Animal Charity Evaluators’ Better for Animals: Evidence-Based Insights for Effective Animal Advocacy resource is an ongoing project to 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, and access ACE’s Better For Animals resource.

This is a living document and we want to make it as helpful and accessible 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 now excited to launch a series of social media and blog posts spotlighting one intervention each month. This month—for the first edition—we are focusing on the evidence around corporate outreach for welfare improvements.

Intervention Spotlight #1: Corporate Outreach for Welfare Improvements

What Is This Intervention?

This category refers to outreach or campaigns to encourage food companies (e.g., retailers, producers, or restaurants) to commit to doing animal welfare improvements throughout their supply chains. Unlike ‘farmer collaboration’, which involves directly engaging with farmers and producers to adopt better practices on the ground, this approach targets the organizational policies and commitments that drive supply chain changes. This includes work such as corporate commitment campaigns; outreach to certifier programs; and efforts to track, encourage, and support companies’ implementation of welfare commitments. A common example of corporate outreach is cage-free egg campaigns targeted at retailers.

What Is Our Overall Assessment of This Intervention? How Confident Are We in This Assessment?

  • Corporate outreach for animal welfare improvements has a strong track record of success, playing a crucial role for hundreds of millions of animals’ wellbeing. However, reports highlight the need for thoughtful implementation and a focus on long-term strategy if these efforts are to translate into sustained, systemic change.
  • We found significantly less evidence for the producer outreach subcategory than for the impact of corporate outreach as a whole. We expect this is partly because NGOs have not typically prioritized producer outreach, given that producers are less well known to the public and present fewer opportunities for public campaign actions. While we think it is likely that conducting outreach efforts to actors across the supply chain (not just retailers) will significantly increase the likelihood of securing new welfare commitments and ensuring their implementation, we were unable to find robust evidence backing this up.

Read the full article about animal welfare improvements by Max Taylor at Animal Charity Evaluators.