewers to go veg. Based on survey data for reduced meat consumption after seeing the videos, I estimate that each $1 donated toward The Humane League's veg ads prevents ~120 days of suffering on factory farms and 20 additional fish deaths. The actual number could be several times higher.

Note: For the current state-of-the-art calculations on the effectiveness of veg outreach (either by leaflets or ads), see Vegan Outreach Cost-Effectiveness Calculator by Peter Hurford.

By the way, if you have a few spare minutes, consider supporting some of the new vegetarians who comment on the Who's Against Animal Cruelty? page. :)

Introduction

In 2005-2006, I wrote a piece called How Much Is a Dollar Worth? The Case of Vegan Outreach in which I approximated the number of years of factory-farmed suffering prevented per dollar of donations to Vegan Outreach to print veg brochures. Friends have recently pointed me to another way to promote vegetarianism (and general concern for animal suffering) -- namely, Facebook ads. One series of ads being run now sends those who click on it to the Who's Against Animal Cruelty? page, which includes a powerful video and Facebook-style comments below. Because ads of this type don't incur the printing and distribution costs of paper leaflets, I think they are even more cost-effective than physical brochures, and going forward I plan to donate specifically toward these ad campaigns. That said, ordinary Vegan-Outreach-style brochures are still wildly efficient, so I don't want to downplay their value.

Benefits over paper leaflets

Lower opportunity cost. One oversight in my original How Much Is a Dollar Worth? piece was in the calculation of b, the number of booklets distributed per dollar. While it's true that if you divide the number of Vegan Outreach brochures distributed by the organization's budget for the same time period, you get something like 4.7 booklets per dollar, this ignores two factors: (1) some of the brochures were handed out by paid leafleters of other organizations, and (2) even the volunteer leafleters could have been doing other things with their time (including, if nothing else, making money to donate). Now, some of those volunteers, if they hadn't been handing out Even If You Like Meat pamphlets, would have been protesting the existence of zoos or doing something else of low (negative?) value. But others would have done very effective organizing in some different way. In contrast, online ads have essentially no distribution cost or activist opportunity cost.

(Well, actually, in practice, it can be good to have some volunteers participate on the landing page for the ads, in order to clean up spam, answer questions, correct misinformation, and provide social support to those considering becoming vegetarian. Even a simple, five-second "Like" on a comment can provide encouragement that -- every once in a great while -- will be the straw that breaks the back of meat-eating. In fact, you can help out yourself, or encourage others to do so.)

Similar or cheaper price per view. Even ignoring distribution costs, ads may also be cheaper in terms of raw cost per item. According to How Much Is a Dollar Worth?, page 4, booklets cost 13-20 cents each to print and ship. Who's Against Animal Cruelty? ads cost 10-20 cents per click in the US but can go as low as ~2 cents for Latin America, China, etc. Currently, ads in Western countries are more important because (1) those countries eat more meat and (2) the viewers of the ads have more wealth that they might donate to veg causes like this one once they learn about the issue. Also, (3) because I care about veg outreach primarily in order to inspire eventual concern for wild animals among those who shape humanity's future, it's most important to influence the views of those who live in the most powerful countries. All of that said, it seems dubious that ads in less wealthy nations are 5 times less valuable than those in the US.

Survey data.

Nick Cooney did a survey on ads linking to a similar website called The Hidden Face of Food in fall 2011. Take a look at the results. I'm a bit skeptical of the high reduction in meat consumption among family/friends (which are more than the reductions in meat consumption by those who originally clicked on the ads), but even if we completely ignore those numbers, then we get something like 917 new vegetarians + 1339 meat reducers among the "liked" group and 238 new vegetarians + 300 meat reducers among the "vegetarian starter kit" group. The entire campaign to create these changes took $5,000, although Nick informs me that costs have increased slightly, such that this would now be about $6,000. Let's ignore the meat reducers for simplicity and conservatism. Then, naïvely dividing, we have ($6000)/(917+238) = $5.19 to create a new vegetarian.

There's a big caveat here, which is response bias: Those who answered the survey almost certainly had better news to report than those who didn't. Nick thinks the response rate may have been around 10% of people asked. Further, let's suppose that no one who didn't respond was affected. Then we'd have $5.19/(0.1), which equals a conservative maximum cost of $52 per new vegetarian. Of course, Nick told me to keep in mind we did offer a tangible item (movie tickets, or rather a high chance of winning them) in exchange for answers, which should have decreased response bias significantly. Also keep in mind that these surveys only represent 8.5% of people who visited the site - those who liked the page or ordered a veg starter kit, so calculations of per-dollar effectiveness based on this data and those metrics are ignoring the bit of behavior change produced by all those 91.5% who did not like the page or order a veg kit.

Unfortunately, we don't know how long these people remained veg, or whether/how soon they would otherwise have gone veg from different influences. Of course, I've been ignoring all kinds of other positive spillover effects, like influence on friends, subsequent involvement with animal activism, and donations toward veg-outreach causes.

Nick's survey also shows changes in consumption broken down by type of animal product. I was heartened to see that the fraction of people who increased consumption of fish/chicken/eggs was small (2-5%) compared with the fraction that decreased consumption (72-92%). Because fish and poultry products cause orders of magnitude more suffering per kilogram than beef and dairy, I find it unfortunate that people often say, I'm not completely vegetarian, but at least I've stopped eating red meat. I'm glad that this trend wasn't particularly prevalent among the Hidden Face of Food viewers.

Nick's piece. Nick has a great summary of Facebook veg ads similar to mine. Nick says, As a full-time animal advocate with over a decade of experience in promoting veg eating, I simply do not see anything else that gives us as much bang for our buck right now in creating new vegetarians and meat-reducers as well-executed Facebook ads. He also gives advice to those conducting the campaigns on how to optimize landing-page display, Facebook-plugin functionality, and target demographics. I particularly like the idea of flighting different ads to see which work best. In an email to me, Nick recalls that one of the many ads we tested in Dec [2011] cost $150 per VSK order (!); the good ones cost around $15-25.), and because it's really hard to predict which will work (it doesn't break down cleanly around demographic lines), doing that checking is so very very vital.

Sampling bias and other considerations. Jeff Kaufman wrote two excellent reviews of Nick's survey, highlighting sources of bias in the survey results and clarifying other points of research methodology.

How to donate.

The Humane League (THL) is currently running veg ads using grant funds, but if you donate to THL and ask for the money to go toward veg ads, THL will increase the allotted budget. If you're a large donor, you can also consider asking Vegan Outreach to direct your donation toward its online veg ads, which is what I am doing in 2012. If you'd like more details or the latest information, feel free to write to me (at the address on the top of my home page) or Nick (ncooney [put the at symbol here] farmsanctuary [put the dot here] org).

How much is a dollar of veg ads worth?

There are two main problems I have with the estimates in the original How Much Is a Dollar Worth? piece: (1) The estimates of how long people stay veg are probably too high, and (2) the cost per booklet doesn't account for opportunity costs of time for the leafleters. With veg ads, point #2 is removed, since ads have very low human cost (maybe a few hours per month) and almost zero marginal human cost. As far as point #1, Nick Cooney has come across some research on veg recidivism (citation forthcoming) showing the following distribution for how long a new vegetarian stays veg:

On average, then, a new vegetarian stays veg for (0.34)(1) + (0.34)(4) + (0.12)(8) + (0.2)(10) = 4.7 years. Needless to say, these figures are understatements, because even when these people go back to eating meat, they eat less than a typical omnivore. In addition, these are estimates for the general population, who might go veg for health or environmental reasons, not just animal-welfare reasons. But it seems that people who go veg out of concern for animal suffering are less likely to backslide.

If we combine this with the conservative $52 per new vegetarian figure for Humane League veg ads, then we get $52/4.7 = $11 per vegetarian-year. (Jeff Kaufman estimated that Vegan Outreach may create a vegetarian-year for between $4.29 to $536. I don't think Jeff's estimate can be directly compared with my $11 estimate here because the approaches are so different, but at least it seems the orders of magnitude aren't way off.)

To see what this means in terms of animal suffering, we can use the expression a_ml_m + f_ea_el_e from How Much Is a Dollar Worth? Taking the average of the lower and upper bounds of the parameters, this equals (26.5)(49) + (0.25)(253)(1.04) = 1400 days of suffering prevented per year of being veg. At $11 per veg-year, this is a conservative 123 days of suffering prevented per dollar, or more than 1 day of suffering prevented per penny! This is very close to the original lower bound in How Much Is a Dollar Worth?

The above figures don't count seafood, which on a per-animal basis comprises most of the animals that people eat. It's tricky to compute days of suffering for fish, because wild-caught fish don't live in factory farms. (Conditions for farmed fish aren't pleasant.) Of course, the pain of slaughter is still very intense, especially since there are no requirements for stunning or humane slaughter of fish. A vegetarian saves more than 225 fish per year, so at $11 per veg-year, this is 20 fish not killed per dollar (in addition to 123 days of suffering prevented for the same dollar).

Finally, these figures ignore the return on investment effects of veg ads: Namely, that by creating more vegetarians concerned about animal suffering, we create more people who will become animal advocates and more future donors to groups like The Humane League. I also haven't counted the fact that a society which cares more about animal suffering is more likely eventually to extend that concern to animals in the wild once the technology becomes available. Given the vast number of wild animals -- and the potential to create massive amounts more suffering if we spread wild-animal life into the galaxy -- I believe that the effect veg ads have on spreading a culture of concern for animals is many times more valuable in expectation than the factory-farmed suffering they avert directly.

Below are selected viewer responses to the video, all from Dec. 2011. For more, see How to Give Encouragement to Several New Vegetarians in Just a Few Minutes.

Here are some sample ads leading to the landing page, from a Vegan Outreach campaign during summer 2012. (Note: The updated ads do not contain veganoutreach.org underneath the title, which should help avoid scaring away those who aren't already sympathetic.)