Leafleting is a common intervention in farmed animal advocacy that is carried out by many organizations. In 2015, Vegan Outreach alone reported distributing close to 3 million leaflets, most of which were handed out on college campuses. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of leafleting, ACE completed an intervention report on leafleting in 2014. However, the quickly growing field of animal advocacy research—as well as a decline in our confidence regarding the findings from some of the previously cited studies—gave us good reason to believe that the 2014 report no longer accurately reflected the state of the evidence regarding leafleting, nor our current views on it. In fact, since December 2016 we’ve noted that it was a mistake to wait as long as we did to update our 2014 leafleting intervention report and to fail to provide sufficient disclaimers in the meantime.

We have now published an updated leafleting intervention report, which incorporates a variety of methods not used in our previous report and reaches quite different conclusions. In particular, based on a meta-analysis combining data from several studies on the short-term effects of leafleting, we conclude that those trials don’t provide clear evidence that leafleting decreases recipients’ animal product consumption in the first few months after distribution. In fact, the results suggest leafleting is about as likely — or perhaps even more likely — to actually cause increases in animal product consumption during this time period. Other evidence4 also supports the conclusion that leafleting is probably less effective than some other promising farmed animal advocacy interventions.

Read the full report about leafletting for animal advocacy at Animal Charity Evaluators.