Animal Charity Evaluators’ Better for Animals: Evidence-Based Insights for Effective Animal Advocacy resource is an ongoing project in which we distill key research on different animal advocacy interventions to help us evaluate their impact in different contexts. We have made this research publicly available to support informed decision making about how to help the most animals. You may read more about the methodology in our recent announcement.

This is a living document and we want to make it as helpful, accessible, and up to date as possible, so please feel free to reach out with feedback! To keep up to date with ACE’s research and the work of the amazing organizations that we support, be sure to sign up for our mailing list.

To help make this information more accessible to a wide range of audiences, we are spotlighting one intervention each month through a series of social media and blog posts. This month—for the second edition—we are focusing on the evidence around veg*n pledges.

What Is This Intervention?

This category refers to running vegan or vegetarian (veg*n) pledges to promote individual dietary change. Veg*n pledges are commitments from individuals to eliminate or reduce their animal product consumption for a specific period of time. Organizations typically campaign to achieve sign-ups to their pledge program, and then keep in touch with participants over the course of their commitment, with varying levels of support and information provided. A prominent example is Veganuary. Veg*n pledges likely have other outcomes too, such as increased public awareness of veg*nism and promoting plant-based foods through corporate partnerships.

Summary: What Is Our Overall Assessment of This Intervention? How Confident Are We in This Assessment of Vegan Pledges?

  • Even though Veganuary follow-up surveys report very high success rates, there are several findings that make us uncertain about the effectiveness of veg*n pledges:
    • Studies that randomly assign participants to pledge conditions are rare, and those that exist generally find that pledges are effective mostly in the short term (i.e., for the duration of the pledge). However, there are considerable uncertainties when generalizing these experimental findings to real-world campaigns.
    • Veganuary’s own conclusions rely on retrospective self-reports of Veganuary participants who responded to the follow-up survey, which may skew toward the most engaged among the overall pool of participants.1 Measuring dietary choices through self report is also often unreliable due to factors such as memory recall errors and social desirability bias, where individuals consciously or unconsciously misreport their animal product consumption, especially when primed to consider the ethical consequences of their food choices.2

Read the full article about the evidence behind vegan pledges by Alina Salmen at Animal Charity Evaluators.