Animal Ask

Animal Ask is a research consultancy that aims to improve the lives of animals by supporting the global animal advocacy movement in its efforts to oppose animal exploitation. We achieve this by providing organisations and funders with research that assists them in making informed decisions about their advocacy efforts.

We have provided support to animal advocacy organisations through three programs: 

• Movement Strategy Research
• One on one Ask Prioritisation
• One on One Ask Consultation

Our movement strategy research examines the broad approaches to advocacy for potentially high-impact opportunities that may be neglected by the movement. This also includes foundational research we have conducted periodically mostly with the aim to inform our own work and future prioritisation. 

Our Ask Prioritisation program identifies the most impactful campaign opportunities available to organisations working to improve the lives of animals. Strong campaigns or policies have the potential to affect many more animals, better improve their quality of life, and are more easily achieved. In contrast, the weakest campaigns can have no, or even a negative, effect. This makes careful research essential to making well-informed decisions about where the movement's limited campaign resources are spent. One example of this work is our work with Animal Equality UK, where we investigated the effectiveness of different policy solutions for improving compliance with existing animal welfare laws. We concluded that increasing inspection frequency is the most effective method, and this has now formed the basis of their enforcement campaign. 

Finally, our Ask Consultation program provides organisations with white papers to support their existing advocacy on key issues, aiming to increase the probability of success for particularly high-priority campaigns by bolstering the case with targeted research. For example, we provided research to Essere Animali on the costs of implementing the humane slaughter of fish.

You can read more about the progress in our past programs in our post on our Impact evaluation of Animal Ask: A retrospective after 5 years.

Over the past year we have experimented with regional or shared market multi-stakeholder projects thanks to our global stakeholder engagement coordinator. These require extensive pre- and post-engagement with a wide range of actors who are positioned to work around a shared strategy including campaign groups and funders. This began in Brazil where our one on one with Fórum Animal extended to engagement with all groups working in the country, a talk at AVA Brazil and a private side event for organisations. Our current project in India was formulated from the outside with this multi-stakeholder view in mind and thanks to the Indian Animal Funding Circle has also allowed us to engage with funders who may support groups acting on the research findings.