As a donor, you can spare a huge amount of animal suffering through effective giving
When thinking about helping animals, we often envision activists advocating for animals. But this doesn’t show the whole picture: almost all advocacy work is supported by funders that allow advocates to focus on their work.
In this piece, we argue that using your career to donate more to animal advocacy organisations is one of the most impactful things you could do — even as impactful as direct work.
Animal advocacy efforts depend on funding
Many advocacy organisations would prefer to hire more staff to work on important tasks, air more advertisements that would raise awareness about animal rights, and start more programmes to strengthen the movement.
While some advocacy organisations are entirely run by volunteers, this isn’t feasible for most organisations. Volunteers are very important for the movement, but paid staff members who commit regular working hours for advocacy work are also indispensable for many impactful organisations.
It’s unrealistic and unfair to expect people to work full-time for animals without any compensation. It’s also hard to attract certain specialists to work on animal advocacy without decent salaries, as they could find high-earning jobs elsewhere. Even though most advocates are not in the movement for money, it’s a fact of life that we all need money to meet our needs.
Funding is a crucial component that sustains the animal advocacy movement. Without funding, most organisations would simply disappear or significantly scale down.
Many organisations are funding constrained
Unfortunately, funding for animal advocacy is scarce. Given the low awareness about animal suffering and limited moral concern for animals, animal-focused charities receive far fewer donations than human-focused charities. In a recent survey, many animal advocacy organisations listed lack of funding as one of the most important factors limiting their impact.
And even within these limited funds, farmed and wild animal welfare organisations receive only about 1% of total donations to animal charities — with 99% going to organisations that work on companion animals, animals used in labs, and captive animals — even though the scale of suffering is much higher for farmed and wild animals. To put the difference in perspective: for every dog or cat euthanised in a shelter, 3,400 farmed land animals are confined and slaughtered.
Donations are as impactful as direct work
Through your carefully considered donations, you can support the most effective animal advocacy organisations and help them achieve their goals. It may not be direct work, but by helping people to help animals, you help animals.
Since donations are necessary to hire staff in animal advocacy organisations, donations can be as impactful as direct work — or even more impactful, depending on how much you’re able to donate.
The impact of donations is even more impressive considering the “counterfactuals” of direct work: what would have happened if someone hadn’t taken a particular role. Advocates working in animal charities do great work, but their impact is at least partially “replaceable”: someone else could have probably taken that job. The actual impact of advocates depends on how much they can perform better than the second-best candidate that could have taken their place. In most cases, this would be around 10%, given that there may be many other people who could perform similarly.
But if a person decides to donate instead of doing direct work themselves, there is no counterfactual impact “discount,” since the alternative would be zero impact (no donation).
Direct work opportunities are limited, but donating is always a very good opportunity
It can be hard to find work in animal charities. There aren’t lots of organisations in every country, and job opportunities are limited. This is also a reflection of lack of funding: the less funding they have, the fewer people they can hire.
There might also be a lot of people who care about animals but don’t want to work in animal charities, even if they had the opportunity. Maybe it’s not a good personal fit for them, they need a higher salary to meet their needs, or they simply have other life and career goals.
People who work in animal advocacy organisations are only a small percentage of people who want to have an impact for animals. For the remaining majority, donating is a great opportunity to help animals.
Of course, being able to donate is a privilege. But many people who care about animals have the means to do so — and often don’t realise how much they can achieve with their donations.
You can also use your career to maximise your salary in order to donate more — which we discuss in a separate article.
Read next: Earn and give more for animals
In Your Current Career
Pledge a portion of your income to animal charities and help change the world today.
