A year of building reach and proving impact
This is a preliminary review. Treat it as an imperfect, internal analysis that we share publicly for transparency and in case it’s useful to others. We’ll keep improving it over time, and feedback is welcome. Because most of our programmes have a lag between the work and the results, we expect a fuller picture of our 2022 impact between December 2023 and June 2024.
2022 was the year we stopped guessing about our impact and started measuring it properly.
We hired a marketing manager and put real effort into getting our services in front of more people. Social media, SEO, advertising, email. The goal was to connect more advocates with the work that needs them, and it worked: in one year we assisted 32 placements, compared to 25 over the whole 2019–2021 period.
We also found out that job placements were only part of the story.
Last year we realised our programmes were influencing a meaningful number of donations to the movement, money that wasn’t showing up anywhere in our impact numbers. So we started tracking it. We now quantify the value of donations raised through our programmes and referrals, and in 2022 that came to $275,000 in current and expected donations.
And we tightened up how we measure ourselves. We brought in external experts and started assessing candidates more thoroughly, so that every placement has a better shot at making a real difference for animals.
The placements we helped make possible
Numbers are useful. The people behind them are the point.
Kara Lombard, Director of Operations at Factory Farming Awareness Coalition
Kara spent most of her career managing HR for financial institutions in the public sector. After retiring from that corporate life to chase her dream of working in farmed animal advocacy, she spent about a year looking for the right role.
She found it on AAC’s job board: the Factory Farming Awareness Coalition, a near-perfect match for her skills. Today she’s using that expertise to create change for animals.
Conor Lamkin, Policy Research Fellow at Pax Fauna
Conor finished a JD and did a few legal internships and fellowships in animal advocacy. She was after something in law and animals, ideally lobbying or policy.
After a while searching, she took a Policy Research Fellow role at Pax Fauna, which she found on our job board. She’d never even heard of Pax Fauna before she saw the listing.
Lyda Durango, Project Director at Vegetarianos Hoy
Lyda had been looking for an animal advocacy role for 3 or 4 years. She was close to giving up and looking elsewhere.
Then she signed up for AAC’s online course, which renewed her energy for the search. She applied to a role at Vegetarianos Hoy she’d found through our job board, and now manages several corporate campaigners across Latin America.
The past and future of our programmes
Here’s where each of our programmes stands, and where it’s headed.
| Programme | Status | What’s happening |
|---|---|---|
| Job board | Expanding our reach | Our job board is our front door, the thing that brings people to everything else we do. After some user research, we’re planning small improvements and looking to automate parts of it. |
| Career advising | Renewed approach | Career advising has real impact, but it eats a lot of our small team’s capacity. So we’ll keep offering advising calls, just to a smaller number of candidates. |
| Recruitment | Stopped | We’re retiring recruitment in its old format and pivoting toward something we think scales better, the Top Talent Directory. |
| Online course | Folding into something bigger | Our online course is becoming part of a wider programme that brings together all our educational content, for a more complete learning experience. |
| Fundraising Work Placement | Very impactful, but funding is hard | Out of 9 participants, 5 were hired into fundraising roles after the programme. Together they raised $386,231 in current and expected funding, $276,000 of which likely wouldn’t have happened without them. But it’s expensive to run, needing roughly $115,000 in hiring and training time. |
If you’d like to fund the Fundraising Work Placement, email lauren@animaladvocacycareers.org.
Introducing the Top Talent Directory
In 2023 we’re launching the Top Talent Directory, an invite-only programme that connects organisations with pre-vetted, high-quality talent from previous hiring rounds.
It tackles a few problems at once and lets both small and large organisations reach top candidates quickly. We think it’ll matter a lot for the long-term health of the movement, by helping retain and support talented advocates.
In its first six months it produced 2 placements, which is a promising start. We’ll evaluate it again at the end of 2023 to decide whether to keep going.
The problems we’re trying to solve
In 2022 we mapped out four problems holding the movement back, and matched each one to a solution.
| Problem | Our solution |
|---|---|
| 1. Recruitment eats organisations’ time and resources. Small organisations especially need help here, because hiring is slow and expensive. We saw this clearly in both our recruitment programme and the Fundraising Work Placement. The FWP did better, because organisations could outsource their vetting and still get well-matched candidates. | Partially addressed by the Top Talent Directory. |
| 2. The movement is short on fundraisers. We need more skilled fundraising candidates, especially for senior roles. Fundraising is the lifeblood of any charity, and strong fundraisers free up senior staff to focus on other high-impact work. | Partially addressed across all our programmes, though a targeted programme like the FWP could do far more. |
| 3. Skilled candidates drop off. Strong candidates are abandoning hiring processes, or not applying at all, because of clunky organisation hiring practices. | Addressed by the Top Talent Directory and a hiring events series. |
| 4. Small organisations have a tiny talent pool. A handful of larger organisations get access to most of the talent. Small organisations work with much smaller pools and sometimes leave roles unfilled, or hire below the bar they need. | Addressed by the Top Talent Directory and job board. |
Our next evaluation point is December 2023.
What organisations told us about the Fundraising Work Placement
This programme is a huge gift to organisations and the animals. The time saved in recruiting, hiring, and training enabled the rest of our team to do more programmatic work. We’re also more efficient thanks to Sabine’s external eye on fundraising goals and campaigns. Thank you AAC for helping us grow the movement to end factory farming!
Monica Chen, Executive Director, Factory Farming Awareness Coalition
Animal Advocacy Careers was able to place someone with the skills we needed most, and it took very little of our time apart from approving the final candidate. We now have a lot more insight into our existing and potential donors and a plan to diversify our funding sources. An unexpected bonus was that through her network she was also able to put us in touch with people who helped us start an outreach programme in a new region.
Leah McKelvie, Secretary, Animal Ethics
As a leader of a small nonprofit, I am very grateful to AAC for providing us with a dedicated fundraiser for 6 months. Recruiting is a time-intensive process, and knowing that the individual had been through a hiring process before coming to us made me feel safe and secure with the new hire. This service has allowed me to assess the impact of our work and saved me time during reporting and grant applications.
Ana Bradley, Executive Director, Sentient Media
AAC’s fundraising placement participant far exceeded our expectations, doing an excellent job at grant writing, communicating with funders, and creating a fundraising training programme for our African partner orgs. This also freed up valuable co-founder time to focus on programming, operations, and research. I’m excited about this individual’s long-term impact at both our organisation and the movement in general.
Cameron King, Co-Founder & Ops Lead, Animal Advocacy Africa
