Jenna Riedi, Communications Manager at Faunalytics

From performing arts to animal research: how Jenna found the role worth holding out for

Jenna Riedi had built her career around animals and around leading organisations. She’d worked in animal shelters, moved through a range of nonprofit roles, and most recently served as the Executive Director of a performing arts nonprofit. She was good at the work. She was, by her own account, happy enough. But happy enough wasn’t quite the same as right.

Jenna had been thinking carefully about impact, specifically, about where her skills could do the most good for animals. Shelter work had been part of her story, but she’d come to the conclusion that it wasn’t the highest-impact path available to her. The problem was that she didn’t have many concrete alternatives. She set up alerts on Indeed and LinkedIn. She looked around. Nothing grabbed her, nothing felt “right.” She even turned down an offer to become Executive Director at an animal shelter, which was a role that, on paper, ticked a lot of boxes. But it still just wasn’t the right one.

She found the AAC job board and came across Faunalytics for the first time. It was exactly the kind of organisation she hadn’t known to look for. A nonprofit dedicated to research that helps animal advocates do their work more effectively: rigorous, evidence-based, and focused foremost on impact at scale. The Communications Manager role felt like a natural fit for everything she’d built through the nonprofit leadership, the communications experience, and the instinct to understand what moves people. She applied. She got it.

As the Communications Manager at Faunalytics, Jenna now puts her skills to work amplifying research that shapes how the whole animal advocacy movement operates. It turned out the role worth holding out for was just one she hadn’t heard of yet.